My Twenty-Eighth Year Commences (Jan 26th)
And I'm given, as I have been recently, to thinking about origin stories. They've been cropping up with unpredictable predictability, lately, latecomers to a party that's already well underway, with the guests shuffling around and eating cake and starting to put dishes in the sink, a party that already slipped out of the most covetable trend demographic two years ago.
Walking through the downtown skyways just before Christmas - Salvation Army bellringers, hordes of besuited workers heading home, shuttered popcorn and shoeshine stands - Moody told me about her parents' meeting-story, which was full of Chance and Coincidence and Historical Specificity and Instant Love. It was a good story. I think the era of organic meet-cute stories is drawing to an end. Soon we will have paid consultants to construct a fictitious, retrogradely romantic origin story for couples united by matchmakers, the Internets, shot-soaked nights at the bar. These stories, too, can be published in the Vows section of the New York Times.
I learned a few things about my grandmother last week. That she was shipped to a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Alps not when she was 18, but when she was 14. That her mother told her they were going on a special vacation together, then brought her there and left her there. That she spent every day bundled in down comforters, outside, under the winter sun. That she was the only one of her friends she made there who survived. That she survived narrowly, leaving behind countless dead friends in her improbably lucky wake not once - but twice.
I thought of her pacing in her kitchen late at night, in her eternal pink and blue satin robe, struggling to breathe, checking the refrigerator over and over again. Standing in front of the sink looking at her washed dishes, her scrubbed floors and dishtowels hung just-so.
"Going to bed?" I'd say, taking a glass down from the cabinet.
"No, Amenda, use this bottle, this is the good water from the store. Yes, I go to bed soon." But she'd stay, readying the breakfast things for the morning, her hands shaking a little as she placed a teabag in my grandfather's cup, an egg in a saucepan, and check them several times, never accepting help, padding from sink to stove, head bent. Seeming to be warding an encircling-something off, shoring something slippery up. This is really my grandmother, I'd think. This is one-quarter of my genetic birthright. What is in me of this wary vigilance, this scrappy flickering survival?
Walking through the downtown skyways just before Christmas - Salvation Army bellringers, hordes of besuited workers heading home, shuttered popcorn and shoeshine stands - Moody told me about her parents' meeting-story, which was full of Chance and Coincidence and Historical Specificity and Instant Love. It was a good story. I think the era of organic meet-cute stories is drawing to an end. Soon we will have paid consultants to construct a fictitious, retrogradely romantic origin story for couples united by matchmakers, the Internets, shot-soaked nights at the bar. These stories, too, can be published in the Vows section of the New York Times.
I learned a few things about my grandmother last week. That she was shipped to a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Alps not when she was 18, but when she was 14. That her mother told her they were going on a special vacation together, then brought her there and left her there. That she spent every day bundled in down comforters, outside, under the winter sun. That she was the only one of her friends she made there who survived. That she survived narrowly, leaving behind countless dead friends in her improbably lucky wake not once - but twice.
I thought of her pacing in her kitchen late at night, in her eternal pink and blue satin robe, struggling to breathe, checking the refrigerator over and over again. Standing in front of the sink looking at her washed dishes, her scrubbed floors and dishtowels hung just-so.
"Going to bed?" I'd say, taking a glass down from the cabinet.
"No, Amenda, use this bottle, this is the good water from the store. Yes, I go to bed soon." But she'd stay, readying the breakfast things for the morning, her hands shaking a little as she placed a teabag in my grandfather's cup, an egg in a saucepan, and check them several times, never accepting help, padding from sink to stove, head bent. Seeming to be warding an encircling-something off, shoring something slippery up. This is really my grandmother, I'd think. This is one-quarter of my genetic birthright. What is in me of this wary vigilance, this scrappy flickering survival?