Happy New Year, everyone. Hope you’re staying dry, warm, and fed. It’s been a minute since I posted anything. Between getting covid, the holidays, and a stunning bout of tech layoffs, I’ve been distracted. I still write every day, and as long as I keep doing that I tend to feel okay. It’s somewhat like a lifeboat from which I can see no shore, a place where I live in meanwhile.
I was reading an interesting article written by a man serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison that made me thoughtful indeed.
As I grow older, I find myself spending more time dwelling on the past. Memory is a tricky thing for me, since it often comes in snatches defined by certain “anchor moments.” A trick of light, the shape of a street, a song, an odor… any of these will send me back to a time when I was twenty, or thirty-six, or fourteen. The jumps between the timeframes are inconsequential, which is weird when I consider how long it took to experience them at the forward rate of one minute per minute.
This is nothing new; people have been writing about it since Epictetus.
My grandmother told me how it seemed she stood on a hill overlooking a vast landscape through which she could see her own path wending here and there. “It looked like I was lost,” she said, “but I see now that I wasn’t.”
At the time she said this, she was in the final stages of congestive heart failure, her lungs slowly filling with fluid so that every breath was an effort. Her words were the faintest whisper I had to lean to hear. She, like the man in prison, had only the past left to her. There was no future, no more life adventures, nothing left to do but die.
A staunch Episcopalian, she was so sure that Jesus and her late husband would be waiting to escort her to heaven that I had no reason to doubt her. In fact, her deathbed had the air of a holy place, the feeling of attending angels hovering in the ceiling corners.
I knew I would miss her, and that my life would never be the same without the safe harbor of her love and respect, but I also knew that it was her time. She had been in the hospital undergoing arduous therapy at the direction of her eldest son, a respected cardiologist. She had the best of care, but one night when we all were gathered in her hospital room, I asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted to go home to die. I looked at my family and said, “There it is, then.” Years later, my father was dying of the same condition and wanted the same thing, to go home to die in the room where his mother, his father, and his grandmother had died.
In the spring of 1990 I was unemployed, so I spent the better part of two weeks sitting by the bed reading to my grandmother. She loved All Creatures Great and Small and The Youngest Science, so I read from those books or the Bible. She was especially fond of the Book of James.
Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!
I wasn’t there when she died. I was up the street at 7&7 Studio rehearsing with Craig Schumacher’s house band, Henry Electric. When I got back to my grandmother’s house, every light was on. I walked up the back stairs to the kitchen and found my dad, my uncle John, and my cousin Chris sitting around the pine table that had once been in my grandfather’s service station. My father rose to greet me with open arms. We embraced and he whispered “She’s gone.”
I walked back to the bedroom and found my aunt stroking her hair. She looked up as I entered and gave me a nervous smile. “She never would have allowed me to do this,” she said.
“Sure she would,” I said.
“Well, I never would have asked her.”
I thought then of how many things I would never ask her. She had died in the same room she was born in; had she not been transferred to a steel medical bed in the final few days, she would have died in the same bed as well. The house was full of books of photographs, bundles of letters, old newspapers, articles of clothing. Her bedroom dresser had bottom drawers containing a trove of pince-nez spectacles, straight razors, booster buttons from long-ago campaigns, half-full diaries. Many of these items had lain undisturbed since they had been placed there fifty or seventy-five years before. Now that she was dead, all the stories that tied those things together were gone.
Ever since I was a little kid one of my great pleasures was to raid the library cabinet for one of the black paper Kodak photo books full of snapshots of a very different Tucson. The white skies and barren desert made it seem like the moon, so unlike the lush tree-shaded house I knew. The people in the photos all worse hats and formal clothes, even when rising bicycles or walking around.
In one photo there was a man driving a tall wire-wheeled car. He was decked out in Mr. Toad driving togs, complete with duster and goggles. “That was Mr. Herford,” she said. He was so proud of that car. It cost more than two thousand dollars, which was a fortune, so to get his money’s worth he drove it everywhere, even a few blocks to the post office.” She laughed then. My grandmother was always a great laugher (another thing I would always miss) “The funny thing was that it always broke down. It was Italian, so he had a little Italian mechanic who rode beside him. The car would stop and blow out a big cloud of steam or smoke, and the little Italian would get out and set his toolkit on the ground, then get to fixing it. Sometimes it might take a few minutes, sometimes longer. More than once he couldn’t fix it, so a team of horses would be summoned to pull it back to the garage. In a few days we’d hear its motor– it was quite distinct— and we’d rush out to watch it go by, wondering how long it would be before it broke down again.”
All those stories, all those names of people in the photos, all of that died with her. The loss was unfathomable.
In the following months I helped organize her affairs and was lucky to discover a treasure trove of letters and journals that showed me a whole other side of my grandmother. She was endlessly polite and kind, but held many private opinions about such subjects as my parents’ divorce, what Reagan was doing to the country, and (often) my own mental health. It felt a bit like I was invading her privacy, though had she been alive I am sure she would have told me all of it.
On to the next subject:
Today I’m announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication: the Slow Learner chat.
This is a conversation space in the Substack app that I set up for anyone interested in a conversation. The plan is to post short prompts, thoughts, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion. For example, if you have thoughts on memory or mortality, loss or grief, or Tucson in the early 1900s, feel free to jump in.
To join our chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app, now available for both iOS and Android. Chats are sent via the app, not email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens.
How to get started
Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Substack Chat is now available on both iOS and Android.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
I loved reading this story! What a rich and wonderful family history. It is enchanting.
Ditto here. A beautiful remembrance indeed. Thanks for sharing it.