Stories of My Mother: A Bridge To Nowhere
Could someone trace the length of thread that runs through our family connecting us to the fiends inside? It does not exist within the entire tapestry. The curse wanders not far, but not to us all. If the worth of a life is the stories that stay behind and the memories transferred our particular segment is working to make that track of that thread worthless.
The problem is, if my sister and I are forgotten and our mother, too, my mother's mother will still be attached to others. My mother's mother could live on well past us. A mother who completed another cycle of abandonment after her own mother left her when she was a child.
My mother was one of five. She's not the oldest, and she's not the youngest. I am not sure exactly where she falls. She and her three sisters and one brother grew up mostly in the periphery of her aunts. To say that they were under their care would be a stretch. Her aunts worked. One had 14 children of her own. The other could possibly have made things easier, she had a wealthy benefactor in the man she had children with, but she worked as well. A lifetime of insecurity creates habits that are hard to break.
So three skinny kids spent their days on the streets, keepin on that hussle. She laughs as she relays a story about her brother taking bread from the bakery to the store. All skin and bones, wobbling under the weight of a huge basket full of bread that sat on his head as he ran. So much food around them they couldn't touch.
Her aunt, with the 14 children, had a farm. She had cows, pigs and children, but not a lot of time. She would wake up in the dark to milk her cows then take the milk to the market. She spent the morning doing odd jobs like washing laundry, and with 14 children this was usually accomplished in tandem with a pregnancy. Busy or exhausted, she would pay my mother and her siblings to collect discarded fruit and vegetables from the market. So they would go and gather the rotting oranges and squash, and before feeding the pigs they cut off anything usable for themselves. My mother spent her childhood eating scraps in many forms. Her mother would drag my mother and her siblings to visit her sisters under the guise of popping in and she would vanish. Just slip out with the dust. When her children were finding acceptance with the relatives they were thrust upon she would return. My mother said she would "come back and raise hell" and all of them would be kicked out.
Details are not often forthcoming. Lately moments have sparked something in her memory. Maybe it's her brush with death, or maybe she's looking toward the next one and wants to be known before it comes.
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Part Two: I Should Have Known Better
The city operates with a degree of benign lawlessness. Children and dogs wander and play in and out of the streets. It's been long understood that the red-light cameras don't function. Without a police car in sight all traffic laws are suggestions. Motorcycles whip through the freeways and cars race near the neighborhoods. The sounds of the pushed engines and tires peeling in the night.
I want to collect the strays. I think I would want to even if it were not something Will Graham is doing. I don't have a big tub to bathe them. And I assume most are not actually strays. I'd be stealing someone's puppy. I would feel righteous in stealing someone's puppy, but righteousness and civility are often at odds. The large dogs elicit sympathy as well, but I find myself drawn by the puppy. Who could avoid it? Much like the children, I wonder where the puppy's parents are. Perhaps, like the children, the puppy can be responsible for itself. I am diminishing it's capability. Just because The Kitten and I need to be kept indoors I presume the same of everything other seemingly vulnerable thing.
The Kitten spends so much time with her belly exposed. She knows no fear. No need for caution. She would never survive the streets. She sleeps like a moon phase, slowly rotating from a loaf to a crescent, exposed belly and back. Holds a paw over her eyes. Is it more comfortable? Is it to block out the sun? Soft breaths, soft wheezes, soft whistles, soft paws. Soft twitches while she snores. Like most cats her sleep is not deep, but it seems so.
Since I have been back in a home akin to the one I grew up in I have found comfort in childish things. Bad pizza. Long naps. Comics. High school dramas and shows about murder. All children love murder. This is a universal truth you should be well aware of when in the company of a child. They are constantly imagining what you would look like gored through. The opportunity to feast on you and absorb your maturity as much as you'd want to absorb their youth is the start and end of their every thought. It's what happens when you tell babies that you want to "eat their little legs." They develop a taste for yours.
The problem is, if my sister and I are forgotten and our mother, too, my mother's mother will still be attached to others. My mother's mother could live on well past us. A mother who completed another cycle of abandonment after her own mother left her when she was a child.
My mother was one of five. She's not the oldest, and she's not the youngest. I am not sure exactly where she falls. She and her three sisters and one brother grew up mostly in the periphery of her aunts. To say that they were under their care would be a stretch. Her aunts worked. One had 14 children of her own. The other could possibly have made things easier, she had a wealthy benefactor in the man she had children with, but she worked as well. A lifetime of insecurity creates habits that are hard to break.
So three skinny kids spent their days on the streets, keepin on that hussle. She laughs as she relays a story about her brother taking bread from the bakery to the store. All skin and bones, wobbling under the weight of a huge basket full of bread that sat on his head as he ran. So much food around them they couldn't touch.
Her aunt, with the 14 children, had a farm. She had cows, pigs and children, but not a lot of time. She would wake up in the dark to milk her cows then take the milk to the market. She spent the morning doing odd jobs like washing laundry, and with 14 children this was usually accomplished in tandem with a pregnancy. Busy or exhausted, she would pay my mother and her siblings to collect discarded fruit and vegetables from the market. So they would go and gather the rotting oranges and squash, and before feeding the pigs they cut off anything usable for themselves. My mother spent her childhood eating scraps in many forms. Her mother would drag my mother and her siblings to visit her sisters under the guise of popping in and she would vanish. Just slip out with the dust. When her children were finding acceptance with the relatives they were thrust upon she would return. My mother said she would "come back and raise hell" and all of them would be kicked out.
Details are not often forthcoming. Lately moments have sparked something in her memory. Maybe it's her brush with death, or maybe she's looking toward the next one and wants to be known before it comes.
****************************
Part Two: I Should Have Known Better
The city operates with a degree of benign lawlessness. Children and dogs wander and play in and out of the streets. It's been long understood that the red-light cameras don't function. Without a police car in sight all traffic laws are suggestions. Motorcycles whip through the freeways and cars race near the neighborhoods. The sounds of the pushed engines and tires peeling in the night.
I want to collect the strays. I think I would want to even if it were not something Will Graham is doing. I don't have a big tub to bathe them. And I assume most are not actually strays. I'd be stealing someone's puppy. I would feel righteous in stealing someone's puppy, but righteousness and civility are often at odds. The large dogs elicit sympathy as well, but I find myself drawn by the puppy. Who could avoid it? Much like the children, I wonder where the puppy's parents are. Perhaps, like the children, the puppy can be responsible for itself. I am diminishing it's capability. Just because The Kitten and I need to be kept indoors I presume the same of everything other seemingly vulnerable thing.
The Kitten spends so much time with her belly exposed. She knows no fear. No need for caution. She would never survive the streets. She sleeps like a moon phase, slowly rotating from a loaf to a crescent, exposed belly and back. Holds a paw over her eyes. Is it more comfortable? Is it to block out the sun? Soft breaths, soft wheezes, soft whistles, soft paws. Soft twitches while she snores. Like most cats her sleep is not deep, but it seems so.
Since I have been back in a home akin to the one I grew up in I have found comfort in childish things. Bad pizza. Long naps. Comics. High school dramas and shows about murder. All children love murder. This is a universal truth you should be well aware of when in the company of a child. They are constantly imagining what you would look like gored through. The opportunity to feast on you and absorb your maturity as much as you'd want to absorb their youth is the start and end of their every thought. It's what happens when you tell babies that you want to "eat their little legs." They develop a taste for yours.
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