9.19.99

I want to talk about interesting things with my g-ma. Sometimes I feel at a loss for things to do or to say and feel awkward in the silence and inactivity. I have recently recovered the things I enjoyed doing with her while growing up and we do those things together now. Playing board games or cards, mostly. But I've also recently come to truly appreciate her as a repository of family history. She is the only one who can answer the questions, label accurately the backs of photographs. My new mission is documentary. Today we tackled bags and a box of old photos. Black and white squares from her youth, my mother's childhood. Nearly each print elicits a story; oh how I would love to record a story for each image! There is not enough time for all that, but maybe for a few, maybe for the more important ones. I love the old pictures. It is the quotidian detail captured candidly that I enjoy the most. Buttons on dresses, hairstyles, appliances, or machinery. I see bodies I never knew so young, younger than I am now; I see me growing old, what my nose will look like in 30 years. A bad snapshot of the front of the old farm shows our land stretching to the road. Cows dot along its acreage, chewing. I have to keep it, otherwise my memory will alter it into something more like what I want it to be. Numerous photos of cows and horses, the models invariably out of focus. I must keep one, or two, just to memorialize the fact that my mother had a habit of taking pictures of the livestock. G-ma narrated important scenes from my early history. I am very interested in these things. I want to know, as best I can, who my mother was, how she related to me, and how I am still the object of her life. I learned painful things. I think it is not my history - it's not, how can it be when I am so far from that life? - but it is. And I don't remember it, or do I? I do; it's there. The fleeting images of movement. We were nomadic and poor. And abused. And she fixed the circumstances, but not herself. I was her life. I was her caretaker. I've seen it. I see it everyday at work. Some other little girl or little boy caring for their depressed and terribly naïve parent. I know, and have known, why it is that when I observe them I sometimes can't help crying. It's just that I didn't have the detail; my knowledge was always a hunch based on those moving memories. Today the voice spoke and gave me claim. And I tell you, I have never felt more respect for the stability and strength of my grandmother.

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