you dreammaker, you heartbreaker

Sometimes I think we are forgetful on purpose. We forget to pay a parking ticket, forget to return a favorite library book, forget to unpack a suitcase after a vacation. We forget to cut him out of all of those framed pictures, we get in the car and forget where we wanted to go until we’re already there. We forget to sit down and write about things that are hard to put into words.

Sometimes I know I forget things on purpose.

It had been weeks since I’d been to see Mr. Kelly. As I walked in his room and found him asleep in his recliner -book fipped closed over his thumb holding his page – I couldn’t think of a good enough excuse to give him as to why I’d stayed away so long. I didn’t want to tell him the truth – to speak the words outloud. So as I stood in the doorway and watched his eyelids flutter with the sporadic thoughts of sleep, I fought back the urge to curl up in his lap and beg for forgiveness. Not that I’d need to beg. Mr. Kelly was notorious for letting me off the hook.

After a few moments his eyes opened – almost sensing my presence – and he smiled at me.

“When did you get here?”

“Just now,” I said and smiled at him.

“I’ve missed you,” he said simply and waved me to his side. “Tell me everything.”

I crumpled to the ground at his feet and rambled on about all of the boring things I’d wrapped my life around in our time apart. Occasionally he’d interrupt with a laugh or a sigh or just to rumple my hair in support.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he finally said after I’d let silence sit between us for an extended moment. “And you’re wrong. You aren’t lost at all. You’re just wandering a bit.”

I bit my lip and traced the patterns in the carpet.

“That’s why I haven’t come,” I said to the rug. “I didn’t want to admit out loud that I’m afraid I have no idea what I’m doing – where I’m going.”

I looked up at him then but he only smiled.

“You will figure it out. You always figure it out.”

No advice. Only confidence in me. The swelling pain I felt in my chest tightened then as Mr. Kelly began to hum to himself. I knew he’d fallen asleep when the rhythmic strokes through my hair slowed and then stopped.

I cleaned up his apartment while he slept – putting books back in their places on the shelves and returning boxes to their cabinets in the kitchen.

“When did you get here?” Mr. Kelly’s voice called from the other room and made me jump. I froze then, both startled and then devastated.

“Just now,” I whispered as I sat on the floor next to him.

“I missed you.”

Alzheimer’s is a funny thing. It creeps up on even the most prepared.

And then just like a wrecking ball, it tears through the life you’ve built, one blow at a time.

I lied to Mr. Kelly before. This was the real reason I’d stayed away. I was afraid he wouldn’t remember me. Afraid that I’d have to play along as the thread slowly unwound from his spool until one day I, too, was just another empty face in the room.

I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t brave enough to look into his blank eyes. I wasn’t ready to be a stranger.

I wasn’t ready to be forgotten.

“What if, instead of forgetting things when we get old, we were actually able to recover other people’s thoughts,” Mr. Kelly had said to me one afternoon more than a year before he started showing signs of Alzheimer’s. “Can you imagine? Wouldn’t that be just amazing?”

I thought of that afternoon as I knelt beside him and repeated all I’d told him just minutes before. We had laughed then over the impossibility of the statement and then thrown out theories of what we thought we might be able to recover.

“What if we could uncover lost thoughts of great composers?” he had said and his eyes lit up. “I’ve always wanted to be a great musician. Our wondering ended then as he had picked up his guitar and strummed a simple song.

His guitar sat untouched in the corner now, dust settling on its wooden frame.

I absentmindedly placed a record on his player as i thought about that afternoon. Familiar music filled the room and Mr. Kelly smiled, closing his eyes again. I swept away the single tear that escaped and threatened to give me away, but others choked my words in my throat as I tried to whisper goodbye.

I knew when he woke again he would have forgotten I’d ever been there.

houses are built to live in

It’s quiet in the house tonight. So quiet that I fish through a box in the tool shed out back and dig out an old AM radio and tune it to a static-filled news broadcast just to hear noise. The small house seems huge as I walk from one empty room to the  next soaking in the loneliness.

Everything here reminds me of my grandfather.

Leaning against the door frame of the living room I can see him sitting in the recliner in the corner, glasses perched on his nose, working a word search from a pile of puzzle books on the table next to him. Without looking up he yells at me for running through the house, for kicking the gravel off the driveway, for building pillow forts in the dining room. Then, a much smaller version of me crawls under his book and into his lap and kisses him on the tip of his nose. And he tells me a story.

But I flip off the light and he is gone.

In the bathroom, I open the drawer for my toothbrush out of habit but only find it empty. I retrieve it from a packed up box in the hall – one of the few left in the house – and return it there when I’m finished. Only a couch and a couple of boxes are left in the house now.

My father used to tell me that a house was just a house – four walls and nothing more – but you could build a home anywhere. I credited this belief to his years as a real estate agent and contractor, building a selling hundreds of cookie cutter houses that ll looked exactly the same and meant nothing to him. Or it could have been his childhood spent following my grandfather as he was transferred to Air Force bases around the world. A house was just a house – in Guam, France, Saudi Arabia, or the U.S. – but with his family it was always a home.

But sitting in the empty house tonight I can’t help but be filled with memories of the times I spent here. Christmases and Easters and summers that were endless, yet never long enough. I was the only one who watched my grandmother pack the memories into boxes and load them onto the moving truck. My dad, my sister, my brothers, my aunts – no one seemed affected by the home we were letting go.

It’s not just a house. It’s 37 years of memories. For me it’s an entire lifetime of memories. And tonight part of me is sad. And I miss my grandfather all over again.

He will stay in this house when we lock it’s doors for the last time in the morning. He won’t move a couple of towns away with my grandmother and her new boyfriend. Our bulging stockings lined up in rows under the Christmas tree won’t move with us either. Nor will the Easter egg hunts in the front yard, or the swing between the trees out back, or the garden where I grew my cantaloupes.

We will leave those things here. With this house. With this home.

I’m afraid part of me will stay here too. Sitting in my grandfather’s recliner. Swinging with him out back. Opening Christmas gifts, dying eggs around the kitchen table, pruning rose bushes along the fence line.

Sitting here alone in the empty house tonight, listening to the old radio. This part of me will stay here with this house.

a desk job

The interview did not go well. Actually, that could be the world’s biggest understatement. For lack of a better way to put it and lack of the energy it takes to think more eloquently, it sucked. It sucked a whole lot.

This wasn’t an important job interview. Just a part-time publishing assistant that I thought might make me more familiar with the literary world and quite possibly get my foot in the door somewhere. But the interview felt more like being stuck in an elevator door, with it dinging and trying to close over and over again, squishing my body each time.

It had started out confident enough . A few solid getting-to-know-you questions which somehow segued into the one single question that doomed the interview. The one question that roped me into giving an answer that somehow managed to question and then insult the man’s knowledge of the female generation. Way to go.

I knew right away he didn’t know much about women as soon as I stepped into his office. He was wearing a dark black suit with a dark tie and a dark shirt  and sat at a thick, dark desk that sprawled across the room filled with dark art sculptures. He was the perfect picture of a successful male.

And then he addressed me as “Miss Blair” – which every girl over the age of 12 knows is patronizing in a professional setting. Miss Insert First Name Here. Yeah, we don’t like that. If you’re going to use “Miss,” stick to last names.

So from there, it went something like this:

He asked a few simple questions before dropping his bomb.

“So what do you want to do with your life? What do you want to be?”

I smiled at him and told myself to stop cracking my knuckles. Then I looked him square in the eyes. “I know I should know the answer to that because I’m 23, but I just don’t,” I told him honestly.

“It’s fine, you  have your whole life ahead of you. You’re young.”

“Everyone always says that, but it’s not really true. These days you have to make it right away or you get left behind,” I told him. “Things have changed. If you want something, it’s not enough to be smart, talented and driven. A million other people want the same exact thing you do, so you have to be competitive, cut throat. Very unattractive qualities.”

“You think being competitive is unattractive?”

“My mother always told me ladies never let on that they are competitive, they never race to the finish line. They simply sit back and wait for the opportune moment to jump in. Some see it as taking their turn, but I think it’s more of a strategy sort of thing. Waiting for the perfect moment.”

“So you think women can’t be competitive.”

“No, I think women have to be smart. I think women have to be smarter than everyone else if they want to be successful.”

“Ah ha.”

In my experiences, “ah ha’s ” are never good.

“At my age, women are obsessed with weddings and getting married. There’s a whole cable channel devoted to reality shows about weddings and women driving themselves crazy over the.”

“What’s the big deal about getting married?”

“I don’t know, it’s not really an obsession of mine,” I told him. “But every girl I know wants to get married now. They want to do it while they’re young.”

“I thought they wanted careers. I thought women your age wanted to take over the world by the time they turned 30.”

“No, that was the last generation. That was our mothers. All the girls I know are relationship-obessessed. They’re hunting for Mr. Right. They’re ready for marriage. They don’t want to end up like their mothers.”

“And what’s wrong with their mothers?” he asked me.

“They’re unhappy,” I said, thinking about my own mother stuck in an office working because her generation decided that if women wanted to be taken seriously, they had to sit behind a desk. “They’re driven, their obsessed, they might be succeessful, but they’re unfulfilled. They sit at their desks all day and wonder what their lives are missing. They’re unhappy. Girls my age won’t put up with unhappiness. I won’t put up with unhappiness.”

Then he just stared at me.

“So you’re telling me you don’t want this job? You don’t want to sit behind a desk all day and wonder what you’re missing out there in the big, bad world.”

I really shot myself in the foot with that one.

“I’ll sit back there behind that desk,” I told him. “I just want to be sure before I sit down that that’s where I want to be. I don’t want to be sitting behind that same desk in 20 years wondering what part of the world I haven’t seen, what I’ve missed.”

Then he stood, shook my hand and told me to go see the world. And he hired some other woman. A woman who didn’t express one single problem with sitting at a desk. And I’m not sure I’m really any better off than she is. After all, she’s the one getting the pay check.

like a clock during a thunderstorm

The thunder shook the windows and for the first time in more than five weeks, I was homesick.

My grandmother wore a path in the carpet as she paced up and down the hallway muttering about the flowers and the patio furniture and the storm siren and her car windows and the radio station while I layed in bed with the curtains thrown back and the blinds pulled up, watching the storm. It would only be a few minutes before she’d drag me out of bed and into the neighbor’s storm cellar.  She is afraid of thunderstorms.

But as lightning lit up the night sky and rain clicked against the windows, I felt myself calmly looking for sleep.

When I was little, my mother used to scoop up my little brother and me and lay on the couch with us by the windows in the living room to watch storms. We’d gasp at the lightning bolts and squeal with excitement when thunder boomed. There on the couch, there wasn’t anything we could possibly be afraid of.

More than a decade older, I scurried down the steps of the top level of a parking garage soaked in heavy rain drops and I stood with Elliott and watched a thunderstorm blow through campus from under the overhang. Out of the rain but close enough to feel the threatening winds, I still gasped in excitement as lightning jumped down from the clouds.

Last night as I gathered up the flashlights and lawn chairs and umbrellas and scurried across the yard after my grandmother who was already yanking up the doors to the storm cellar, I felt a pang of homesickness. I guess I was homesick for the calm excitement that used to arrive with storms.

Here, I just found panic.