It seems like a thousand days since Sunday.
I just took my sister to the airport, and my brother is traveling and will come back through town this weekend. Yesterday, we went through a footlocker that my mother left in my garage several years ago. I thought I knew what was in it. I have vivid memories of looking inside it once before. But I was wrong, because things I thought were there were not, yet there were lots of good and funny surprises, some of which I’m sure will become part of LJ posts in the coming months.
Mostly it was just comfortable and comforting to sit on the floor with my siblings and see some of the sentimental things that my parents thought were worth saving over the decades, even though they moved so much that they were constant purgers. From the time I was little, my mother used to say to me on special occasions, “I want to build memories.” As her own memory began to fade, we found that the trick for veering her away from frustration was to ask something like, “What was the name of David’s dog when he got out of the Air Force?” or “How did you and Daddy meet?” or “Who was your oldest sister?” She could look back twenty, fifty, seventy years and answer, which was like a little victory for her every time. Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease, and it’s a weird feeling to be grateful that cancer took her body before dementia could take everything else.
Last night I finished reading Armisted Maupin’s Michael Tolliver Lives, which turns out to have been the right book at the right time (thanks, Tim). I was struck by Michael’s perspective of our “logical” family, that family we create from our friends, as filling gaps very often created by a biological family. I’ve been blessed with great people in all of my families.
I wasn’t sure whether to do this post today, then I realized that my hesitation was because I worried people might think being silly was inappropriate. Yet I’m the first person to tell someone else, “Who gives a shit what other people think? As individuals, each of us manages our joys and our sorrows in whatever way and time works for us, not as others think we should.”
So I have fended off a headache with some pain medication, I’m enjoying my Starbucks mocha frappuccino, and I invite each of you to give me a page number from 1 to 612 and another number between 1 and 30, and I will tell you something to be happy about from this book: