I Remember

I remember.

You were so good to me. I sat on the floor, in awe of you, combing my fingers through the long weave of the shag carpet. Discovering the patterns of sienna mixed with the varying tones of brown. Like tiger stripes in a dry savannah.

Your voice was like a song. Talking and laughing as the sound of the dishwater cascaded from your hands in a splatter, to the plate in a high pitched rattle, and the pots with the peal of a bell.

I can hear the faint Canadian Midwest, and even fainter Scottish accents on your Southern California voice. I wonder if when I grow up, I’ll sound like you.

Behind your voice was the constant drone of afternoon television. There were the slaps and arguments of your “stories”, and the nasal cuckolding nag of the talk show hosts in their red power blazers and high shoulder pads, that screamed to the audience at home “I am the expert”. The adult world seemed like a very frightening place, full of serial killers and husbands jilted at the altar. It seemed there was a lot of suspense, and not much time for fun.

But you. You were my safety in a confusing world.

Your sister.

She would explode into the aging mobile with her continental accent. It was as if The Queen herself had made her entrance carrying bags of expensive gifts and food. Ours was never good enough. She had to bring scallops and champagne, and itchy clothes for me that were too tight and too formal for the high desert.

“Jenny darling, we never say butt!” She would command in her faux British accent, “You say your derriere or your tush!”

Her husband was a high ranking accountant in the oil industry. He was also a Freemason. He would come in the door and wink at me, then we'd do hand gestures, similar to sign language. It was our little game. Our way of telling each other “I love you”.

They had lived in such exotic places as Sri Lanka, India, and Indonesia. When Gaddafi imposed communism and nationalized the Libyan oil industry, they had to leave everything and flee for their lives to Tunisia, and then Spain. All outside executives were public enemy number one.

Her children hated her for abandoning them to military schools when they were only boys. She displayed the same glamourous, vain, and gold-dripping voice with them as she did with all her friends and relatives. No love, just petty laughter and commands. They went on to great things as adults, but never got over the pain of never having true parents.

When they sold their mansion in Sedona, she came for Thanksgiving, where she called out without remorse: “I have these lovely ivory bookends- that I don’t know what to do with! Would anyone care for them?” We all sat as silent as a tomb, with dropped jaws, but no one was really surprised.

Your husband.

What can I say about my grandpa? Well, he wasn’t really my grandpa. Your first husband was an abusive alcoholic. You had to hide from him with your children at your mother’s house. Later, your eldest daughter followed in your footsteps by marrying a man who would knock out her front teeth.

I loved my step grandpa so dearly. He was tall, loud, and very German. He had served in the US Navy in WW2, and it seemed his whole identity rested on that fact.

He had a machine shop at the back of the property where he was always repairing things. I imagined that was how all grownups worked. I didn't know that people bought anything new. If a hinge broke, weld a new one, if the phone had a bad connection, splice together old wires to make a new phone cord. If you need a new fence post, make it yourself. That was what men did.

The shop was his world, and in there, sometimes storms broke loose. If he was repairing something in the vise, he might ask whomever his victim was to go in and take it out for him. They might open it up to see the thing fall to the ground in two pieces. Then he would attack whoever it was, and blame them. When in actuality, the item was so cleanly sawed, you knew he had set you up. But the beating was so severe, you believed it was you who did it, and were apologizing profusely by the end.

There was the black man on his Navy ship during the Second World War. The only one stationed there. He bragged laughingly about hanging him over the side of the ship. For years I thought he meant that they built him a swing, but as a teenager, the finality and the horror of those words hit me like a bullet to the chest. Could the man who baked me cookies and drove me to school have been a bigoted killer?

Your son.

My daddy. A great man. Piggybacked between two abusive fathers, and a saintly mother- a woman whose laughing voice was like the peal of a mountain spring over little rocks.

You raised him well. He is quiet, a man of many thoughts and few words.

Grandpa signed him up for school with the wrong last name, and when he corrected the teacher, saying the surname of his true father, he came home to a beating so terrible, he still tells the story of it with clouds of bitter revulsion in his throat.

He just wanted to be loved as a boy. He wanted some man to be proud of him. But he was thrown off the property at fifteen years old. The year was 1967, and he had heard of people travelling along route 66, so he hitchhiked clear to Massachusetts. Later he ended up along the California coast, in the mountains of Northern Arizona, and even as a very young fisherman on the Kenai Peninsula.

I would sit in rapt attention, as he would tell the stories of his journeys. I was so excited by them. They were my folktales, and later, my aspirations. By the time I was fifteen, I had run away and done my own travelling.

He found me at the shelter, and gave me what I thought was a stern look of disgust and disapproval. But then I saw him put something on the bed. It was his old metal pole framed pack that he used when he was hitchhiking as a boy. Inside was a red sleeping bag, water, and his Sherpa-lined corduroy jacket.

God I loved that man at that moment. My daddy was so good to me.

After he left, I began crying, and saying over and over “I want my dad. I want to go home.” They called my parents, and I went with them. My mom screamed at me and threw me by my hair, but my dad and I had an understanding. And later, I would use those gifts he bestowed upon me in the youth shelter to have my own adventures as a young woman.

I moved away very suddenly at age eighteen, and ended up over a thousand miles away on the wind swept Oregon coast. It was here that I rode a Coast Guard ship up the mouth of the Columbia River, as it navigated the treacherous bar into the gray, and unmerciful Pacific Ocean.

It was also here that I followed in your footsteps, and married a man that I would quickly grow to fear. A man who day to day held my life in his hands, and made this fact quite clear.

Around the time that I was giving birth to your great-granddaughter, the one you wished you could have lived to see, massive wildfires were scorching the valley where Grandpa used your savings to buy and build the family homestead.

Soon, there was news that everything was gone. Just the driveway, the water tank, and my memory of you is all that remains to this day.

I brought my daughter to see you when she was eight. You had been dead a decade, but you still live in the red earth, so rich in granite, that the ground glitters with tiny crystals every day in the sunshine. That’s where you live. That’s where I remember you. Your voice has been silenced, but I can still hear its silver peal in the scattered light of the tiny crystals that will forever sparkle in the hot sun of the California desert.