Before - when I used to read things other people wrote that had nothing to do with what might become a resource for my students or a direction for my art - I used to read William Faulkner.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
The Hamlet
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Labeled Clothing
Down the nursing-home hallway was an old friend of Mammam’s – but they knew nothing of each other anymore. Anna Johns was a bit more alert than Mammam at this point and, just as Mammam did earlier, she could converse in a chit-chat manner that didn’t always immediately make clear her mental limitations. I visited The Manor with my father and we paused in front of Anna. My father said in that tone reserved for children and geriatrics, “Hia Anna! How are you?” “I’m good. Who are you?” she said immediately. “I’m Rose Topolski’s son, Walter.” No response. My father asked, “Do you know what your name is?” She promptly reached down, took the light blue slipper from her left foot and read the label inside, “Anna Johns.” she said confidently.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
A Violet and a Rose
At first we would bring Mammam home from the nursing home for Sunday afternoon visits but as she began to resist return, those visits became less frequent and eventually stopped. Visiting Mammam, surrounded as she was, with people in similar mental states, was always funny, exhausting and heartbreaking. I remember wanting to go and then, upon arriving, I would immediately want to leave. The halls smelled of living decay, excrement, cafeteria food and disinfectant.
Friday, October 23, 2009
As the Crow Flies
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pandowdy
Memory and communication are similar in that we long to have both in some pure sense. With both, our best gauges are far too susceptible to contamination to make them reliable.
“What’s in them?” My father pointed to two white unmarked pie boxes on the counter.
I laughed and said loudly, “No Mom – he said that that dish isn’t clean.”
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
(re)naming and (re)collecting
My Dad went by Walt, Wally, Vwadje, and earlier in his life, Tippy. It seems that everyone that is my father’s childhood friend had an alternate name - Jimmy Pickles is my favorite. We called my mother’s brother Uncle Buck although his name was Paul. (I was told he was in a gang in his youth – they called him Buck Rogers and part of it stuck.) We called our godparents and family friends ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ although they were technically neither: Aunt Peggy, Aunt Pattie, Aunt Louise, Uncle Charlie and Uncle Richie. We called my Mom’s mother Mammam Dando; she was rarely in our company so we referred to her in a manner that mostly served to differentiate her from my Dad’s mother - we just called her Mammam. We called Dad's father Dzjajie. ('jȯ-jē )
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
\ˈsen(t)s\
Howard Hughes died around that time and the earlier made-for-TV movies that chronicled his life and forecasted his death were playing in reruns on Saturday afternoons. Hughes, according to the stories, would separate and consume his peas by size and in order. He would also collect and stock the fingernail clippings and hair he would acquire from his annual personal hygiene sessions. The notion of such eccentric behavior was entertaining at the time. But I was stunned when I realized that the small plastic-wrapped bundles on the door and bottom shelves of Mammam’s side-by-side freezer contained her garbage.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Tharptown
My parents moved out of the apartment above Mammam and Dzjajie’s when my mother felt that Mammam was getting too possessive of my sister Donamarie. They moved to an apartment in Tharptown a couple blocks away from the house I lived in until I went to college. The owners of the house at the time, Dot and Merle Beaver, lived downstairs and the arrangement was not dissimilar to the one my parents escaped. Eventually, Dot who had never had children of her own, became very possessive of my sister as well.
Pictured above are Donamarie, Paulie my cousin, and my brother. It was Jan’s first birthday and they were posing on and near the yellow, gray and black patterned dinette set that moved with them to their next house; it resided in our kitchen until I was a teenager. The original image was taken about six years before I was born in the apartment above the Beaver’s – I think that is Dot’s arm on the right reaching in to make sure Jan didn’t tip backwards. That is probably Dot’s purse on the left. Next to it on the counter is something that only exists in this image and earlier versions of it – I put it there about eight years ago. It is an appliance of sorts with a function that addressed a very specific need common in kitchens of that earlier era and now.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Kapusta-Head
On top of Mammam’s refrigerator – on the edge, just within her reach – was a thing that defies categorization. It was plastic and its base resembled a terracotta plant pot. From the textured plastic that tried to imitate soil in the pot sprung a plastic plant/figure. All its parts were shaped like vegetables but configured to look like a person – celery arms, cabbage head, but yet black eyes with long lashes that looked like no part of any vegetable. It was meant to be funny and it was.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Changing Spaces
My father remodeled Mammam’s house several years before she went to the nursing home. He replaced two double-hung windows in the upstairs bedroom at the front of the house with two smaller awning windows. He chose to place them fairly high on the wall so furniture could fit below and so as to increase privacy; the windows were in the front bedroom of the apartment above my grandmother’s bedroom. There had not been tenants for many years but my father had a plan that would eventually change that.
That was earlier.
That day she heard my father upstairs installing the windows and went up to investigate. “Hi Mom!” my father said, “What do you think of the new windows?”
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Tea
Several months before my grandfather died, Mam- mam was making tea and as she carried a soup-pot of boiling water to the table where the cup and tea bag waited, somehow – for some reason - she fell. Boiling water splashed on her upper chest and down her left arm. She was alone but somehow managed to reach the phone. When admitted to the hospital she took a room on the floor above my grandfather’s. She had multiple operations in which the top two layers of her epidermis and a layer of her dermis were taken from donor sites on her upper thigh and grafted to her chest and arm. She was in excruciating pain when she visited her husband from her own hospital room but she never told him about the accident – he died there without knowing.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Spelling and Alzheimer's
As we cleared the last of Mammam’s belongings from her house we found several notes that she had written. They were written for anyone - including herself. My favorite was found in a box under her bed on top of a carefully folded George Washington coverlet . It read, "Bedspred. Bedspread. Beadspred. Here it is. There it is. Ha Ha Ha."
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Keepings
On the side of the kitchen cupboard near the entry to Mammam’s dining room, hung a dinner plate. Carefully cut felt was glued to the surface - the word ‘Rose’ was near the bottom and the image above it was a woman’s profile. She wore a black hat and tulle covered the top half of her face. Mammam had wrapped the plate with Saran-Wrap.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
A Later Version of Now
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Hopping Hearts
Monday, September 14, 2009
Son of a Bitch
It was always the fault of “some son-of-a-bitch.”
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Gettysburg's Cannon
The phonebook that year had a grid of nine images on its cover; each celebrated part of Pennsylvania’s history: the Liberty Bell, a covered bridge, a statue of William Penn, a round barn, Independence Hall, a locomotive, an Amish horse and cart and some Mountain Laurel. The lower right image was a cannon from Gettysburg’s Civil War battlefields.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Lost Spitball
My father claims we were related to Stanley Coveleski – cousins. The brothers that owned the gas station on the corner of Sunbury and Shamokin Streets – they were our cousins. The woman that lived across from St. Ed’s playground – she was a cousin. The guy with the handle-bar mustache - a cousin. The number of cousins that my father claims we have prompts a concern that somewhere along the line there was some accidental inbreeding.
The newspaper delivery-girl stood just inside Mammam’s kitchen door; our silence made the circumstance a little awkward. The longer it took Mammam to find her purse, the more awkward it got. “Mammam, she’s waiting to get paid.” I yelled. “Yeah, yeah, I’m comin!” - but she wasn’t. When I called to her a fifth time she interrupted my words with a sudden entrance. “Hey! Looky at what I got!” She was holding a set of rabbit ear antennae – the kind to receive UHF-VHF television channels from inside the house. “How about that!” She extended it toward the delivery-girl and I wasn’t sure if she was offering a closer inspection or an alternative means of payment. The girl took a small step backward toward the closed screen door. Mammam asked, “What the hell do you think somebody’d do with this?” I said, “Mammam, where’d you get that? “ and immediately, “I don’t think she wants that - you need to find your purse.” “Oh yeah , yeah okay.” She set the antennae on the table right in front of me. The one side was half-way retracted and the other fully extended, the thin flat cable attached to it almost reached the floor. She exited the kitchen again to return, surprisingly, almost immediately, with her purse. After some further coaching and a few reiterations of the amount due, the delivery girl was finally able to provide change and leave.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
A Rose for Rose
I sat at the small kitchen table with Mammam Topolski, my father’s mother, standing next to me. She cut a thick pat of butter from one of the quarter-pound sticks I just brought her from Weis’s market. She ate it off the knife. She ate it like it was cheese. And she enjoyed it – she said so.
I recall one very specific instance where, in the midst of a narrated recollection of hers, I realized that she was there – inside her story - and I was with her. She was in that prior time and place and I was next to her in a revised reality. She didn’t know who I was specifically but she knew I was some form of the actual blood-relationship we had – I was her husband, or her son or her grandson – that didn’t matter really. I was familiar and comfortable in a significant way.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Sammy
His fingers, some of them stubs, grasped his half emptied thermos of tea - he leaned under the arch of our kitchen entry, "Lets hit the bricks Annie." He’d say that every time they got ready to head home. Behind him, the cabinets he built lined the rear wall of our kitchen. They were freshly repainted bright yellow. The black colonial-looking handles had little faux dings all over them – as if they’d been rendered from raw steel with a ball-peen hammer – they didn’t fool me.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Being Where I Want to Remember
I was seven before I knew her name was ‘Anna.’ (The coal region slur mingled the words – we called her, “Andana.”) I was eight before I knew that Uncle Sammy was her brother, not her husband. I was seventeen before I knew she was still a virgin. I was forty-three when she died that way.
My mother was raised in that tiny house with four adults plus Joannie during the summer. There was only a toilet; aside the stall – between that and the shelves with the canned goods - they leaned the large galvanized tub that they’d fill with water for a bath. We would hear Uncle Sammy call up from in the basement kitchen, “Annie, come wash my back for me would ya?” My sister would say “Eeeeww!” with her lips but stop the sound from coming out. My mother would tell me to pick up the toys before we left and I’d put them in the sea-foam green bucket that was kept behind the couch. Though it lacks some of the best toys it held then, like the red Cadillac with the white interior, the bucket is in my studio. It is tucked back on the shelf near what I claim to be my father’s childhood violin - or what is left of it.
I keep things like that - or facsimiles - in my studio hoping that their histories will leak out and seep in.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Remembering Where I Used to Be
Mammam Dando’s chameleon moved unseen among the leaves at the window and the lace curtains. Invented stories and wooden blocks busied me. Mom would close the bedroom door to keep me out while she cleaned the bed.
I don’t remember the bathroom.
I don’t remember the room off the kitchen.
I don’t remember ever staying very long.