Roses are Red

I don’t pen thoughts about you so much. I prefer to re-mythologize the mythical man who became more than mythical when he left this world. You are still here, and it’s not the way it should have been – you should have been in the house still, one of the many he built for you, for us. You shouldn’t be so poor, and poor in spirit. You shouldn’t have kidney failure, and dammit they re-term Everything in this fuck-all world into something nice and clean and detached from what it is, but in this one case, it’s still just plain old kidney failure. You were stubborn always and sheltered and “backward” as you put it, from being born in Manhattan, only to move to Queens with the rest of the tribe.

You had but one lover in your life, and one man who it’s been said was like a “god send” come to take you away from your rigid and stoic father’s house, from the bed you shared with your only sister until you got married at 23. He, your husband, knew more about your family history than you did. And though you called him ‘daddy’ or ‘dad’ for the remainder of his days (a mere 45 years), which always struck me as not right somehow, he was not your father figure. He was the youth that kept going until it burned up into the sky. But no, this is about you. Half of me is optimistic adventure and half of me came from a place of fear. A place you only really escaped when he was around. You told me that he was the one, in bed at night, that used to talk out the future with you – you were always afraid and truthfully, he led the ship into some uncharted territory and you probably won’t ever get back from now, but, as you told me sitting by his side on that last day when the fear left you, “we had Such Fun doing it all”. Sometimes now, you can’t see the meaning of that and those sacrifices, because you came from such a rigid place.

Your father hit you too – because you talked back. Your mother’s younger daughter, gone also, the sick and frightened one who you would protect from being hit, which you would never admit unless asked, she just didn’t look like the rest of you. That story about the Sicilian makes sense when I think of her small stature, her jet black hair. Who knows…..he was away on the ships a lot, stealing Irish whiskey and English novels and games for you all. A card carrying Communist who you still blame for your lack of vision, of hope, of imagination – that he drilled into you that he didn’t believe in anything he could not see. To which I told you that I don’t believe much in what I see. It doesn’t hold its face up to the light as it should, and most realities are scratched out story over story and you can’t even begin to get at the real one. But I refuse to stop looking for it.

I don’t mind that I give you money towards your rent every month that I cannot afford to, I don’t mind that I let you come by my big two apartment 3rd floor to visit with cats, watch cable and dust because you “like to”. Your energy when I was young was indescribable. The house clean all the time, the gardens, the errands, the late night baking sessions when you would stay up and cakes would be born in the night. I don’t think other than Catholic pizza every Friday that I saw the inside of a fast food joint for dinner or a night of “eating out” for same more than 30 times before I became an adult. I didn’t eat Chinese takeout until I was 22 or so. The old man loved to tell people that “from the morning after we were married to this morning, there has always been breakfast waiting for me.  I don’t tell her to do it…that’s just you momma (meaning your momma)”.

Somehow little by little in your old age, alone with your thoughts, and memories, you tell John things about your life together that you don’t tell me – why I don’t know, and I don’t mind that you’re not warping my mind with imagery of your sex life. A personal thanks from your own personal daughter. I know it was seven years before you had kids and even so, you always told me how much “fun” you had – the tray you brought him early on, with a cigarette and a shot of whiskey or some such liquor”…..I have some of this in me, I know I do, but you lived it on such a simple trajectory and I don’t know if I pity that, or am jealous of it. Both, most likely. But, I put men on a pedestal that women have to crawl and beg to get to around me. The ones that I dealt with growing up did their best to assure me of the meanness of women, is all I can say. Some things you can’t rise above, so just play along without someone getting hurt.

I worry, is the point. I worry even though it is not in my nature to do so. I worry in ways that are engulfed in sediment acres below the earth across my eyes. Ways that tighten hips and bite lips and won’t let me settle into a thought process sometimes. Ways in which I have to stare blankly at television or the same old song like my father used to, and have to explain “I’m thinking, I’m not watching or listening”. Solving problems all the time and making new ones just for kicks. In these problems I think about you, and when you might need to go on dialysis, and how you seem ok, but yet will you deteriorate and when your negativity comes over you in spells I can’t fight off sometimes, and you say you don’t want to do it, and you want to go soon and it’s too hard up there, and everywhere, and then I hear the old man saying “I was with her thirty years, and still can’t reverse what her father did to her. Everything is negative…”

I realize this strain of blackness is in my family line, and I’m glad my genes fell mostly on the other side of that hill, in the light of oncoming waters and sunshine, in the moment and the joy and the lack of worry and a beaming smile, even when I felt my sadness out completely in every inch of me. I think about what it will feel like when you are gone, but won’t let myself get that far, since a lump always forms in my throat and a general lack just washes over me. My nemesis, my closest gossip monger, now my mother, she is my child…..

M. Lucia