Text: Fading

I was riding in the car with Rachel today. She put in a musical CD showcasing her musical accomplishments during high school.

“I’m the piccolo,” she said.

I pictured her as a piccolo. A dot. I pictured her as a single bouncing atom among atomic sounds. There was a wave of other instrument players, but her sound rose above them. She was glowing; all else in my mind was black. If I had never seen the stars, I could imagine that this is what they sounded like. She was like a star, a glowing white dot in a sea of blackness, burning with passion and with musical intensity.

“I was rated a 1. The group as a whole was rated a 4. ”

She said it so proudly. I had no idea where the scale began or ended, but I knew she did well. I was told by the sound of her voice and the way she smiled.

The music turned my attention out the car window. I started to focus on the small things; a small group of houses grouped together on the peak of a hill, the way growing weeds offered a blast of rustic orange against the fading yellow of the fields. I focused on an incoming moon and then on a falling sun. Sometimes I forget to look up once in a while. Sometimes I am too busy. I kept thinking while her music played . . .

I've been working out more. I shaved my head. A friend of mine commented that the shaving of someone's hair marks a major change in their life, maybe a checkpoint, or a turning point. Maybe it does.

I was thinking of something I heard in a philosophy course I took a while back. What would Aristotle answer to the "chicken or the egg" question.

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

"The chicken, so the egg knew what to become."

I then thought about my dad. I thought about how he was only in my life in fragments. It is like having a partial blueprint of what I am supposed to be. Now the missing pieces to my construction are lying in the dirt at Crown Hill Cemetery, six feet under in a wooden treasure box. I spend the rest of my life wondering why my mom and him didn't work out and why his second marriage resulted in his wife cheating on him and leaving for another man. Have I learned the things from him that make me the type of person to be left, to be cheated on? I say fuck it. The only person I can trust for the rest of my life is myself. Nothing surprises me anymore. If I'm surprised, I'm not vigilant. I'm vigilant enough to know that I'm not my father. I'm not the product of a broken household, even though it was ever present.

My mom spent a majority of my childhood bartending, cocktailing, drinking, dating, and partying. We moved trailer to house, to house, to Arizona, to Kansas, back to Colorado. I've been dragged through the dirt of her life while she found out how to clean it all off and find herself. My dad was a phone call or an "every other summer visit" away. He still feels that way. He's dead. It hasn't mattered since it happened. I'm a broken record. My point here is that despite these people being the supposed primary caregivers in my life, I've overlooked one small fact. My Grandparents raised me. They were married for 40 years, had a house paid for and no debt. My grandfather was a man who was loved by many; humorous, honest, sincere, and cared more about me than anyone I know. My mother tells me that my dad struggled to be cast in the same image of his own father being absorbed mostly in the shadow of his legacy. My grandmother now sits in a house; a desolate place where both her son and her husband died under her watch. She is starting to fail in the mind, but seems to be mildly healthy in body.

"Someone sent me a birthday suit," she tells me. I was at her house this past week.

"What?"

It is the first time I genuinely laughed at her house in a long time. Usually everything is so morbid and I just sit there and listen to her. I offer nothing; nothing that makes her feel any better. I tell her not to worry and that she looks great and that she will live another 20 years if she keeps cleaning like she does. She chuckles and swears she hopes not. I hug her often. She says I mean a lot to her; I'm all she has left. I understand this but I feel so detached. I was never that close to my grandmother. Even when we lived together I didn't talk to her that much.

"Betty sent me a birthday card."

Oh, that makes more sense now. I knew what she was trying to tell me, but I wanted to make sure she did too. Betty is an elderly woman who lives across the street who is dying of cancer. She has a nurse who visits her and also escorts my grandma to the store. My grandmother stopped driving a couple of months ago because she clipped some guy's car and he got $500 out of her pocket to pay for it. The insurance company said she had to comply and she was so mad at the fact that no one even looked at her car.

"People are doing this everyday, Bobby."

"Really."

She calls me Bobby or Bob or Charlie. My cousin and my uncles are named Bob. I don't say anything. This year she didn't remember when my birthday was and I called her on that day. I didn't say anything. She got mad that I didn't mention anything and I told her it didn't matter. My grandmother paid my child support my entire life while my dad worked 70 hours a week to pay for his lifestyle. His marriage to a woman 10 years younger than him in a Florida home they owned with their only child, Diana, was the only lifestyle I knew he had. My mother mentioned cocaine. The combination of cocaine abuse, diabetes, smoking, and a poor diet is what did my dad in. What of this did my grandmother know as she entered the basement room where he was watching TV and now slumped lifeless against a bed I used to sleep in. What do people know of anything, or anyone? They know what is shown.

My grandmother also is the unofficial source for everyone who has cancer or has died recently in the Westminster area. I hear about it every time I go over. The time on her television says 8:25 and I know it is 4:30. Does she even care what comes on anymore? Has death been her only focus since her husband? Does time even matter when you lose the one you have cared for all your life?

"You should come into Pappadeaux with Bob and Marita one afternoon. Do you like seafood?" I asked.
"I love catfish. I used to make it all time," she glowed.
"We have great catfish, especially if you get it blackened."

This is the most interesting conversation we've had since I learned my dad's sister's husband has cancer. She checks the clock. She knows I usually leave within an hour or so. She apologizes for boring me or keeping me too long.

"Stop worrying about that. You don't bore me and you aren't keeping me."

I try to assure her. She seems to forget what we are talking about. There is a brief silence. I notice that one copper tile is pulled from above her stove, there are at least forty that tile the wall above it. Everything else seems to look exactly the same since I was little. Spotless as usual. In the silence I realize something. I come to the realization that time does feel like it has stopped here. There are three clocks visible in her kitchen: the stove, the microwave, and my watch. It seems like time is only passing on my wrist, not in my mind or body. It is only apparent since the hand is constantly ticking. The house is filled with antiques like my grandmother's soul. She is 84 as of this post. She has dyed her hair brown. She pushes it in such a manner that would not show baldness and definitely not a sign of gray. She has been fighting the passing of time since she was born; she is a product of the world's vision of the body. Her entire life she has dedicated to the preservation of her face and hair. What happened to her mind? Maybe the body just forgets how to display what's being thought, but maybe the thoughts are sound.

There has to be some connection here. The melody of Rachel's piccolo, a broken copper tile, my grandmother's fading mind; it all hits my heart differently. I might find an answer to it all someday.