Memoir-ish stuff
Jan. 26th, 2009 07:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonionayI'll post about my awesome weekend later. For now, I want to post the quick thing I wrote at the workshop. Someday, I do want to write about my life. Thinking about it on the way home, I was struck by the unique, vivid world I sometimes grew up in--filled with my grandpa moving irrigation pipes and my mom talking to her invisible people and stuff like that.
The exercise was to write about something painful (inspired from our own lives) in a humorous manner.
My grandma sat at the head of the kitchen table while my dad checked on the marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, and the smell of turkey wafted through the air. I was making macaroni and cheese for myself.
My mom was babbling in the next room over, giggling occasionally. Thank God she was in a good mood. Hopefully it would last through Thanksgiving dinner. Then, if she started screaming, Dad would take her for a drive, and I’d go for a walk out into the surreal world that was the Bitterroot Valley.
Out the window past my grandma, the Sapphire Mountains sloped up from the valley cradle I’d spent so many childhood summers in. This wasn’t the house where my father had missed watching me grow up, that was the one a few miles north which my grandparents moved from when I was twelve. Since going to college, I had dreams about the valley and the Willoubhy place. We’d never driven past it in all these years, I didn’t know what it was like. Was the house still there? Did it still have the half-dirt, half rough concrete basement of terror? It and my childhood was no longer real. But that reality was out there.
Mom’s shuffling stomp approached, and she rounded the corner into the kitchen.
“I’m going to put Liz as the centerfold of the next Playboy,” she said. Liz was her mother, my grandma sitting just behind her.
“That’s all right,” Grandma said.
It was a thoughtful gesture. Mom didn’t like anyone anymore, not outwardly. My dad was the Green River Killer-and the son of Adolf Hitler. My grandpa—her father, was General Rommel. I learned a lot of early history lessons from her. Grandma wasn’t anyone in particular—she just turned Jews into lampshades, which always boggled me ten years ago as a child. Like…magic?
Currently, according to the listening devices that talked to her and were her only friends, she owned a huge media empire, so wanting her mom to be a part of that showed she really had some love for her family.
I hate being able to speak schizophrenic. “Don’t marry Prince William, he wants to eat your eyeballs,” means I love you and worry about you.
The exercise was to write about something painful (inspired from our own lives) in a humorous manner.
My grandma sat at the head of the kitchen table while my dad checked on the marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, and the smell of turkey wafted through the air. I was making macaroni and cheese for myself.
My mom was babbling in the next room over, giggling occasionally. Thank God she was in a good mood. Hopefully it would last through Thanksgiving dinner. Then, if she started screaming, Dad would take her for a drive, and I’d go for a walk out into the surreal world that was the Bitterroot Valley.
Out the window past my grandma, the Sapphire Mountains sloped up from the valley cradle I’d spent so many childhood summers in. This wasn’t the house where my father had missed watching me grow up, that was the one a few miles north which my grandparents moved from when I was twelve. Since going to college, I had dreams about the valley and the Willoubhy place. We’d never driven past it in all these years, I didn’t know what it was like. Was the house still there? Did it still have the half-dirt, half rough concrete basement of terror? It and my childhood was no longer real. But that reality was out there.
Mom’s shuffling stomp approached, and she rounded the corner into the kitchen.
“I’m going to put Liz as the centerfold of the next Playboy,” she said. Liz was her mother, my grandma sitting just behind her.
“That’s all right,” Grandma said.
It was a thoughtful gesture. Mom didn’t like anyone anymore, not outwardly. My dad was the Green River Killer-and the son of Adolf Hitler. My grandpa—her father, was General Rommel. I learned a lot of early history lessons from her. Grandma wasn’t anyone in particular—she just turned Jews into lampshades, which always boggled me ten years ago as a child. Like…magic?
Currently, according to the listening devices that talked to her and were her only friends, she owned a huge media empire, so wanting her mom to be a part of that showed she really had some love for her family.
I hate being able to speak schizophrenic. “Don’t marry Prince William, he wants to eat your eyeballs,” means I love you and worry about you.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-26 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-26 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-26 09:42 pm (UTC)Nice. Very visual and evocative.
I learned a lot of early history lessons from her.
You're really onto something different here.
“Don’t marry Prince William, he wants to eat your eyeballs,” means I love you and worry about you.
Wow, this is really something!
You definitely evoke the feeling of falling into a different world.