My grandparents are slowly cleaning out their house. There were lots of practical items they encouraged us to take—roughly twenty years’ worth of hotel soaps, and I am now the proud owner of a pizza stone and a Pyrex baking set (yay!)—but other things were sentimental.
It was a bit of a head trip, reading this postcard thirty years later—especially since I just went to San Francisco! (Notice the politically-incorrect caption at bottom left.)
Vintage Sesame Street.
There’s something off about this picture, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…
Found this at the Somerville Flea (indoors at the Armory). Let’s just pretend my name is Eva Christiansen and I bought this card at Woolworth’s, signed it, and mailed it to you. Happy Holidays, everybody!
I’m in the middle of one of those spells when blogging doesn’t feel like a productive use of my time. Sometimes it’s easy, because I’m trying to be useful but I’m ultimately doing it for my own amusement, so I don’t mind so much that my sister is usually the only one leaving comments.
It’s not amusing right now though. The never-enoughness, the needing-to-be-seen-ness, the ultimate futility of social media and book promotion is really bumming me out.
Most of the time I consider myself an optimist. Not today though, and that’s okay.
I never learned how to juggle—literally or figuratively, as you can tell by all the balls I’ve dropped over the past several months. I have a bad habit of getting really excited for new projects and forgetting about the ones I haven’t finished yet.
So, mostly for my own benefit, I’m putting them down here so I can get to work on wrapping them up:
Can-Do Vegan: Now that I’ve finished the definitive revision on the 2016 novel (it’s been accepted! HOORAY!!!) I can get back to work on this baby.
Uganda and Rwanda 2013: I stopped blogging this trip because I didn’t know how to write about the genocide and the landmarks we visited, or if I should. But I have to get over that, because there are great pics and stories left to share.
#100happydays of drawing: I finished this challenge last summer but never tweeted the rest of my sketches. I’ll probably blog the highlights sometime soon.
I need to add yet another project to this list, haha: I audited Intro to Hinduism at Tufts this past semester, and I promised my professor I’d do a blog series in lieu of turning in assignments or taking the exams. I’m aiming to post the first installment tomorrow.
All this is in addition to actual book projects, of course. I have something big to share with you, hopefully later on this summer!
I am grieving for a country that doesn’t exist yet.
I don’t know anyone who voted for that repulsive excuse for a human being, but then I guess that’s just proof of how thoroughly I have insulated myself, both online and in real life. And I’m not alone. No one I know was remotely prepared for this.
My first thought was, I am so, so ashamed to be an American.
And then: Eff that. This is OUR America, too. I’m not going anywhere.
When I do eventually get the chance to ask someone who voted for that hatemongering, predatory narcissist WHY they did it, I will say this: “Did you ever stop to think that voting for the candidate endorsed by the KKK would result in a surge of hate crimes? Did you ever really consider what you were aligning yourself with?” (Because wah, wah, wah. Why is everyone calling us ignorant and racist?)
So far I’ve attended a peace rally, set up a recurring donation to the ACLU, signed up to volunteer with HIAS, and joined a bunch of “secret” groups online who are beginning to organize and disseminate information. If anybody has any more suggestions as to how to protest, volunteer, and speak up, I’d love to hear them. (I’ll be making more donations to Planned Parenthood, SURJ, et al.)
It’s absolutely terrifying how quickly the media has rolled over. Check out this bullshit:
There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new world. It was hard for grown folk to live; conditions and surroundings offered even to strong men constant and many obstacles to the continuance of existence; how difficult was it then to rear children!
A few years back I read Alice Morse Earle’s Child Life in Colonial Daysas research for a project currently on the back burner. Here’s my favorite passage, which I kept forgetting to post at the appropriate time of year (until now!):
The first thought of spring brought to the men of the New England household a hard work—maple-sugar making—which meant vast labor in preparation and in execution—all of which was cheerfully hailed, for it gave men and boys a chance to be as Charles Kingsley said, “a savage for a while.” It meant several nights spent in the sugar-camp in the woods, a-gypsying. Think of the delight of that scene: the air clear but mild enough to make the sap run; patches of snow still shining pure in the moonlight and starlight; all the mystery of the voices of the night, when a startled rabbit or squirrel made a crackling sound in its stealthy retreat; the distant hoot of a wakeful owl; the snapping of pendent icicles and crackling of blazing brush, yet over all a great stillness, “all silence and all glisten.” An exaltation of the spirit and senses came to the country boy which was transformed at midnight into keen thrills of imaginative fright at recollection of the stories told by his elders with rude acting and vivid wording during the early evening round the fire; of hunting and trapping, of Indians and bears, and those delights of country story-tellers in New England, catamounts, wolverines, and cats—this latter ever meaning in hunter’s phrasing wild-cats. Think of “a wolverine with eyes like blazing coals, and every hair whistling like a bell,” as he sprung with outspread claws from a high tree on the passing hunter—do you think the boy sat by the fire throughout the night without looking a score of times for the blazing eyeballs, and listening for the whistling fur, and hearing steps like that of the lion in Pilgrim’s Progress, “a great soft padding paw.”
What forest lore the boys learned, too: that more and sweeter sap came from a maple which stood alone than from any in a grove; that the shallow gouge flowed more freely, but the deep gouge was richest in sweet; and that many other forest trees besides the maple ran a sweet sap.
Today would have been my Grandmom Kass’s 89th birthday. She passed in her sleep one week after Kate and Elliot’s wedding in February.
I wrote in my journal:
I thought I had done my grieving in advance, bit by bit over the past four years. Turns out that’s not how grief works, at least not for me.
It took me awhile to post about her death (for reasons I won’t get into), but here’s what I eventually put up on Facebook:
Today we’re back in New Jersey, gathering with relatives for a Mass said in her name (in lieu of a funeral, which she definitely did not want) and takeout from our favorite Italian restaurant afterward.
I miss her, he says when we call, and we can hear the tears in his voice.
You had a good long life together, we tell him. I can’t begin to imagine what it feels like to lose the person you chose to share your life with, especially when you’ve been inseparable for seventy years. Even if she was leaving you little by little.
But I do know one thing: it is not possible to say “I love you” too many times.
I have put off writing this post for four weeks, because clicking “publish” on a blog post is a public announcement that one more person who loved me is gone from this world. It’s selfish to grieve for that reason, but I don’t care. He loved us for how we made him feel, too. And I could not possibly have felt any more loved.
On Friday, August 11th, my sweet, affectionate, hilarious grandfather ate lunch (at the rehab facility we hoped he’d soon be getting out of), closed his eyes for a nap, and did not wake up again.
In the six months since our grandmother passed, he told us often that he was ready to go. That he could have suffered a heart attack in the middle of the night, slumped on the bathroom floor for who knows how long before his aide found him in the morning, just goes to show you how tough he was. At 92, for crying out loud!
On my last visit home before he died, I gave him a hand massage (when Kate and I were visiting together we’d do both hands at once) and, for the first time, asked if he’d like me to massage his feet as well. It makes me sad how embarrassed elderly people can be about the state of their toenails—who cares, right? you’ve been using the same pair of feet for how many decades?!—but he wanted a footrub too much to demur.
I was just about finished the first foot when his lunch arrived, and afterward he was drowsy so I let him sleep and promised I’d do his other foot the next day.
The next day, he slept all through my visit.
The day after that, I met my aunt and uncle at the rehab facility, and he napped through that visit, too, except he did this weird thing where he’d respond to people talking in the hall. “You don’t mind if I sleep, do you? I’m sorry,” he said at one point when he realized we were there, and we told him not to apologize, he could sleep all he wanted.
As we left I gave him a kiss on the forehead, and that was that. I never got to finish his footrub.
He loved helping me wind my yarn because he used to do the same for his mother, who was pretty much a genius with a crochet hook.
I’d totally forgotten how he’d twist a cloth napkin into the shape of a bird and make it look like it was darting out of his hand, so I was delighted all over again browsing through iPhoto just now.
The two most important things to know about my grandfather were his playfulness and his devotion. Even after he retired, he always worked too hard mowing and shoveling and whatnot—he literally had a heart attack and lost consciousness in the garage one hot summer day. And when my grandmother became ill, he remembered his wedding vows. No matter what, he was not going to let her go into a nursing home. He took care of her—with help from home health aides most days—every single day for the rest of her life.
My grandparents weren’t up for attending Kate and Elliot’s wedding back in February, but I recorded a mini-interview with them that we could play at the rehearsal dinner.
Me: What do you think of Elliot? Grandmom: Oh, I think he’s fantastic. Nobody better than him. Me: Nobody better than him, right? Grandmom: That’s right. He’s the best. Me: The best of all men! Grandmom: The men of all men! That’s right. Me: I know another great man. A good husband! What do you think about Elliot? Grandpop:[through a mouthful of dinner] I think he’s a very nice felshon. I’m in love with him!
I just think it is so adorable that he couldn’t decide between “fellow” and “person” so he went with the portmanteau.
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My aunt Kathy (who has done an AMAZING job of juggling finances and healthcare headaches for the past four years, bless her soul!) told me not too long ago that my grandfather’s definition of success was to be able to save enough money to leave an inheritance to his children. By that measure (and others), he was absolutely a success. When I called him he sometimes used to say, “Didja make any money for me today?”, which used to irritate me when I was out of print and flat-out broke, but eventually I realized I needed to lighten the hell up. So when he’d say, “Didja make any money for me today?”, I’d reply, “Oh, yes. Potloads of money. Tomorrow I’m going to send you a check for a million dollars.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about all that these past four weeks: what a good worker and saver he was, how devoted he was to the people he loved. I’ve been clinging to the notion that the best way to honor him right now is to work as hard as I can—and when I get paid for that work, to put a good bit of it aside for something bigger than my own keeping.
My grandfather showed me how to be a good-hearted human. So I will work hard. I will remember to laugh at myself. And I will always show my family how much I love them.
