(no subject)
An excerpt from a letter to my penpal dated August 16th, 2007:
On the bus, going home after a surprise visit to my grandmother's. My grandmother is such a complicated person -- to understand, to relate to, to relate with. We sat in her one-bedroom apartment together and wept. For ourselves, not for one another. Now that you're turning nineteen, i can tell you all the things i couldn't before. Underneath all of my grandmother's character, which sometimes gets in the way of her likeability, is a simple, lonely woman, whose sorrow is etched onto her face. She apologized for making me sad, so i wept some more.
My grandmother is someone i can write about with ease. She's always been there on the sidelines of my life, so there's a lot of material but not so much that i get lost in the details or not know where to begin (as i would writing about my parents). I don't know her as well as i do my parents, making her (ironically) easier to understand. I can just make assumptions.
I remember a lot about visits to her apartment as a kid. Particulary the long 45 minute car rides to get there. She lives on Bathurst St. and we live off of Bathurst St. but the street is long. Also, it's an incredibly Jewish area. All along Bathurst i used to look out my window at the delis, bakeries, Kosher restaurants, synagogues, bagel places, and Judaica stores. And oh, the burial and headstone businesses -- thousands of them. I used to believe that more people died here than anywhere else.
My grandmother's apartment building. My brother and i used to go down to the recreation room near the lobby and scour the floor for circular coloured plastic dots, wondering aloud what they were and where they came from. We collected them in my grandmother's jewelry box. Years later, i realized we had a collection of bingo "dots", accidentally dropped to the floor during weekly building games and never retrieved by the geriatric tenants. Oh, how scared we were of getting caught on all fours, stealing these off of the floor. The gazebo right outside the building, which i told my brother was haunted. I started to believe it myself. The wrought-iron gates and pidgeons, how we'd run, afraid of their poop. The girl i befriended, whose grandmother lived on the ground floor and had a garden outside. We'd rip out the spinach leaves, wash them, and eat them raw out of the dirt. The bench outside, on which i finished reading The Catcher in the Rye one afternoon.
My grandma says that sometimes she thinks about all the clothes in her closet and how long it'll take us to go through it all and put it in the trash. Death is a scary thing.
On the bus, going home after a surprise visit to my grandmother's. My grandmother is such a complicated person -- to understand, to relate to, to relate with. We sat in her one-bedroom apartment together and wept. For ourselves, not for one another. Now that you're turning nineteen, i can tell you all the things i couldn't before. Underneath all of my grandmother's character, which sometimes gets in the way of her likeability, is a simple, lonely woman, whose sorrow is etched onto her face. She apologized for making me sad, so i wept some more.
My grandmother is someone i can write about with ease. She's always been there on the sidelines of my life, so there's a lot of material but not so much that i get lost in the details or not know where to begin (as i would writing about my parents). I don't know her as well as i do my parents, making her (ironically) easier to understand. I can just make assumptions.
I remember a lot about visits to her apartment as a kid. Particulary the long 45 minute car rides to get there. She lives on Bathurst St. and we live off of Bathurst St. but the street is long. Also, it's an incredibly Jewish area. All along Bathurst i used to look out my window at the delis, bakeries, Kosher restaurants, synagogues, bagel places, and Judaica stores. And oh, the burial and headstone businesses -- thousands of them. I used to believe that more people died here than anywhere else.
My grandmother's apartment building. My brother and i used to go down to the recreation room near the lobby and scour the floor for circular coloured plastic dots, wondering aloud what they were and where they came from. We collected them in my grandmother's jewelry box. Years later, i realized we had a collection of bingo "dots", accidentally dropped to the floor during weekly building games and never retrieved by the geriatric tenants. Oh, how scared we were of getting caught on all fours, stealing these off of the floor. The gazebo right outside the building, which i told my brother was haunted. I started to believe it myself. The wrought-iron gates and pidgeons, how we'd run, afraid of their poop. The girl i befriended, whose grandmother lived on the ground floor and had a garden outside. We'd rip out the spinach leaves, wash them, and eat them raw out of the dirt. The bench outside, on which i finished reading The Catcher in the Rye one afternoon.
My grandma says that sometimes she thinks about all the clothes in her closet and how long it'll take us to go through it all and put it in the trash. Death is a scary thing.