Despertar

edits

Haha, okay, I wrote the last entry kind of distractedly and mixed up what I had intended for the title and first line. I know Christmas means carnage is a quote from Babe, the conclusion to this little syllogism set forth by the duck when he realizes he's dinner. I decided not to be the jerk who has to make sure everyone knows she's seen every movie ever. And now here I go defeating that purpose. Anyway! Yes. Babe is also how that Saint-Saens symphony became one of my favorites. I am so learned, so exposed.

Also, and I've already explained this to her privately and don't know why I am so persistently belaboring the point, my entry was not meant as a counterpoint to Aaron's, which, I realize, was not an anti-consumerist rant. When I wrote it, what I had in mind were Jenn's entry, which joked about wanting to convert to Judaism to avoid National Consumer Day, and my friend Steve, who told me yesterday, in a single breath, that he is both anti-Christmas (because the spirit of love and celebration has been choked out by the spirit of consumerism) and anti-Safeway (because Trader Joe's is the only grocery store worth his patronage).

*

I'm in Detroit. At a Sunrise Independent Living facility.

About three weeks ago, I realized I hadn't seen my paternal grandmother in, literally, ten years, and before that, since I was seven or eight years old. Four times, total, in my entire life, before yesterday. It's my dad's thing, his issue; he hates the place and the way he grew up, he resents the tether-pull of an aging mother in a shitty city, so he does what he can remotely (arranges for her assisted living services, pays the bill at the home) and never visits. Sends pictures, I guess, but she is eighty-six years old, without the dexterity or the openness to change it would take to switch around the framed photos on her bookshelf.

Three weeks ago, I realized that means she is probably still looking at the same pictures she has been for ten years. Which means, in her mind, I am still thirteen, with big glasses and horrible hair. (Unacceptable.) So, okay. I should go see her, I thought.

I tried to get my brother interested. He's her grandchild too, he hasn't seen her in just as long. He was only ten, then, so he probably doesn't remember her at all. He wouldn't bite. Already flying up from Atlanta, he wasn't interested in spending his whole Thanksgiving break in transit. Fine. Dad, then? No, because, see above, he hates Detroit and is vaguely disgusted by his entire nuclear family. Mom? No, that wouldn't make any sense, for her to spend Thanksgiving with in-laws, without her husband.

My cousin came, but he always comes. He is thirty-four and she mostly raised him, so he knows her well; they have a bond I don't really understand. Which is confusing, for me. I don't have any other relatives who are more involved with each other than they are with me. My grandmother was introducing us to friends of hers, the gentlemen she lunches with every day, and when she introduced us both by name, they perked up at the sound of his. "So this is the grandson we hear so much about!" they all hollered. "Boy, if we don't hear enough about you!" Awkward, that. I don't care if she talks about him all the time and me never, of course. She never sees me. But then, this: "Yes, and this is my granddaughter, and she's been so busy out there, in law school and flying to California"--a random detail she retained from this summer--"that I haven't seen her in about four or five years"--an embarrassingly generous estimate. Making excuses for me, or maybe actually believing that's why I haven't been, when the truth is it took me this long to realize I could come even if my dad didn't. Either way, my cousin, who is exponentially busier than I am, and always has been, has been three, four times just this year.

While my cousin is sleeping on the air mattress on the floor of her condo, literally at her feet, I'm sleeping in the eighty-seven-dollars-a-night guest condo on the upper floor of her building. Surrounded on all sides by the elderly, in varying stages of elderliness. Some just kind of meandering up and down the hall, leaning hard on their canes, smiling at me. Others perched on armchairs in the hallway, staring up and down the hallway like they're waiting for a bus.

My grandmother talks a lot, like my dad. She grows very disoriented when you touch her things or move them. I was trying to be helpful, putting away newly bought toilet paper as an apology for not being around for a decade, and she freaked out, tottered over and did it herself, explaining to me as she did that the cyst on her kidney makes it critical to have toilet paper in extreme abundance at all times. Telling me how glad she is that I'm here, how she was so excited, yesterday, to come and meet me at the airport, she forgot to take all her medication.

She was one of the last people to see Jimmy Hoffa alive, in the sixties (seventies? I didn't really follow this story and I'm not sure I know who Jimmy Hoffa is except that he was somehow involved with murder and union struggles, and that they never found him alive or dead). The restaurants were still segregated then (meaning this was, I guess, the sixties), and she ran into him and "two Spanish men, or maybe Mexican, I don't know, some kind of Spanish" at a diner. Even though they were going to eat on the white side, and she on the colored side, they held the door for her and let her go in first, which she remembers to this day. She has been told, over the years, by many people, that she should go and tell the authorities this detail, that she saw Jimmy Hoffa that day when everyone was looking for him, but she won't, because "honey, I don't know nothin' about no Spanish men, I couldn't tell them what they looked like."

She got paid two cents and hour to shuck peas, in South Carolina. Her mother and father earned a combined income of one dollar a week to serve as maid and cook to a white family in South Carolina, till a family friend told them they should "go get work with some Jews" in New York. After which she moved to Detroit, met and married my alcoholic Irish grandfather, raised four children and buried one. Nursed in the psychiatric ward, attended Caesarean sections for colored women who were forcefully discharged within eight hours of giving birth.

All that, and she gets excited, now, about lunching with her loser grandkids at an IHOP in Farmington Hills. About the pens my cousin bought her, a two-pack of Bic Atlantis ballpoints.

Oh, and guess what? I'm part Dominican! This is a nice gift, this little bit of exoticism. Something to take home with me.

I do feel like a jerk, though. How dare I let ten years go by?