2003-12-05 - 9:12 p.m.
my grandma had a heart attack. i found out like fourth hand. thanks a lot family.
ive waited a while to write about it. i dont know what to think. my grandmother (on my dads side) was never loving towards me. she never called me, except for the obligatory tri-annual thanksgivingchristmasmothersday chat. except that chat is totally the wrong word. how do you efficiently say "spoke without feeling, tugged words out of a sticky net of nice-isms, listened to reverberating hollow vats of guilt culminate in a 'i love you bye.'"?
down in texas, visiting these strange, oddly shaped, weird smelling people, i invariably felt chastised, stripped, downtrodden. my grandparents made fun of me. they mocked my shyness. they laughed at me. they pointed out all my faults.
all in a few hundred hour days.
and in between, years and years of nothing.
who are these people? why should i care about them?
i am saturated with guilt. my father is turning into an alcoholic. we cant even talk about it, about his dying parents, about his drinking, about his sadness. there is a huge lump of misery in me, and that lump is my father.
i spent the latter part of my childhood terrified of him. i remember why too. we were taking a nap on the couch together, and my mom came in. she was pissed about something. she snapped at him, at both of us. she sneered some sniding, fatal, crippling remark. something about my grandpa and my aunt. i couldnt touch my father ever again after that. i remember one painful holiday he asked me why i couldnt hug him and i was just petrified with fear.
hes just so strange and far away. hes the stranger, the strange man.
awful awful memories of me being scared in the car. scared that he wasnt driving where we were supposed to be going. terrified when he took shortcuts and longcuts. and now i take shortcuts and longcuts too.
this thanksgiving he finished a bottle of wine before two in the afternoon. he was eerily jolly, funny even. it was nice, it lightened things up. he said when he was a boy he got made fun of. because he told kids he wanted to be a girl. he didnt remember why. i said i used to want to be a boy. there was a moment of recognition, a flash of too-shiny eyes seeing way too much of my soul.
we went for our traditional family thanksgiving walk. my sister and mother were punishing him for being a fool. and i lost the strength to play along with his jolly mood.
he started weaving back and forth on the path, and i was sad sad sad that he was that drunk. but i looked and saw he wasnt doing it out of enbriation, but on purpose. he had his eyes closed, and was walking blindly down the park walkway. he told me to do it too. i wouldnt. but i thought that i would, if i was a kid and he was a kid and we would be friends, and this is exactly the kind of thing i would do. the kind of thing i still do, just not with my father.
