Straight No Chaser

Questions and Answers, or, One or the Other

1. are people taking this contest too seriously?
i don't think so. i asked for effort and creativity, and, in all but a few cases, that's exactly what i've gotten. i don't think you should bother doing something if you're going to do it half-assed. that doesn't mean do it for the gps; it means, the dual purposes here are self-exploration and mutual encouragement (and, to a lesser degree, the entertainment of shannon), so if you want to play, try playing to those goals.

2. are you trying to impress people with your entries?
eh. no more so than usual. at first i felt an added pressure to set some sort of example, but i quickly realized no one was going to follow it, anyway, so it was back to writing for myself, for fun.

3. are the people that read the entries going a bit too far with tearing other people's entries down?
far be it from me to judge anyone for being childish. i want this contest to be fun, and while i stopped laughing at the meanness long ago, i can't speak for anyone else. i think that, ultimately, it's up to you how much respect you've got for your fellow contestants and yourself. and for me, i guess. that's what i think.

when my grandfather was dying from emphysema, he carried an oxygen tank from room to room, and the little plastic tubelets that went in his nose were this pretty shade of pool green.

at seven, the worse he got, the more eagerly i believed he was eventually going to get better. i was probably too young to appreciate how pulled-together he was, how shiny his belt buckles and neatly made his bed, but i definitely noticed when that changed. i hated seeing him in pajamas at four in the afternoon. he had always been benefactor and disciplinarian, quick with a sharp backhand when i broke his polaroid camera, but when he went on permanent bedrest, he was almost annoyingly saccharine. still always had a fresh haircut, though, thanks, probably, to my grandmother.

one of the last times we went to visit him, granddad was totally disoriented, unsure whether he was in the hospital or at home. it made my mom very upset, more so because chad and i were sort of sick that weekend; sick dad, sick kids, sandwich generation, very stressful.

she brought us in, both sniffling into tissues, and he said one lucid thing, as i remember: "i can't catch colds!"

panicked, sort of. he was wearing his blue and white striped pajamas, or at least the top half of them (i hadn't seen his legs in weeks, at that point), and as doting a grandfather as he was, had always been, he looked at us as though we carried the plague. we were seven and four. chad couldn't even follow the conversation well enough to perceive that that wasn't a good moment at which to loudly suck up a long string of snot.

grandmother fretted. mom took us home.

he died less than a week later.

for about the ten years following, i didn't remember most of the details, just what he was like beforehand, and how upset my mom was afterward. at about seventeen, though, i remembered the parts about the oxygen tank, the striped pajamas, our colds, my brother's snot.

off and on, i get preoccupied with this idea that we killed him. it's pretty stupid, but, he was one of my favorite people, and i tend to sabotage the things i find wonderful.