Friday in New York
Friday, 5 August 2005 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59"How Do You Know It's Not True If You Don't Believe In It? . . . How Can You Understand Something You Don't Believe In?"*
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The trip to the cemetery.
I called His aunt when I got to my hotel, to let her know I'd arrived safely and to make arrangements to go to the cemetery. That was Wednesday. We settled on Friday, about ten. (Thursday I'll get to later.)
I took a long shower that morning. I messed with my hair. I got dressed—I wore the slacks that Melissa had given me because I wanted them to see the cemetery; I wore my favorite white shirt. I messed with my hair some more. I put on a little green eye shadow; I was wearing my contacts. I looked, I'm sure, like an aging Catholic schoolgirl, and why not? It's what I am. I wore the contacts so I could wear my cheap sunglasses and push them to the top of my head when it wasn't sunny, and look cool. An aging Catholic schoolgirl trying to look cool.
Her car was the same as mine, a Crown Vic of approximately the same age, but in browns rather than green and blue. We had to go back to her house, so she could get her phone, and she apologized profusely for this inconvenience. (I can't explain how that makes me feel; can you imagine it? She didn't have to be doing this; she didn't have to even answer when I wrote, let alone call me and say she'd do this. Who am I?) She was very nice to me; when we got to the cemetery, we stopped for water (which she bought) and afterward she bought me dinner. She was worried about me not getting anything to eat because of it getting to be late on a Friday afternoon and me staying in a Hassidic neighborhood and everything closing and all. So, we stopped at her favorite pizza place and she bought me pizza.
She's planted some flowers on the grave. His mother's name has been added to the tombstone. It's very real. It's very real. I took some pictures, which felt weird.
(Also weird: Celia was exactly four days older than my mother.)
But, then, it all felt weird, because we didn't talk about Him. Seriously, at all, except for a very brief mention. You'd think I was there for some other reason, but a reason neither of us knew. You'd think there was something there too strange to talk about, and maybe that's true. Instead we talked about her mother-in-law, who is in the hospital. We talked about Celia. We talked about her daughter, and her daughter's cat, and my cats.
(I wish I had a better handle on how other people think, because then maybe I could extrapolate what His family thinks about me.)
Tangential and yet absolutely relevant story:
Yesterday, my mother called to tell me she'd gotten a letter from an old girlfriend of my uncle Bob. They were involved before he married my cousin Patty Ann's mother, so this was over ten years before the forty-eight years ago my parents got married. My mother has never met her. She was writing to ask if my mother could send her a picture of Bob, because she's still in love with him.
My mother called to tell me this, because she was both amused and appalled by it. "There are people out there crazier than we are," she said a couple of times. And I kept thinking, No, there aren't, you just don't know.
She called back to tell me she was going to go through her photos, find a wedding picture (he was best man at their wedding) and we could go to CVS and remove the rest of the wedding party, so as to have a nice picture to send.
So, now I know who I am. I am my mother's daughter, who believes that no matter how crazy something is, if it's important to someone, if it would make them happy, it's worth doing. That you don't get to judge other people—well, you do, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't help them in their delusions. Life is too hard to steal people's dreams from them; life is to hard not to make their dreams easier.
Is that what His family thinks, too? It would comfort me if I knew that was the case, because I'm used to being thought crazy and I can't seem to do anything about that, but if I'm amusing enough (and therefore pleasant to be around), if I'm not a nuisance, maybe I will be allowed, if not inside, at least to stand here on the periphery, in the shade.
(And why should that be any different, anyway? I've lived my whole life with the philosophy of, Be quiet; be good; if you must speak, be amusing. It doesn't exactly work, but I don't know what else to do. When I see myself being different, when I picture myself being more assertive, what I see is being told no. And I'm not even sure if that picture is something I've seen before, or just the only thing my mind can imagine.)
Does it make any sense to say that leaving NY makes me feel like a turtle that's been pulled out of its shell?
*Peter Schinner
-:- -:- -:-
The trip to the cemetery.
I called His aunt when I got to my hotel, to let her know I'd arrived safely and to make arrangements to go to the cemetery. That was Wednesday. We settled on Friday, about ten. (Thursday I'll get to later.)
I took a long shower that morning. I messed with my hair. I got dressed—I wore the slacks that Melissa had given me because I wanted them to see the cemetery; I wore my favorite white shirt. I messed with my hair some more. I put on a little green eye shadow; I was wearing my contacts. I looked, I'm sure, like an aging Catholic schoolgirl, and why not? It's what I am. I wore the contacts so I could wear my cheap sunglasses and push them to the top of my head when it wasn't sunny, and look cool. An aging Catholic schoolgirl trying to look cool.
Her car was the same as mine, a Crown Vic of approximately the same age, but in browns rather than green and blue. We had to go back to her house, so she could get her phone, and she apologized profusely for this inconvenience. (I can't explain how that makes me feel; can you imagine it? She didn't have to be doing this; she didn't have to even answer when I wrote, let alone call me and say she'd do this. Who am I?) She was very nice to me; when we got to the cemetery, we stopped for water (which she bought) and afterward she bought me dinner. She was worried about me not getting anything to eat because of it getting to be late on a Friday afternoon and me staying in a Hassidic neighborhood and everything closing and all. So, we stopped at her favorite pizza place and she bought me pizza.
She's planted some flowers on the grave. His mother's name has been added to the tombstone. It's very real. It's very real. I took some pictures, which felt weird.
(Also weird: Celia was exactly four days older than my mother.)
But, then, it all felt weird, because we didn't talk about Him. Seriously, at all, except for a very brief mention. You'd think I was there for some other reason, but a reason neither of us knew. You'd think there was something there too strange to talk about, and maybe that's true. Instead we talked about her mother-in-law, who is in the hospital. We talked about Celia. We talked about her daughter, and her daughter's cat, and my cats.
(I wish I had a better handle on how other people think, because then maybe I could extrapolate what His family thinks about me.)
Tangential and yet absolutely relevant story:
Yesterday, my mother called to tell me she'd gotten a letter from an old girlfriend of my uncle Bob. They were involved before he married my cousin Patty Ann's mother, so this was over ten years before the forty-eight years ago my parents got married. My mother has never met her. She was writing to ask if my mother could send her a picture of Bob, because she's still in love with him.
My mother called to tell me this, because she was both amused and appalled by it. "There are people out there crazier than we are," she said a couple of times. And I kept thinking, No, there aren't, you just don't know.
She called back to tell me she was going to go through her photos, find a wedding picture (he was best man at their wedding) and we could go to CVS and remove the rest of the wedding party, so as to have a nice picture to send.
So, now I know who I am. I am my mother's daughter, who believes that no matter how crazy something is, if it's important to someone, if it would make them happy, it's worth doing. That you don't get to judge other people—well, you do, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't help them in their delusions. Life is too hard to steal people's dreams from them; life is to hard not to make their dreams easier.
Is that what His family thinks, too? It would comfort me if I knew that was the case, because I'm used to being thought crazy and I can't seem to do anything about that, but if I'm amusing enough (and therefore pleasant to be around), if I'm not a nuisance, maybe I will be allowed, if not inside, at least to stand here on the periphery, in the shade.
(And why should that be any different, anyway? I've lived my whole life with the philosophy of, Be quiet; be good; if you must speak, be amusing. It doesn't exactly work, but I don't know what else to do. When I see myself being different, when I picture myself being more assertive, what I see is being told no. And I'm not even sure if that picture is something I've seen before, or just the only thing my mind can imagine.)
Does it make any sense to say that leaving NY makes me feel like a turtle that's been pulled out of its shell?
*Peter Schinner