the luck of the Irish
The man sitting next to me is apparently very successful. He's about my age. He does music, or art, or skateboarding, or some fucking thing. Maybe it's all of the above; I'm only casually eavesdropping on the conversation. He's been invited to this coffee shop by the woman sitting next to him to speak with the three teenage hipsters seated raptly around him. (I realize how tragically hip it is to update your internet web-log from the coffee shop. I'm here because this is where Neal works, and he doesn't get off until six. Also there is internet and coffee here. Also I have a hangover). They, the teenagers, are impossibly fresh and new. They speak words like "Truth" and "Society" with Capital Letters. I wonder if I was ever that dewy.
He's giving them career advice . . . mostly it consists of dropping out of college, jettisoning most of your friends, and learning how to bang the drums (or paint, or whatever) really well until someone pays you to do it. I mean, I think so? His presentation is far more hopeful and positive than my synopsis is, and I haven't been hearing everything that he's saying. Maybe that advice is the good advice, though. I did the opposite. You know, got my degree, got another one, went to parties, was too timid to make any big noises. All that ended up amounting to a damp mound of smoldering failure. I really want to interrupt him, scratching my balding, psoriatic scalp, and point to myself, illustrating an alternative future that is possibly more likely, or at the very least not less likely. I won't do that because, appearances notwithstanding, I don't actually enjoy crushing people's dreams, and I don't find schadenfreude to be an entirely pleasurable sensation.
--
Today is my grandfather's birthday. By the time I'm finished writing this, it won't be his birthday anymore. He's eighty-five, and a couple of weeks ago he moved into a nursing home. That wasn't supposed to happen. The original deal, struck shortly after my grandmother's death from a shattered pelvis, was that he'd sell his house to my chronically debt-ridden aunt for a very attractive price. In return, she'd take care of him so that he didn't have to go to a nursing home. To that end, they redid the downstairs bathroom with handicapped-accessible rails, a space-age future toilet, and one of those Sealy posturepedic(tm) beds that look like they could eat you if they were given the proper persuasion. Then someone got around to diagnosing my grandfather with senile dementia, and all of the above stopped mattering very much.
So there are a bunch of different causes of dementia, and the diagnosis is more of a syndrome rather than A Thing That Happens. I mean, I guess so. That's what Dr. Wikipedia told me, and there's just something I trust about that mad old bastard, especially when I'm too lazy to do real research. I'm told that my grandfather had a series of mini-strokes all over his brain, his capillaries bursting like bubble wrap. Sometimes he thinks I'm my dad. That's not so upsetting, since I sound and look a lot like him, and even my mother has consistently called me "Rob" since I was a baby. More worrying is when he wakes up believing that he's spent the last night in the backseat of his car during a business trip to Kalamazoo, Michigan.
For his birthday, my mother suggested that I write him a letter telling him about my memories of him when I was younger, so I did. It was kind of difficult, because a lot of the things I remember about him are not the sort of things that you bring up in a birthday letter, which is I suppose why I'm writing this. Things like his car accident that left him with one leg shorter than the other, or his stories about his unit in WWII liberating the death camp at Nordhausen, or his frank admission that armies on both sides shot prisoners. Mostly I wrote about the bedtime stories he told me when I was little; delightful, exciting, and violent Westerns involving characters with names like Maloney and Graybeard.
I mentioned some of this to a friend of mine at her birthday party (I can be sort of a buzzkill sometimes). She asked me whether it was my mom's dad, and I started laughing, because this is my mom's dad's story: He died of renal failure when my mom was three. Her older brother, my uncle, had just turned six. He died on my uncle's birthday. His birthday was the day after Christmas. None of that really affects me very much; it's someone else's absurd, impossible tragedy. It seems almost imaginary to me. It just struck me as funny because that's so very much worse than what I'm obsessing over now, or really anything that's ever happened to me.
It's bad form to eulogize someone who's still living, and that's what this feels like. It feels like a repeat from when I was twelve and spent every Tuesday in the Alzheimer's wing of the group home my great uncle stayed in, watching him deteriorate and learning to hate the smell of disinfectant. No one ever claimed that I'm a paragon of good form, so this is just another thing I do that's in questionable taste. It's just been on my mind.
He's giving them career advice . . . mostly it consists of dropping out of college, jettisoning most of your friends, and learning how to bang the drums (or paint, or whatever) really well until someone pays you to do it. I mean, I think so? His presentation is far more hopeful and positive than my synopsis is, and I haven't been hearing everything that he's saying. Maybe that advice is the good advice, though. I did the opposite. You know, got my degree, got another one, went to parties, was too timid to make any big noises. All that ended up amounting to a damp mound of smoldering failure. I really want to interrupt him, scratching my balding, psoriatic scalp, and point to myself, illustrating an alternative future that is possibly more likely, or at the very least not less likely. I won't do that because, appearances notwithstanding, I don't actually enjoy crushing people's dreams, and I don't find schadenfreude to be an entirely pleasurable sensation.
--
Today is my grandfather's birthday. By the time I'm finished writing this, it won't be his birthday anymore. He's eighty-five, and a couple of weeks ago he moved into a nursing home. That wasn't supposed to happen. The original deal, struck shortly after my grandmother's death from a shattered pelvis, was that he'd sell his house to my chronically debt-ridden aunt for a very attractive price. In return, she'd take care of him so that he didn't have to go to a nursing home. To that end, they redid the downstairs bathroom with handicapped-accessible rails, a space-age future toilet, and one of those Sealy posturepedic(tm) beds that look like they could eat you if they were given the proper persuasion. Then someone got around to diagnosing my grandfather with senile dementia, and all of the above stopped mattering very much.
So there are a bunch of different causes of dementia, and the diagnosis is more of a syndrome rather than A Thing That Happens. I mean, I guess so. That's what Dr. Wikipedia told me, and there's just something I trust about that mad old bastard, especially when I'm too lazy to do real research. I'm told that my grandfather had a series of mini-strokes all over his brain, his capillaries bursting like bubble wrap. Sometimes he thinks I'm my dad. That's not so upsetting, since I sound and look a lot like him, and even my mother has consistently called me "Rob" since I was a baby. More worrying is when he wakes up believing that he's spent the last night in the backseat of his car during a business trip to Kalamazoo, Michigan.
For his birthday, my mother suggested that I write him a letter telling him about my memories of him when I was younger, so I did. It was kind of difficult, because a lot of the things I remember about him are not the sort of things that you bring up in a birthday letter, which is I suppose why I'm writing this. Things like his car accident that left him with one leg shorter than the other, or his stories about his unit in WWII liberating the death camp at Nordhausen, or his frank admission that armies on both sides shot prisoners. Mostly I wrote about the bedtime stories he told me when I was little; delightful, exciting, and violent Westerns involving characters with names like Maloney and Graybeard.
I mentioned some of this to a friend of mine at her birthday party (I can be sort of a buzzkill sometimes). She asked me whether it was my mom's dad, and I started laughing, because this is my mom's dad's story: He died of renal failure when my mom was three. Her older brother, my uncle, had just turned six. He died on my uncle's birthday. His birthday was the day after Christmas. None of that really affects me very much; it's someone else's absurd, impossible tragedy. It seems almost imaginary to me. It just struck me as funny because that's so very much worse than what I'm obsessing over now, or really anything that's ever happened to me.
It's bad form to eulogize someone who's still living, and that's what this feels like. It feels like a repeat from when I was twelve and spent every Tuesday in the Alzheimer's wing of the group home my great uncle stayed in, watching him deteriorate and learning to hate the smell of disinfectant. No one ever claimed that I'm a paragon of good form, so this is just another thing I do that's in questionable taste. It's just been on my mind.