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Let Me Tell You A Story About Me.
Jul. 27th, 2012 11:40 pmAbout last weekend... You know- I thought a bit, a lot about trying to have pictures to show you, but I come back to this: NO. I'll confess to you, friends, I kind of scroll through posts where there are pictures. That's all well and good, that there is a picture, but - well but this is Livejournal! We write here. A picture says a thousand words but I read what you say because I'd rather read a thousand of your words than see any picture. I'm sure you understand.
So I'll tell it as well as I can. You know - I have two possessions that have been my possessions for longer than I can remember, as in, longer than I can physically recall. As in, I've had them since before I achieved conscious awareness as a person, before I developed language. One of these things is my paddington bear. As a small child I would not be separate from it, as an older child I cherished it as a memento of a time I frequently wished for. As an adult I kept in around to maintain an aura or mystique of sentimentality. Now? Now it stays on my bed because that's just where it goes, like the sheet or the window or the walls or the ceiling, that's just where it goes, it doesn't go somewhere else. I sometimes, with a pang of contempt imagine what this means about me. Not that I am hurtling toward middle age and sleep with my childhood teddy-bear, I am proud of myself and apologize for nothing. I mean that I think about it - my paddington, and how it's the late-70's equivalent of the american girl doll, a manifestation of the grotesque yuppy pretensions of my parents, my poor parents who've... faded, fallen into a weird oblivion of unacceptability. Their generation now caught red handed ruining everything and with their hands out, asking for more. I look at my paddington, worn as anything, threadbare and beloved and I think nothing good about my formative years - because I once had love and reminiscing fondness for those days, and now? I have been told, and have indeed observed, that you begin to forgive your parents their faults when you, yourself, become a parent. Conversely, you begin to judge, with clearer eyes the bad missteps, the tacky inhumanity of their feeble familial ambitions. I've come around that bend, I am approaching a state where I won't forgive.
But I'm an historian, I read deep truths into the past from the documents of the present. Deep truths that are open to debate, that are strenuously debated. That's the best kind of truths.
So I am rethinking my experiences, re-writing my history, revising my assumptions. I take this to be an important Thing of a Person. Loving one's assumptions is akin to believing what you are told - it's unbecoming, you must ask, about all the things you think or care about: "Why?" And you answer it and that exercise makes the good things more true, more profitable and more. Purely More. And the things of little merit are seen for what they are, you unearth the valuable and the real when you ask yourself - why do I love this and should I?
My second artifact, my second possession that I'd return to a burning building to retrieve is a picture of me. The only picture of me that's ever hung on any wall I've paid for. Discounting mirrors, you know, I'm not shy, and I am vain, a little vain, appropriately vain, but not insensitive to vanity's shamefulness. You know what? You hang up pictures of yourself and everyone sees you, and only. You hang up pictures you've made, arts, items? You're kind of hanging pictures of your inner-self, a different vanity that I expect is perpetrated extensively by smart people, smart people who aren't as pretty as me. You hang up some mirrors - there you're saying, I think, Let's see what we look like, let's examine this, this situation, this communion, let's see -See what is what. And also, look at yourself, You're cool, I wanted you to notice. So mirrors, I have them hanging up, a few. My other item though, it's my picture.
It's not just me, it's me as a baby, cute as anything, I was a strange looking baby, not adorable and harmlessly uncertain looking, not inquisitive and charming - not in the way of babies of the mode. Something different, maybe I was a baby of another time, no startle on my face, I look... I look happy and... Kind of Certain. A weird expression on a baby, it's a weird baby picture. It's not just me though, there's this lady in the picture, a pretty lady, from another time, It's a picture from the 70's but she's got the look, the made-up put together face and cheer of a lady of the 60's. She's beautiful, really beautiful, but in a way that you sense rather than see, just see. She's happy, in a way that's pure and transmitted through film. My Grandma.
Now. I'll tell you this. Tata Methuselah didn't come to the states until the middle 90's and she'd been crazed, really crazed, as in Crazy, before that. She was catatonic for years and I and Liza were the last people to hear her speak when we watched, horrified, my wonderful aunt and I, holding each other close as my Tata Methuselah, Beshiba, died on the table, screaming in Arabic. Tante Liza told me that she'd been calling for her father to save her. We all cried, a lot. Tata Methuselah never spoke engilsh, I never spoke arabic, let alone her weird provincial arabic, I never had a sense of who she was beyond a frightening witch-looking lady who wore all black and who, in her 90's had not a streak of grey hair under her black headscarf. She had tattoos on her face and hands that puzzled and scared me when I was young and that I bragged about later, when I saw the girls I knew going for tattoos. "tattoos... They're for old ladies." I'd say. And believe.
My mother's mother met her husband when she was a waitress at his restaurant. That was in the 40's. He'd already been married, a widower, he had 4 sons already, he was raising his younger siblings besides. His restaurant is a starbucks now, in Chagrin Falls. You can see it, if you want, look it up, google-earth if you feel like it. He was older but ambitious. Bald, even then I think, early, I don't know if she was pretty, the women on my mother's side have a look, somewhat patrician, somewhat straw-haired and american, broad smiles, fractured looks in their eyes. Why not? My grandmother, a daughter of the American revolution herself, Thayer, of an old WASP line. She had steely eyes and a curt demeanor, she had 8 children herself and never tolerated a moment of nonsense. As a boy I loved nonsense, but had no relation to her. I remember her only as an old lady, very old and small. Forgetting, everything. I came into her house, years ago, but not so long. I think I wrote about it here in fact. I came to her house, her far away house down in Florida, where she'd lived all my life, and she, with her near-hundred grandchildren, many she'd been closer to than me - all forgotten in dementia acquired in her 90's, she remembered me. She says: "I know you, tall man. You should meet this girl, you're that Methuselah character. You should talk to that girl." That girl being my mother, her daughter, that Methuselah character being me - and at the time I'd been wearing a pompadour, highlighted blue, rubber bracelets up to my elbow, spiked bondage cuff, tie and a jacket, self-assured smile (not quite guessing what would come). The next time I'd see here was her funeral. Put in the ground here in Ohio, after so many years away, We put her in the ground with her people, where all her people had been laid down since white people lived on the banks of Lake Erie.
So that's my heritage, me without a grandparent, and without a grandma to call gramma when I was a baby, my blood relations being apart from me to the tune of continents and oceans. So who's this lady, the beautiful earnest lady in the picture, and really, she's earnest, she's so good it's something you can't not see when you look at it. I've had the luck to know a few really, unambiguously good people in life, and I learned to recognize them by remembering her face. So who is she? No relation of mine. Not blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh. Here's the tale, short and sweet: My carpetbagger parents had lived in the city because it could pay them. My father, immigrant and faulty in english but stern of gaze and humorless - he did what all his sort do and opened a grocery store. We call it grocery store - but you might say corner store, or convenience, or something racist and antagonistic - a lot of people do that too. But that's what my dad did. He opened his store and worked every shift. In my lifetime he was in two gunfights but never had enough courage to carry out the food-stamp fraud that made his cousins rich. My mother she lived, kept, in the fashion she wished for, down the street with me. Little me. Gestating, think to then, to '74, before I come along, the long winter of that year under Gerry Ford and next to my father's store is what we'd call a salon, but what my Grandma called her Beauty-shop, rising inflections, beautifully curt, it's my cellar-door. Beautyshop and she cuts my pregnant mother's hair while Lucy's bones are dug up, while Black September addresses the UN, while the last vassal of Divine Emperor Hirohito surrenders to the milk-drinkers. So they are friends, my pregnant mother and this older lady with a grown son of her own in the Air Force, and a husband, cool and stoic, Appalachian, heroic, who works 12 hour days at JNL (the great scar on the river if you're a google-earth user, the big patch of black smoke and steel-industry right downtown, later LTV, later still Mittal Steel - now run by robots). She'd come north for work, so had he, they met at the mill where she was cashier, found out about him, liked him enough to chase him down at a bar (on a Sunday even!) Loved each other, she and him, him overlooking or really just liking that she'd a son, pretty old by then, about 7? 9? A boy of her own and he helped, I suppose, having not been there, to raise him.
These are people and they have their stories that I'm not privy to. Once I was told that he - Jimmy Smith, had sired and later denied a bastard on the Tennessee mountaintop he was from. But I never knew. To me he was a man who worked tirelessly, drank, with a certain intensity, one that comes of working hard, and who looked like James Dean - grown thick and overworked. I visited them, years later, in the 90's, when they'd moved back to the mountaintop, when he bought it all himself with cash money earned in the pipefitters local - when he built the biggest house in town with his bare hands for his wife so they could raise dogs and goats on their mountaintop - then I'd go and see him and we'd drink beers together and I'd marvel, because he was old then, but barely grey, still with the pomade stiffened pompadour, in his 70's then, with his marlboros rolled up in his white t-shirt sleeve. I never saw him not wearing jeans. "Oh he had a suit!" My grandma tells me. "He did, but we didn't bury him in it." She says bury so it rhymes with furry. She told me this over the weekend, when she returned here, for the first time in a long time, a very long time. He died this year, this summer. He worked 12 hours a day for 20 years so he could buy the mountain he grew up on where everyone called him Tea because of how crazy he was for Teaberry gum. "I had them put 'tea' on his tombstone, He was the last of his family in the holler and ain't nobody know what it means but me, but I'll tell you so you know when you see it."
She came back. Came back to see me. I cried when I saw her, we hugged and held each other close for a good long time, stared and couldn't stop looking. I remembered that lady who raised me right and was good to me when my doltish yuppy parents couldn't figure out how to be. I can tell you that a lot of life lies between that picture and now, many things, betrayals even, resentments, my own ascendance to paternity. My own attainment of some feeble wisdom. I cried to see her, introduced her to my daughter. Here's the best person I could make, Here's the best person that I know. It was... It was something. It was important and I don't talk about this lightly because to me it's all there is.
There's more to this, I know. I'm not telling it all, but I saw her and was relieved. And happy.
So I'll tell it as well as I can. You know - I have two possessions that have been my possessions for longer than I can remember, as in, longer than I can physically recall. As in, I've had them since before I achieved conscious awareness as a person, before I developed language. One of these things is my paddington bear. As a small child I would not be separate from it, as an older child I cherished it as a memento of a time I frequently wished for. As an adult I kept in around to maintain an aura or mystique of sentimentality. Now? Now it stays on my bed because that's just where it goes, like the sheet or the window or the walls or the ceiling, that's just where it goes, it doesn't go somewhere else. I sometimes, with a pang of contempt imagine what this means about me. Not that I am hurtling toward middle age and sleep with my childhood teddy-bear, I am proud of myself and apologize for nothing. I mean that I think about it - my paddington, and how it's the late-70's equivalent of the american girl doll, a manifestation of the grotesque yuppy pretensions of my parents, my poor parents who've... faded, fallen into a weird oblivion of unacceptability. Their generation now caught red handed ruining everything and with their hands out, asking for more. I look at my paddington, worn as anything, threadbare and beloved and I think nothing good about my formative years - because I once had love and reminiscing fondness for those days, and now? I have been told, and have indeed observed, that you begin to forgive your parents their faults when you, yourself, become a parent. Conversely, you begin to judge, with clearer eyes the bad missteps, the tacky inhumanity of their feeble familial ambitions. I've come around that bend, I am approaching a state where I won't forgive.
But I'm an historian, I read deep truths into the past from the documents of the present. Deep truths that are open to debate, that are strenuously debated. That's the best kind of truths.
So I am rethinking my experiences, re-writing my history, revising my assumptions. I take this to be an important Thing of a Person. Loving one's assumptions is akin to believing what you are told - it's unbecoming, you must ask, about all the things you think or care about: "Why?" And you answer it and that exercise makes the good things more true, more profitable and more. Purely More. And the things of little merit are seen for what they are, you unearth the valuable and the real when you ask yourself - why do I love this and should I?
My second artifact, my second possession that I'd return to a burning building to retrieve is a picture of me. The only picture of me that's ever hung on any wall I've paid for. Discounting mirrors, you know, I'm not shy, and I am vain, a little vain, appropriately vain, but not insensitive to vanity's shamefulness. You know what? You hang up pictures of yourself and everyone sees you, and only. You hang up pictures you've made, arts, items? You're kind of hanging pictures of your inner-self, a different vanity that I expect is perpetrated extensively by smart people, smart people who aren't as pretty as me. You hang up some mirrors - there you're saying, I think, Let's see what we look like, let's examine this, this situation, this communion, let's see -See what is what. And also, look at yourself, You're cool, I wanted you to notice. So mirrors, I have them hanging up, a few. My other item though, it's my picture.
It's not just me, it's me as a baby, cute as anything, I was a strange looking baby, not adorable and harmlessly uncertain looking, not inquisitive and charming - not in the way of babies of the mode. Something different, maybe I was a baby of another time, no startle on my face, I look... I look happy and... Kind of Certain. A weird expression on a baby, it's a weird baby picture. It's not just me though, there's this lady in the picture, a pretty lady, from another time, It's a picture from the 70's but she's got the look, the made-up put together face and cheer of a lady of the 60's. She's beautiful, really beautiful, but in a way that you sense rather than see, just see. She's happy, in a way that's pure and transmitted through film. My Grandma.
Now. I'll tell you this. Tata Methuselah didn't come to the states until the middle 90's and she'd been crazed, really crazed, as in Crazy, before that. She was catatonic for years and I and Liza were the last people to hear her speak when we watched, horrified, my wonderful aunt and I, holding each other close as my Tata Methuselah, Beshiba, died on the table, screaming in Arabic. Tante Liza told me that she'd been calling for her father to save her. We all cried, a lot. Tata Methuselah never spoke engilsh, I never spoke arabic, let alone her weird provincial arabic, I never had a sense of who she was beyond a frightening witch-looking lady who wore all black and who, in her 90's had not a streak of grey hair under her black headscarf. She had tattoos on her face and hands that puzzled and scared me when I was young and that I bragged about later, when I saw the girls I knew going for tattoos. "tattoos... They're for old ladies." I'd say. And believe.
My mother's mother met her husband when she was a waitress at his restaurant. That was in the 40's. He'd already been married, a widower, he had 4 sons already, he was raising his younger siblings besides. His restaurant is a starbucks now, in Chagrin Falls. You can see it, if you want, look it up, google-earth if you feel like it. He was older but ambitious. Bald, even then I think, early, I don't know if she was pretty, the women on my mother's side have a look, somewhat patrician, somewhat straw-haired and american, broad smiles, fractured looks in their eyes. Why not? My grandmother, a daughter of the American revolution herself, Thayer, of an old WASP line. She had steely eyes and a curt demeanor, she had 8 children herself and never tolerated a moment of nonsense. As a boy I loved nonsense, but had no relation to her. I remember her only as an old lady, very old and small. Forgetting, everything. I came into her house, years ago, but not so long. I think I wrote about it here in fact. I came to her house, her far away house down in Florida, where she'd lived all my life, and she, with her near-hundred grandchildren, many she'd been closer to than me - all forgotten in dementia acquired in her 90's, she remembered me. She says: "I know you, tall man. You should meet this girl, you're that Methuselah character. You should talk to that girl." That girl being my mother, her daughter, that Methuselah character being me - and at the time I'd been wearing a pompadour, highlighted blue, rubber bracelets up to my elbow, spiked bondage cuff, tie and a jacket, self-assured smile (not quite guessing what would come). The next time I'd see here was her funeral. Put in the ground here in Ohio, after so many years away, We put her in the ground with her people, where all her people had been laid down since white people lived on the banks of Lake Erie.
So that's my heritage, me without a grandparent, and without a grandma to call gramma when I was a baby, my blood relations being apart from me to the tune of continents and oceans. So who's this lady, the beautiful earnest lady in the picture, and really, she's earnest, she's so good it's something you can't not see when you look at it. I've had the luck to know a few really, unambiguously good people in life, and I learned to recognize them by remembering her face. So who is she? No relation of mine. Not blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh. Here's the tale, short and sweet: My carpetbagger parents had lived in the city because it could pay them. My father, immigrant and faulty in english but stern of gaze and humorless - he did what all his sort do and opened a grocery store. We call it grocery store - but you might say corner store, or convenience, or something racist and antagonistic - a lot of people do that too. But that's what my dad did. He opened his store and worked every shift. In my lifetime he was in two gunfights but never had enough courage to carry out the food-stamp fraud that made his cousins rich. My mother she lived, kept, in the fashion she wished for, down the street with me. Little me. Gestating, think to then, to '74, before I come along, the long winter of that year under Gerry Ford and next to my father's store is what we'd call a salon, but what my Grandma called her Beauty-shop, rising inflections, beautifully curt, it's my cellar-door. Beautyshop and she cuts my pregnant mother's hair while Lucy's bones are dug up, while Black September addresses the UN, while the last vassal of Divine Emperor Hirohito surrenders to the milk-drinkers. So they are friends, my pregnant mother and this older lady with a grown son of her own in the Air Force, and a husband, cool and stoic, Appalachian, heroic, who works 12 hour days at JNL (the great scar on the river if you're a google-earth user, the big patch of black smoke and steel-industry right downtown, later LTV, later still Mittal Steel - now run by robots). She'd come north for work, so had he, they met at the mill where she was cashier, found out about him, liked him enough to chase him down at a bar (on a Sunday even!) Loved each other, she and him, him overlooking or really just liking that she'd a son, pretty old by then, about 7? 9? A boy of her own and he helped, I suppose, having not been there, to raise him.
These are people and they have their stories that I'm not privy to. Once I was told that he - Jimmy Smith, had sired and later denied a bastard on the Tennessee mountaintop he was from. But I never knew. To me he was a man who worked tirelessly, drank, with a certain intensity, one that comes of working hard, and who looked like James Dean - grown thick and overworked. I visited them, years later, in the 90's, when they'd moved back to the mountaintop, when he bought it all himself with cash money earned in the pipefitters local - when he built the biggest house in town with his bare hands for his wife so they could raise dogs and goats on their mountaintop - then I'd go and see him and we'd drink beers together and I'd marvel, because he was old then, but barely grey, still with the pomade stiffened pompadour, in his 70's then, with his marlboros rolled up in his white t-shirt sleeve. I never saw him not wearing jeans. "Oh he had a suit!" My grandma tells me. "He did, but we didn't bury him in it." She says bury so it rhymes with furry. She told me this over the weekend, when she returned here, for the first time in a long time, a very long time. He died this year, this summer. He worked 12 hours a day for 20 years so he could buy the mountain he grew up on where everyone called him Tea because of how crazy he was for Teaberry gum. "I had them put 'tea' on his tombstone, He was the last of his family in the holler and ain't nobody know what it means but me, but I'll tell you so you know when you see it."
She came back. Came back to see me. I cried when I saw her, we hugged and held each other close for a good long time, stared and couldn't stop looking. I remembered that lady who raised me right and was good to me when my doltish yuppy parents couldn't figure out how to be. I can tell you that a lot of life lies between that picture and now, many things, betrayals even, resentments, my own ascendance to paternity. My own attainment of some feeble wisdom. I cried to see her, introduced her to my daughter. Here's the best person I could make, Here's the best person that I know. It was... It was something. It was important and I don't talk about this lightly because to me it's all there is.
There's more to this, I know. I'm not telling it all, but I saw her and was relieved. And happy.
