In my dream I was playing with a baby, making a fuss over her in sing-song and Motherese. She was just a few months old, cute as a button.
“I love you!” I said to the baby, overcome with maternal sentiment and delight.
“I only like you as a friend,” she said.
I think my blog’s getting pretentious. Wordy. Anyone want to weigh in on this?
I need to figure out how to upload funny pictures of celebrities that I steal from here.
When Jennifer brought her two-year-old daughter Harper to the nursing home to visit my grandmother, we pushed the wheelchair into the sunlit center courtyard, wound vacuum in one hand and “Co-Cola” (as they say in Georgia) in the other, and we were all cheered up by watching Harper run from plant to plant and tree to tree, poking her little fingers at bark and bloom. She swung round and round the crape myrtles until the salubrious effects of my grandmother’s Valium started to wane and we went back inside.
After they left, my grandmother pronounced the red-headed Harper “full of beans.” She said Jennifer was delightful too, but after a few beats she wondered “why such a pretty girl would do that to her hair.” Maybe she was just hair-obsessed because her own hadn’t been washed for a couple of weeks, except by a shower cap shampoo at the hospital, which just seemed to make her hair greasier. I offered to bring her some astronaut shampoo, but she really wanted a wash and set.
“Well,” I said, “I think the crimson and purple look great on Jen.” Big Wis looked at me skeptically. “And actually I saw a picture of her head shaved once. She’s one of the few people I know who can carry it off.” In her silence I became self conscious about my split ends and the rat’s nest at the back of my neck. I thought of the time in 10th grade when I tried to pierce my eyebrow with a safety pin, but my skin kept spitting out the ring, rejecting the transplant. And the belly button that got infected in 8th grade because I’d gone too deep with the needle. And the time I ran away. And my senior year of college when I dropped out for a semester, gained major lbs (could no longer fit into those Gap khakis and Talbots button-downs she loves so much), and developed some substance abuse issues. And the nails - always too short - always more obvious than the other mistakes. (Since I was a kid - “If you grow them out, I will buy you a new such and such/take you to Chucky Cheese.”) She nudged me a few times in the hospital room to stop biting.
“At least Jennifer doesn’t have tattoos,” I said. “Or piercings.”
“Yes,” said Big Wis. “That is certainly true. It could be worse.”
We try to prevent our grandparents from knowing exactly how much worse it can get. But I have decided that they like the challenge of loving us through the phases and rebellions (as long as they get to love at a distance). I think they’re proud in some way that they’re still friendly with the cool kids. Even though Big Wis came back from the nursing home salon that afternoon with a smooth grey helmet for a head instead of her natural, wild curls, I felt like she was inspired in some small way by Jennifer’s hair. Just like she was inspired by Harper’s somersaults in the grass. At any rate, I feel like it’s good for older people to see the most flagrant signs of youth. And I don’t think that it’s intolerance that makes some grandparents shake their heads at the mohawks and ripped jeans and gum-chewing on the street corner (yes, I think like a 1950s housewife sometimes - that is my secret), I think they’re just over all that stuff. They just want to meet people so put-together that looks aren’t a distraction. They don’t understand people trying to draw attention to themselves in that way. “Why would such a pretty girl do that to her hair?” was a very real question to my grandmother. She didn’t see that appearance can still be an effective translator of emotion. Especially, I think, for people who are attracted to metaphor, to poetry, and to art in general.
Later that day I explained to Big Wis that Jen had had a really tough year, and my grandmother said that she was sorry, and that she now understood the hair.
I thank everyone who wrote to ask about my grandmother’s health. I thank everyone who commented on my blog, even though I did not respond. I am thankful that my grandma was on the rehab hall of the nursing facility, and not the feces hall, where old men groaned in wheelchairs and ran into my shins from time to time when they wanted me to take them back to their rooms. I was looking at the phone book and the old man crashed into me with his desperate request. “You can’t take him,” said the nurse. “If he’s in his room, he will try to get into his bed and hurt himself.” I asked him where he lived and he emphatically spelled out his last name, like I had a Rolodex that would tell me everything. I wish I did. I knew nothing about the Alzheimer’s, the senility. I knew nothing about my grandmother’s roommate, who had to be fed by a nurse and who frequently sent her oatmeal back for being too cold. I am excited because my friends Jason and Jessie are getting married this weekend. Life seems to be picking up again. I started a class tonight with a young teacher who has funny stories to tell. She also inspires me because she is a writer and a waitress. I am less than a waitress. I aspire to be a waitress. If only someone would support me in this dream. I like to bring people food. I am planning my trip back to Williamsburg for my five-year Homecoming. I hope to run into people, and to show them that I am no longer a wreck. I hope to watch some bad football while drunk. Maybe football will be my new sport, after doing laundry. I hope that ex-boyfriends will be amazed by me. I am putting sea algae on my nails to grow them. I am thinking of condensing my entire novel to 50 pages so I can figure out what’s important in it. I wonder if I am getting too wide for striped shirts. I will not put any more poetry on my blog for a while. I didn’t really mean it as poetry; I meant it as the transcription of a dream. It’s scary putting yourself out there. I am starting a bridge club for my grandmother, to replace her weekly group of card-playing widows in Georgia. Darren and I watched some soccer tonight at Zinc - Barcelona versus Lyon. There were some loud French persons sitting across from us at the bar but I didn’t get up the courage to ask them my carefully rehearsed questions in French. I told myself I didn’t want to distract them from the athletics, but in actuality I was afraid because I didn’t know how to apologize for speaking terrible French in French. I ate some of Darren’s mashed potatoes though. Good night.
My feet churned the dust like a tornado.
I approached Edinburgh
and then the continent went dark.
The wedding photographer was drunk.
He took pictures of ruins, of history.
An esplanade of smoking sphinxes
and grey coliseums
where we had lived once.
My body was all that was left,
whisking the ashes,
a relic of weather and population.
A senile platoon of old ladies in wheelchairs sat next to the parking lot of the nursing home, looking for fresh air before their 5 o’clock dinner. Each octogenarian was accompanied by a nursing aide wearing scrubs and smelling like cigarettes. The old woman who looked the worst off was sulking at the group’s periphery, near the dusty hanging plants. She looked toward the parked cars and slouched lower in her wheelchair. “I’m ready for Jesus to take me,” she said.
“Don’t say that,” said her aide. “Let’s talk about something nice.”
“I’m ready for Jesus to take me,” the woman said again, like Jesus was the Grim Reaper who crept into the home at night to pick and choose his aged victims.
“Just eat your cookie,” said the aide.
Is that why there are so many pudgy nurses? The more grey heads and wheelchairs I see, the more I crave potato chips.
They say that the sweetest sound in the English language is one’s own name. I heard a lot of it today. “Wistar, you have no blood vessels in your left leg.” “Wistar, can you eat some fruit cocktail, or do you think you might throw it up?” “Wistar, we’re just going to stick this needle in your vein for a hot second.” I am my grandmother’s namesake. I was there with Wistar, sitting beside the orthopedic hospital bed, editing an erotica novel on my laptop while Big Wis watched the first few episodes of Desperate Housewives, and we both started to get confused. “Hey Wis,” said my other, visiting grandparents, “Would you like to come to dinner with us?” “No,” said Big Wis, thinking they were inviting her, demobilized with infection on her fluffy pillows. “I don’t have anything to wear. I think I will just dine here tonight. I ordered mashed potatoes.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was me who had been invited [that seems like bad grammar - me versus I - someone help me], that no one was dreaming of taking her out to dinner, that she was obviously bedridden while I was mobile and restaurant-able. The other Wistar. The young, healthy Wistar, who can hoist the 90-pound grandma onto the commode, who can eat a cheeseburger in 30 seconds, who can tune out the TV during Law & Order. As opposed to the elderly, southernly Wistar, who can catch a fever and be suspicious of Mexicans. Who can refuse to be hungry for dinner. Who can reject the circulation in her leg. One nurse came into the room and said, “My father-in-law is named Wistar. I’ve never in my life met another Wistar and here are two in one room.” “Terrific,” I said, “Make the other one get better.”
This article by Michael Hirschorn from the Atlantic Monthly, entitled Quirked Around, could easily be expanded to be an encyclopedic cultural history of the mid-90s to the present. Quirk. The word makes me shudder. The word has caused me to put down many modern novels after a page and a half. And yet quirk is so well integrated into our contemporary literary, comedic, and cinematic standards, that it’s really impossible to escape. And I’m not totally sure I’d be able to say goodbye. I read the Atlantic article on my laptop while watching Home Movie, a quirky documentary directed by the same guy who made American Movie, the quirky documentary about the sub-par, mid-Western, horror movie director Mark Borchardt. Home Movie is about a handful of eccentric characters across the United States and their bizarre homes. There’s a Louisiana man who lives on a houseboat and sells alligator heads to tourist shops. There’s a flute-playing, drum-circling couple who inhabit an underground missile launch site in Kansas. There’s a former Japanese sitcom star who looks like the Joker and lives in a treehouse in a remote Hawaiian jungle…You get the idea. It’s all very fascinating, to tell you the truth, and there’s a part of me that wishes I had “discovered” these people. I could have stolen them for a book. How could you not fall prey to the quirk, in spite of your best intentions? It reminds me of a conversation I had with my cousin Nick who lives in Brooklyn [most excellent Nick, most excellent Alice, their kickass life together with loaded guns, great captions, & NYU photo school degrees]. We were sitting in a hip neighborhood bar in Red Hook, on a street which was the last street I would expect to find a hip neighborhood bar, on a street where grizzled old men rode bikes with ancient fishing poles strapped to their backs, where the door to the bar looked like it had been built out of weathered sailing ships, and Nick said that there was no such thing as authenticity anymore. It seems like the minute you find a genuine dive bar in Brooklyn, where locals have been drinking beer for decades before the college kids started gentrifying the neighborhood, where the jukebox hasn’t been refurbished to play only Rolling Stones and David Bowie jams, you immediately make the place uncool and inauthentic just by being there. Because you secretly know you don’t belong. You are one of the enemy. The bartender who wears an eye patch because he’s actually missing an eye, and not because he thinks it’s funny to look like a pirate, should refuse you service. You don’t belong because you’re outside looking in. Suddenly you’re peering suspiciously around the bar, judging how “real” everything is, to what extent the regulars lack self-awareness, whether any drink specials involve PBR. You’re judging the other hipsters who walk in two minutes late to the new scene. YOU were there first. You discovered the place.
I’m getting way off track here. Let me try to bring this back around.
I think the problem with quirkiness is the same as the problem with finding a normal bar in Brooklyn. You’re staring too hard. You’re forcing it. You don’t need to watch an eccentric alligator herdsman to feel interested in humanity. Look in the mirror sometime. You’re special too, without having to be obsessed with styrofoam solar system dioramas or owl poop. Your novel doesn’t have to be about the train conductor with a three-legged hamster who sits on his shoulder. Your hipster bar with the hipster tennis shoes dangling from the hipster bar stools is an authentic place too. The people who are just being themselves and having real human emotions and real human lives without any bullshit, contrived quirks, are always going to be better “subjects” than the dime-a-dozen, “I have a thousand cats,” “my back is tattooed with pictures of the Rice Krispies guys,” kind of people. Before you can write great fiction, or be comfortable sitting with your friends at any bar (and I’m a long way from both), you’ve got to accept that you yourself are okay, that you yourself are a real “character,” deserving of the best and the worst beers, without all the witty, quirky accessorizing.
First draft
First person
Last chance