Once upon a time
before my grandmahood
I’d only see a mess
where something else had stood.
Now I have been blighted
my perception gone agley
it isn’t bricks and gravel
it’s Minecraft that I see!
Thanks again to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.
Tag Archives: grandma
Connections: January 28
Grandma says we need fresh air!
It’s time to climb and jog!
Grandma seems a wee bit daft;
we think she’s slipped a cog.
It’s quite all right
to say OUTSIDE!
when there’s no ice floe
on the slide,
but today it’s frozen
like our digits —
really, Grandma,
there are limits!
Connections: January 5
Play
one day
too old
or so foretold.
But December
makes us remember
what we did
as kids.
Grandma:
memory-keeper
-sower
-reaper
cardboard hold-out
iThing rout-out.
Imagination:
inter-generation
sellerless, buyerless
the original wireless.
For related musings/rantings, see Legacy and @Grandma’s.
And Happy New Year, dear reader!
August 13
My wonderful Grandma O’Hern lived on Summer Street
in a magic house with brown sugar and blankets for tents
and a swing on the front porch.
And moss roses in the summertime.
Now you know why I grow moss roses every year.
August countdown.
Fruitcake, Part 2
While I was writing my last post, “Fruitcake,” I was plotting “Fruitcake II,” intending to suggest that my grandmother was the fruitcake, making myself as snarky as the fruitcake nay-sayers. But I wasn’t sure I should do it. To write such commentary about my grandmother seemed dishonorable.
The NYT sensed my writer’s dilemma and on 1 December published a piece by Ken Budd, who told of similar misgivings and maintained that “honest writing” (his memoir) wins over “feelings of the dead” (his father’s). Helpful, but not quite a perfect parallel since he admired his father and I am, at best, ambivalent about Grandma. Also I am that private person he says his father was. Writing anything remotely personal makes me squirmy, and I know when I write about family I’m writing about me at my life’s foundation; I cringe, knowing that putting life into words — even if no one else reads them – is a way of baring it.
But that precisely is the reason to write, yes? To bare — and bear — life?
Yet enough baring already. With a cosmic chorus of self-revelation reverberating through our quivering psyches, why would I want to add my little paragraphs about my grandmother? Because I am addicted to the writing process, indebted to it, intrigued by it. It dims the din.
I do care that I’m exposing my dead grandmother — and me — to strangers. I do care about her right to rebuttal, which is inconvenient for her right now. But I care more about finding the words. Maybe I’m becoming a writer.
