Category: Family

Random Ramblings as the Weekend Begins

End of the week, beginning of the weekend.  Weekends can be kind of tricky because they “feel” like weekends, but really, as a writer with a day job, there’s some heavy lifting to be done on the weekends.  Up until today I had several quasi-plans for the weekend–these are plans that people have broached but then not really solidified, and they have about a 50-50 chance of just going away on their own.  I knew that I could only do about half the plans, but I don’t like to be the person who always says no, and since I never know which plans will actually happen, I tend to wait and see.  Not infrequently, that strategy works out, but sometimes I have to back out something I thought would disappear but didn’t.  Sometimes,  for group things like book club or wilderness I’ll hang on right ’til the bitter end, assuming there will be a small cascade of last minute regrets until the the host will just cancel about two hours before the event.  Then I get to feel kind of self-righteous for not cancelling plus I get a block of bonus writing time…

All of this is not really main thing on my mind though–except to say that I got to postpone a bunch of semi-scheduled stuff guilt-free because I needed to leave the time available to hang out with my brother, who is moving to Chicago (“back” to Chicago, as we both spent some years there).  He was going to leave Friday, but some things changed and now he is leaving Monday, and so his schedule is all weird as he does things like return his cable box, wait for a truck to come take his car, meet with his subletters etc.  I will squeeze myself into whatever piece of interstitial time arises.

Omitting the netherworld of a weekend, leaving on Monday is like leaving  tomorrow. I have to say I’m pretty sad about it. That is the main thing on my mind.

My Brother Is Leaving LA

My brother is leaving LA and moving (back) to Chicago. I’m happy for him, because it feel like a change, and it feels he’s been looking for a change, but I’m also sad because he will be gone.  Although we are certainly different in many ways, in other ways, of my siblings, we have the most in common in terms of sensibility, and so in some ways he is the closest person I have to myself.

If they are not sudden, partings have a chronology.  At first one in aware of the upcoming parting but it is far away. You will see the person a dozen more times: the thrumming drum of the parting is muffled by all the times that stand between any of those times and the last time. A dozen times becomes several times, several times become a couple of times… and finally it is the last time–the time after which the person will get in a car or on a plane, or some metaphorical boat to the underworld and go someplace different and far away.

And the last time, the awareness of it being the last time floats and lands, floats and lands through your time together. You think “this is the last time,” and then for a few moments you forget it is the last time, and then you remember and think, “this is the last time.”

In thinking of this and being sad, I am also being over-dramatic, because Chicago is hardly the ends of the earth my brother and I will certainly see each other a few times a year.  It’s not like saying goodbye to our friends in Australia almost a decade ago, or like saying goodbye to my father the last time before he died. But I think maybe all the big goodbyes in my life have sensitized me to the smaller ones as well, like stubbing the toe that’s been broken.  If I let myself remember, the small goodbyes are just rehearsals for the biggest goodbyes. In every case, with no exceptions, the big goodbye is out there, a gong echoing and reverberating through the years of  padding between then and now, saying “I am here.”

Yeah–that’s  weird metaphor juxtaposed with other questionable metaphor, but hey, I’m writing sad–because I’ll see my brother on Sunday, and it will be the last time I see my brother before he moves away.

After Life

Someone I know from my place of work died recently.  He’d had an interesting life: He’d served in the military then done well in academia. He married four times and had a number of children. As the person who processed his expense reports, I can say that in very recent years he spent months at a time in England and Italy, and that he ate well–like I imagine Henry the 8th would have dined if he’d had a per diem. His receipts reported spirits with every meal, and things like Shepherds Pie and quail.
For almost a year, the gentleman was ill and seldom visited our offices. The few times he came in, he seemed mostly peeved at his condition, which was revealing itself to be one with finite outcome. Upon his death, it has been his second wife, with the help of two various sons who has emerged to handle his large library, items in his office and the number of bills that he received to his work mailbox. When the mail began to transition and be address to “Executor of the Estate,” I called to confirm that this was she. This was when she revealed to me that there was, as of yet, no formal executor–because there was no will!

I found this both surprising, and I guess, not.  On one hand, he had fair warning.  On the other, maybe he figured that after he was gone, it didn’t really matter.  Maybe he’d had conversations and things were pretty much worked out in ways one can’t see from a distance.

But as the person opening doors, filing paperwork and procuring boxes for family members trying to work their way through the rooms full of books, papers, thoughts and ongoing business that one man accrues in a life, I could only be struck by how little anyone seemed to be prepared for this eventuality. And really, the choice not to make a will, even given a good six month lead time, seems somewhat self-involved and presuming–qualities some might have discerned in him even before his death.
My father had a will, but it has still taken my mother years to go through the myriad of things left behind. She continues to go through things, purging and storing and making decisions largely, I think, so that we–their children–won’t have to. Although it is hopefully decade away still, she is putting thought into things so that her possession and affairs will be as easily dealt with as possible.  Basically she is the opposite of presuming when it comes to such matters.

But the other night as I was thinking about this, I thought: What about my end of the bargain? An obituary seems the very least one could do in such a situation, and I realized I wasn’t sure what my mother’s parents’ names were, or even where she was born! Since I was using a Southwest voucher and making an impromptu trip to Indiana, I decided it was time to do for real something I have been promising to do for a couple of years–try to ask the questions that in the future I will wish that I had asked.  And this time, instead of assuming that I could come up with some good questions, I consulted the internet, something like “How to Interview a Family Member,” and of course, because it’s the internet, found several articles on taking a Family History, here and here and here.  A lot of the questions are similar. I ended up with a double space list of three pages, and after dinner this evening, turned on the recorder, and we had Part I of a very interesting conversation!

After Life

Someone I know from my place of work died recently.  He’d had an interesting life: He’d served in the military then done well in academia. He married four times and had a number of children. As the person who processed his expense reports, I can say that in very recent years he spent months at a time in England and Italy, and that he ate well–like I imagine Henry the 8th would have dined if he’d had a per diem. His receipts reported spirits with every meal, and things like Shepherds Pie and quail.

For almost a year, the gentleman was ill and seldom visited our offices. The few times he came in, he seemed mostly peeved at his condition, which was revealing itself to be one with finite outcome. Upon his death, it has been his second wife, with the help of two various sons who has emerged to handle his large library, items in his office and the number of bills that he received to his work mailbox. When the mail began to transition and be address to “Executor of the Estate,” I called to confirm that this was she. This was when she revealed to me that there was, as of yet, no formal executor–because there was no will!

I found this both surprising, and I guess, not.  On one hand, he had fair warning.  On the other, maybe he figured that after he was gone, it didn’t really matter.  Maybe he’d had conversations and things were pretty much worked out in ways one can’t see from a distance.

But as the person opening doors, filing paperwork and procuring boxes for family members trying to work their way through the rooms full of books, papers, thoughts and ongoing business that one man accrues in a life, I could only be struck by how little anyone seemed to be prepared for this eventuality. And really, the choice not to make a will, even given a good six month lead time, seems somewhat self-involved and presuming–qualities some might have discerned in him even before his death.

My father had a will, but it has still taken my mother years to go through the myriad of things left behind. She continues to go through things, purging and storing and making decisions largely, I think, so that we–their children–won’t have to. Although it is hopefully decade away still, she is putting thought into things so that her possession and affairs will be as easily dealt with as possible.  Basically she is the opposite of presuming when it comes to such matters.

But the other night as I was thinking about this, I thought: What about my end of the bargain? An obituary seems the very least one could do in such a situation, and I realized I wasn’t sure what my mother’s parents’ names were, or even where she was born! Since I was using a Southwest voucher and making an impromptu trip to Indiana, I decided it was time to do for real something I have been promising to do for a couple of years–try to ask the questions that in the future I will wish that I had asked.  And this time, instead of assuming that I could come up with some good questions, I consulted the internet, something like “How to Interview a Family Member,” and of course, because it’s the internet, found several articles on taking a Family History, here and here and here.  A lot of the questions are similar. I ended up with a double space list of three pages, and after dinner this evening, turned on the recorder, and we had Part I of a very interesting conversation!

 

 

 

 

 

Weekend Excerpts

SATURDAY:  My mother-in-law, in town for the weekend, holds my arm as we stand at the L-shaped buffet at her friend’s new Thai noodle shop.  She wears jeans, a floppy tee-shirt and tinted glasses with white rims studded with Swarovski crystals. Her friend, on the other side of the sneeze-guarded trays of food, has on a floor length skirt, and lots of purple.

The food in trays are aren’t the familiar dishes listed on the English menu of the restaurant my husband and I usually go to next door. She suggested for me lumpy squares of pumpkin sauteed in spices and I agree.  I point to a curry with basil, chicken and bamboo shoots, and when she looks hesitant, assure her I will like it.

We travel to the short side of the L,  where in one tray balls and cubes of unidentified meats  float in a brown broth, next to another tray of potato-sized slices of  a starchy root that isn’t a potato soak in a bright orange bath. What’s that? I ask, intrigued, but she doesn’t answer, either because she hasn’t heard me, or, more likely, because she can’t figure out a way to translate it.

“Or that?” I point to cut green stems drifting in what could be a familiar combination of coconut milk and red curry powder. Her friend on the other side of the counter comes over to check on us. “Is it morning glory? “Is it bok choy?”

“Not bok-choy,” says the friend.

My mother-in-law, looks seriously at the whole section of offerings and says, “Not for you, I think. These not for you,” and steers us toward the register.

SUNDAY: On Sunday mornings I try to counterbalance a week’s worth of muscle-stiffening sitting at desks by going to a yoga class that meets at 9:45.  I leave the house at 9:43 and arrive at my class at 9:55–a serious breach of etiquette at some yoga studios, but this is a gym, so nobody cares. When the class lets out at 10:45, if I see my friend Gina, we go the the little snack stand inside the gym and order two fresh juices made of mixed veggies, and drink them at one of the little cafe tables along the wall with a partial view of child care area where toddlers play with colored balls, push wheeled objects, and occasionally shove into each other so that one falls and cries.

When my friend has not come to class, I go straight to my car, usually run some errand, like buying gas for the car or stopping at the grocery store.  At 11:AM the radio announcer introduces the Moth Radio Hour, a collection of real people tell five-to-ten minute stories from their own lives.  This morning I emerge from the Vons in time to hear a woman with a Sarah Silverman voice tell about the birth of her youngest sibling when she was twelve, and being told they did not share a father. “My father always took us to get ice cream to tell us bad news. If you don’t want to find out that your grandpa’s been diagnosed with cancer, or that your dog has been put to sleep, don’t go to Cold Stone Creamery with my dad.”

Arriving home with my groceries  I park, but  turn the key in the ignition only enough to kill the engine but not the power, so I can hear the rest of someone’s story before I go upstairs to fold laundry and write stories of my own.

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