June 10, 2010

Just when I thought things were getting back to normal after this the news came that despite the horrible economy we've found a buyer for my parents' home — the house I basically grew up in.

Yesterday I got a call from the guy who's been the property manager since we've been renting out the place. He'd loaded up his truck with boxes full of my dad's papers, photographs, slides and records and was heading up to my house to drop the stuff off.

Thank God my wife bit her tongue (the look on her face said to me "oh, no! Not more stuff!")

I sat on the floor of my garage for about six hours from afternoon into the night, poring over things I'd not seen in maybe 15-20 years. What an emotional roller-coaster! Warm fuzzies, brought on by gazing at drawings from my childhood, were pulled out from under me not unlike a cheap carpet when I came across the copies of dad's emails to me regarding his cancer four years ago. Yeah, he didn't trust his disc drive. He printed out everything and kept the pages very neatly filed in folders organized by subject (and another set organized chronologically).

I must've looked at a few thousand color slides before the eye-strain caused a massive headache. Was it the Ketel One that caused the headache or made it finally go away?

Some highlights of the things I found:

• photo proofs of studio shots taken of my brother and I when we were very, very young that were used as Christmas cards (It appears that both I and my brother struggled to remove the "Santa Claus" hats that were plopped on our tiny heads for the shoot)
• amazing slides of the Vermont country-side ablaze with fall colors. There's just nothing prettier than a Sugar Maple tree in all it's fall glory.
• a pristine copy of my uncle Joe's hit record, It Is Now Post Time.
• a zip-loc bag containing my mom's recipe cards, in her careful, distinctive penmanship. I thought that when I couldn't find them in her apartment in Los Angeles, they'd been lost forever. Thank God they weren't.

Whew. This is the first time I've penned anything for this site in years. I'm saying to myself "now, that wasn't so bad, was it?" What have I been waiting for? It's time to resume writing... 'cause if I don't I may just explode.

Love,

shaogo

I could really use a wish right now..

She is beautiful inside this fog, forgetting the road and these cars entirely. There is so much to see past the blurred highway greys and I know she wants the rain, loves to fingertip follow the droplets down the window pane. I had thought she was completely finished this time. Truly it seemed as though she would simply climb inside of herself and remain a long while, perhaps forever. Instead some rational being emerged to discover a great deal of wasted time, in the end, that is all. Some rational bit of a whole person who can decide that time is only just this disjointed construct designed to bewilder us into unassuming marionettes. That this is all at best the art of learned acceptance for the traits inherent in most human beings. It is difficult to ascertain the reason for this rational emergence. Some sort of bizarre coping mechanism devoid of any real merit to avoid this mess of stifled tears and lost hope.

She is beautiful with her almond eyes peering at the tops of the swaying trees, gauging the strength of the wind and of herself. It hardly seems proper to remember some old and forgotten promise to belong to a single person for any length of time - the rational beings having deemed time and love irrelevant due to a seeming lack of scientific grounding.

Perhaps he had only been in her life at all to remind her that there is no one, in the end, who will always be there. No reason for tears over fairy tales that don't exist and love that will always have an expiry date. No sense, none at all, in emotional displays of incomprehensible sadness. She will live a ghost life, alone, with no soul and no reason to feel at all.

And she is even more beautiful - hours later - with her knees curled to her chest, head against the window, tear-soaked sleeves clinging to her pale skin. Her fingertips following droplets down the window pane.