Two huge cardboard boxes. One filled with three impossibly adorable children-- tiny, huge-eyed, several years before their excess weight was problematic. On the beach, their bathing-suit bottoms filled with sand. On Christmas morning, the girls in flowered nightgowns and new "Holly Hobby Homemaker" kits (bonnets, aprons, brooms and dustpans), the boy in feety pajamas with a foam T-ball set, matchbox cars, a hard-hat, a slinky. Two dizzy parents, exhausted but blissed-out at their good fortune-- they couldn't have their own children, and after years of waiting were suddenly handed a pile of pretty babies, all with the same round face. The children grow fast in the photos, too fast to make albums. The girls wear make-up, the boy has acne. It's the 80's. Everyone gets fat. The last photo in the box is another Christmas, five years before the boy will be on his knees in his parents' bedroom performing CPR on his father.
The other box: press clippings from 1932. A purple heart. A girl on a horse, a girl in a prom gown. A daguerreotype of a man with white-blue eyes and an ice-pick stare, and shrapnel in his arm and leg. A woman in finger-curls, too old to be holding her own infant but there she is in the portrait studio, amazed with maybe a hint of the fierceness she would feel for this child and the terror over losing another. Countless black and whites of couples, babies, vacations... I am told everyone in the pictures is dead by the one person in the photos who is not-- the girl on the horse, in the dress. Forty-six years before cancer will quietly take part of her body.
I am drinking the monsignor's whisky long after my mother has gone to bed, and tearing through her boxes. The monsignor is the only one allowed to smoke in her apartment, and the smell of his Marlboros clings to her new carpet. He can't feel his feet because of his Lupus. He walks with a cane and has trouble getting out of cars and chairs. She cooks him dinner three nights a week and buys his groceries for him, and sometimes she cleans his house. They dream about each other sometimes. He dreams the Black Demons are making visits to all the people in their retirement community, and he wants to call her to warn her but he can't find the phone. She dreams he is her husband, but she sleeps on the couch in the living room at night so she won't disturb him. They laugh about these dreams in front of me as if it's just funny, nothing more.
I interviewed my mom about the photos before she went to bed, rather businesslike, at the kitchen table. Her mortality (and mine) is all I think about when I'm with her these days, which gives a sort-of heightened quality to our interactions... but anyway I was taking notes as she talked, and in my head I was thinking, "the blog might find this detail interesting..." or "I wonder what the blog will think of THIS story..."
So finally my mom was like, "why the hell are you taking notes?" It didn't even occur to me how odd it was. I told her, "I'm a writer, mom, I write things down," which seemed to satisfy her... but it also signaled to me that maybe I am taking my blog a little too seriously.
At any rate. There you have it, blog. The weekend of my discontent, told from within two large cardboard boxes at a modest retirement community in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, USA.
