Soft (Andi)

One of the little boys looks just like my cousin and a tiny bit like my middle son when he was small. And I know the man is my grandfather because he’s dressed in a suit and tie and smoking a pipe, even as he’s pushing a wheelbarrow across the lawn.

And look, there’s my grandmother. She’s very pretty. In this clip with its scratchy softness and jerky motions, she’s about a decade younger than I am now. She’s smiling wide enough to show off the gap in her front teeth. It is surprisingly easy to match this young woman delighting in her family with the old woman I knew when I was growing up in the apartment above her.

We lived—me, my mother, and later, my father—in the same house where my mother was raised. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents—in the yard, on their porch, in their television room with a fire going in the fireplace. I only remember them as elderly, but while it’s initially jarring to see black-and-white versions of these people filled with youthful vitality, that wears off pretty quick.

I’m reading Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance, a memoir about finding out she was not her father’s daughter, at least not biologically. And it’s a slightly familiar story to me. While I wasn’t conceived in a test tube, the man I call my father isn’t actually related to me genetically, though we have the same hair and similar senses of humor. Shapiro writes about biological recognition, that fist in the gut feeling of coming across blood that matches your own.

And that’s what I feel when I watch these grainy home movies from 70 years ago. These are my people.

I’ve been reading and transcribing my grandmother’s father’s journals from around the same time, 1943, and what I keep coming back to is a) almost all of these people are dead and we really don’t have a ton of time in the world, do we, and b) context. Everything that is etched out in our daily lives is set against the larger backdrop of the universe. I know, this is a pretty obvious revelation, but I keep getting struck anew by how important this is.

I’m actually quite good at feeling the larger sweep of geological events around me, so good that sometimes my own paltry daily reality feels so insignificant as to be pointless and worthless, but I do think a balance is important. Yes, the things you are doing, however soon they will be forgotten, are still worth doing, but also yes, in another 70 years, 700 years, 7,000 years, the changes will be such that our bodies and minds and creations might be, potentially, unrecognizable.

And we have a choice—does this concept fill us with determination or despair?

It kind of depends on the day.

My oldest son was in the high school musical this weekend and I helped a tiny bit with set painting. One of my jobs was painting black over the sets from last year, beautiful street scenes that existed only for a few shows but that were, nonetheless, precious. Reader, it hurt. And when I mentioned the pain to the set designer, she shrugged. “That’s just how it works,” she said. And continued to carefully apply primer to a linen cloth that would take hours to dry and would appear on stage for about seven minutes, three shows, before being stacked in a dusty corner somewhere backstage.

That’s just how it works. 

 

Beth, your word for next week is GIRL. And here is your previous blog.