my, my, my--how poorly I escape the prison of my own familial making.
My grandfather, Valton, had a way with words. He could coin a phrase by rubbing his fingers together. He'd remember a joke from 50,000 years ago, and one-up the fuck outta it into left field. And at the stubborn ol age of 91, he died. One year ago, three weeks from now. He died a not-too-terrible, miserable old man's death. Living for number of years off his financial well-being. Before any real sort of collapses happened.
Except the very real kind---his legs, his body, his lungs, before his mind ever did. He lived a nice, white, only sorta-kinda racist man's life. Profoundly privileged, and only moderately entitled. Well, shit, maybe more than moderately--yet, live entirely well, he did. He won the lottery. Maybe a couple of times. Travelled the world even before that doing work for the government. My mom still won't get a DNA test for fear she might find a sibling or two somewhere around the globe.
And still, the man's greatest gift, and most well-endowed organ, was his brain. He could remember a sentence uttered decades gone, a joke, so ribald for the age we were speaking in, that it made my fillings ache with sensitivity. He was an old, dirty man, squired from the dirt in Oklahoma where watermelons and corncobs, fit only to wipe your ass with grew. He was a farmer's ninth child, and baby of the family whom no one ever did call out on his own pompous, self-indulged magnanimity.
He rode in on the coattails of countless others. He was generous to a fault. He believed the best in anyone and would shell out money to fund their misfortune. Meanwhile, ensuring his own. I never had the luxury of doing so myself--and perhaps should count myself so lucky. That I never found myself in a position to feel I was better than anyone around me, or help them through their tight moments, when the plight of their being was so goddamned uncomfortable, itching so damn much, like a skin trying to be shed.
I never had the luxury, nor the misfortune such as he. What I did have was a proclivity and richness in words. In being able to thread together a string of vowels and consonants long enough to say the things that made sense to others, even if I dint' quite understand the sense it might make to myself, now or then. And therein I find myself trapped. At the magnanimity of my own pomposity. In showering others with words they may or may not deserve. In reveling in the silly, inanity of cajoling language to do what it is I wish, to describe in some indescribable way the unscrupulousness of my syllabary that might rob one of their own mastery of language by diminishing their understanding by my highfalutin-ecety.
What?
Exactly.
Good-fucking-night.