What's on the Personal History Channel.

Dear Imaginary Reader,


The month of August seems to be right up there with April as one of the crueller months. August wants to  be a summer month, but after about the 15th, the Southern kids are back in school, the advertisements for school supplies are giving hope to every beleaguered parent, and was that a pumpkin window decoration I just saw in the Dollar Store?


And the days are noticeably shorter. July saw me up around 6a.m.,sitting on my front porch, watching the Village come to life: the summer-hire boy watering the hanging baskets lining Main Street; the local real estate baron checking the rental-house dumpster; the chittering cloud of chimney swifts dive-bombing the brick post office chimney. Alas, if I"m out at 6 a.m. these days, I'm watching what passes for a sunrise- lots of red-sky-at-morning- and watching the walkers stride up and down Main Street for their daily aerobics. And though it's cool enough for oatmeal, is that really a cause for celebration?


This August has also been the month of finishing the house. Vegan Girl and her Non-Vegan BF will be moving in this weekend-paying rent and utilities- completely legit. This meant a whirlwind of cleaning, painting, and installing light fixtures, and also the removal of my past, to make room for her new present.


The Old House basement, attic and front room have been cleaned. Gone are the sagging sofas, caches of  bike parts, moldy clothes, and cans of old paint we were saving in case of touch up.   I now must find a home for: a box of 1990s Spiderman comic books; a shoebox of bottlecaps; a box of Mother's Day cards; old sheet music, photos, dishes, as well as various and sundry pieces of furniture.The birdseye maple tv cabinet from the 1950s. The kitchen island on wheels. The maple microwave cart.Stuff I have no use~ or room~ for in the new place, but someday might.


Yesterday as I hauled yet another bag of detritus to the garbage, Eldest Son called his sister about his djambe. She was gleefully depositing her youngest brother's leftovers to the trash. (Want to see a girl's face light with the light of joy? Watch her rid the house of evidence that her brothers ever existed, let alone lived in that house. Then she becomes Athena- sprung from the temple of the greatest & smartest god, no comparable siblings. Though thinking of her father as Zeus is a biiiiig stretch.)


 The djambe has come to symbolize all that is Wrong with This Picture. ES lives in Alaska. The djambe is here. He wants it there. But "there" is going to change soon, as he is planning a move to South Carolina again. And who knows how long that will last. "People who move a lot shouldn't have dogs or djambes" I sniff. This leads to inquiries about boxes of comic books,  bottle caps and yes,mom, I do want my old Target name badge. The farther away from settling he is, the more minutae of his past he wants kept. Not by him, by me. And I am unwilling to keep pasts- tenses,  parts or participles.


And so CSO and I found ourselves around 5 pm in the kitchen of the old house, or "Red October" as I now call it, for I was jettisoning ballast faster than you could say "Emergency! Everyone to get off street!" Old candles. Serving platters. A music box that plays "Fur Elise." Things I consider junk.


CSO stops me: "Don't throw that away."  
Me: "But I have no use for it."
CSO:"But your parents gave it to you."
ME: "I still have no use for it."
CSO: "You shouldn't throw your life away."


I have to stop myself here. Because I am tired, and hot, and covered with a fine layer of sanding grit and dust, I am afraid I'll fall into histrionics. If I could say it calmly, I'd say this: So much of my life feels like a mistake, why would I want to preserve it? The years I spent married to the wrong person. The futile attempts to civilize the savage children that resulted, with little success (My odds are 1/4: Vegan Girl is the success story- finishing school, getting a job, supporting herself, making a life free of substance problems). The time I wasted when I was young and idealistic, thinking  I could really change something, really DO something.Finding out when I was in my 40s what I was meant to do, who I was meant to be, and what I was good at, and trying not to resent all the lost time I could have had honing that talent. Like Yeats's Irish Airman, thoughts not of regret, but of balance, waste, the lonely impulse of delight.


But CSO sees memories in a different perspective. His mom has Alzheimers. She is in assisted living, trying to remember who, what and where on an hourly basis. He sees memories as precious, learning experiences, time-frozen moments.Things that evoke memories are touchstones.  I see them as a report card. I hear a tapping foot. I see red marks on a grid.


 I stand there in the hot, humid, dusty kitchen and hold this all back. CSO has put an enormous amount of time, energy and sweat into getting the house ready. I could not have done this on my own. We are both exhausted, hot, sore from painting, wiring, sanding. In the morning, we will stiffly stagger through coffee (me) and breakfast (him) and then try to get through the day without ODing on Advil.


But for now, I owe CSO something. To consider his point. So I pick up the Fur Elise music box ( which my parents bought as a reminder of how long it took me to learn to play that particular piece, and how they suffered through the frustrated keybanging when I reached the bridge: point taken)  and put it aside. I know it's here in the house, somewhere. I'll probably be glad someday, when I find it. The comic books rest in the cardboard box. The djambe is in a closet. It's almost moving day. I'll be on the porch. 


 I am not Marcel Proust, nor was meant to be. No madelines for me, thanks. The past? It's passed. I don't need many  souvenirs.(1) We're good. It is what it was. It was something.


Here's a poem.

Only Something

Only something with no

need— 

warped by element, loved 
into recession
                    
Only something with no
mother, a boat on its water,
afloat and nowhere

could refuse the harbor

Something with no vacancy,
no hunger, cropping its own
low capacity

No birth wound, no age ring,
something strayed
by spontanaeity

Only something with primal
border, with mineral
armor

could turn from this offering

Like a peak you sometimes
see, not a chain of anything

                           ~Priscilla Becker

(1) I changed the "any" to "many" at the last read of this. I've been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace.
 He uses footnotes a lot to explain his writing. Kind of a meta-cognitive stream of meta-consciousness. I'll try not to get too attached to this.  xo Herself.