i can't stop listening to sam cooke's "a change is gonna come", which he wrote after his son died. i'm leaving for west virginia in the a.m. it's been a while, 2 years and some change, but enough time to really change a lot of things. a second is enough time to really change a lot of things.
i'm laying belly down on the carpet, it smells musky and there's a boy lightly snoring on my bed. it's been a long time coming, but i know a change is gonna come.
***
What Can be Given
The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only in that moment...a story is different.
-Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Several months ago when my grandfather called to say that at the age of 88 he was leaving Florida, my mother vowed we would visit as soon as possible; so for the Thanksgiving holiday, my family and I, including our Maltese-Poodle Sammy, bundle into our comfortable sudan to make the nine hour drive to West Virginia. As I throw my bag into the trunk and climb into the back seat, I catch my brothers' disdainful glance. We know what we ride towards will not be as much a reunion as it will be a showcase of grandfather's ennui, which has been exponentially increasing since he married his third wife, June, in 2000. We drive. Country unfolds all around and there is no cell phone reception. The car's digital navigating system tells us we have arrived at our destination but it is too dark to see any roads stemming from the route we travel.
Two hours later than anticipated, our arrival is marked by homemade Irish coffees and a tour of the new house, pre-furnished and punctual, which rests on a plot of land that June's family has owned for generations. In the front of the plot, closest to the gnarled road, is her brother's house, theirs in the middle, and her sister's in the rear—a comfortable establishment where each couple can care for and share with each other, be it meals or around-the-house help. For lack of bedrooms, I sleep on a blow-up mattress in the living room.
* * *
Upon moving to New York City, I began a search, an intrusive search, through second-hand bookstores and flea markets for misplaced personal journals or diaries. I wanted these books I sought to act as some form of muse to me as a writer. One winterslick night as I shuffled down a Brooklyn sidewalk, I found a blue notebook half shrouded in dirt; a godsend. The notebook was the school journal of a fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican Brooklynite, or so I have read. Her name is Anabella Torres and she is semi-literate. In the notebook, Anabella wrote about her goals and how she is going to reach them. She plans to do better for herself, she plans to get out of Bed-Sty although her entire family is there with her. The one word Anabella repeatedly misspells is “success.” Although there is a sense of grudging disdain in her words, there is also a sort of palpable neediness. What Anabella wrote to please her teacher, mantras towards prosperity, relays an authentic sense of struggle and desire for betterment. Her name and home address are written on the inside front cover and as often as I consider returning the book, I cannot overcome the feeling that she misplaced it with larger purpose.
* * *
I wake to gunshots—it is hunting season. Mom and I take Sammy for a walk as we explore the land. Sammy veers towards a fallen log and Mom follows. I notice how her red coat stands out against the tired browns and grays of an overcast November morning. Together we climb a cleared path on a hill to the west of the plot. The decaying leaves push into the earth under our feet. At the top of the hill there is a clearing and an oil rig and I find that my phone has reception for the first time in these stagnant days. Sammy runs around like mad, sniffing and exploring. Mom and I watch him scramble through the grass as his nose brings him to a finding. It is a vertebrae bone, considerable in size and misplaced. It begins to snow. Mom and Sam go back down the hill, but I stay, take a seat on the rig and make a call to a friend. She does not answer.
* * *
Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words II works eloquently in understatement as it is quite literally an act without words. The act opens to two men who are folded into their individual sleeping sacks alongside a neatly folded pile of clothes. From stage left, a mechanical goad appears to prod at the closest sack. A haggard man emerges. He stands, swallows a few pills from a bottle in his pocket, dresses in the clothes from the pile, kneels and prays, pulls his sack farther from where the goad appeared, undresses and leaves the clothes in a heap, takes pills, prays, sleeps. Again, the goad appears and prods the now closer, other sack. A clean-shaven man pops his head out and efficiently stands, dresses in the clothes from the heap, brushes his teeth, checks his watch, exercises, reads a pocket map, checks his watch, moves his sack farther from the goad, undresses, checks his watch, brushes his teeth, exercises, checks his watch, sleeps. Again the goad appears and prods the sack closest to it, the haggard man. He wakes and begins his routine and, mid-prayer, the lights cut to blackout. The act is over.
Rosemarie Waldrop's Alarms and Excursions also works with the poetic silence Beckett poses in this act. She writes, “But what do we not altogether say in what we say? Is it what we try to keep silent, what we cannot or will not say or precisely what we do want to say and what all we say hides...? For these unsaid things we are gravely responsible.” What goes without verbalization in this act—the belief in prayer, man's obsession with time, faith in waking—is communicated through motions. Perhaps it is our motions that say the most about our thoughts and our demeanor—how we offer a hand to a grieving friend, smile in sunlight, skate fingertips over a loved one, tilt the head towards a familiar, lost voice.
* * *
Later in the day, the six of us—mom, dad, brother, grandfather, dog, and I—make the drive from Sod to Nitro to see mom's great aunt. The outside of their house is more pleasant than the surrounding, ramshackle homes. We are greeted at the door and as we proceed through, she hugs and kisses mom, dad, brother, grandfather, pauses and looks at me puzzled, “You're not one of us.” She laughs reluctantly. I shrug. We sit in the living room, which is appropriately covered in family memorabilia and photographs. Mom takes the liberty of pointing me out to everybody in a picture from a family reunion when I could not yet walk. Grandfather takes a seat across the room. He, who is usually an adamant contributor to talk of family history, stays silent. His face lays long and heavy, his focus on something not present. There is talk of relatives whose names I have never heard; bodies who, in passing, I could not discern even on an empty street. We leave within the hour. There is a turkey to be prepared.
Back at the home scents of pumpkin pie, cranberry pilaf, and mashed potatoes stir in the air. We celebrate our Thanksgiving a day late due to school break and travel time, which causes it to fall on a Friday night, the Sabbath. My mother converted to Judaism after she married my father, not because she had to, but because she chose to, and my grandfather has always been respectful of this. He puts Sabbath candles on the table and my family says the prayers as we all join hands. Mom offers that we also say grace, and asks grandfather if he would like to lead. He shakes his head no as his eyes fill with tears.
* * *
On September 11, 2001 in his City apartment, William Basinski, a post-minimalist recording artist, transferred analog tape loops from the 1980's into digital format. Because of their age, Basinksi found that as the loops revolved, the magnetic tape disintegrated. With each revolution, bits of iron oxide fell from the tape, fragmenting the continual drone. Throughout the day, he transferred five different loops, the most compelling of which is DLP 4. The piece is a simple electronic keyboard drone, a few melancholy chords that seem to fold into and over themselves. What is fascinating about DLP 4 is the brevity with which it deteriorates. The piece continues for a mere 20 minutes, insubstantial to the nearly hour-long DLP 5. It is audible decay. What Basinski created that day was not only art, but also a requiem: chilling, prophetic, the ideal soundtrack for tragedy.
* * *
When I wake, everyone is seated around the kitchen table over homemade cinnamon buns and bowls of oatmeal. The talk is polite, but there is a stiffness in the air already. As I sit at the kitchen table and stir butter and sliced bananas into my oatmeal, grandfather breaks his silence and offers me the china that fills the kitchen cabinets. My entire life, he has been giving me things like this—porcelain dolls, plates, embroideries; knick-knacks for him to be remembered by. I accept the plates and then, for the second time, grandfather tells the story about how, one hunting trip, he shot four bucks. He includes every minute detail—how he saw them in the forest beyond the hood of his truck, how he moved in silence in order not to frighten them, how he left the door slightly ajar as to not make noise and also have a light to focus with. It occurs to me that grandfather holds this hunting accomplishment as the most empowering of his life, perhaps even the last time he felt alive. Grandfather has always been a storyteller. Although listening to his same stories repetitiously becomes grating on my brother and me, it illuminates the past we would otherwise never know.
One story which we have both been subjected to several times is one of grandfather's coal mining days. As a young teen, he worked in the coal shafts of Illinois. More sufferable than the threat of miner's lung was the shaft collapse he endured one day, black powder like smoke filling his breaths and fogging his sight as he struggled through a tunnel 50 feet underground. In his essay The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin muses, “The storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing...after all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is unfolding.” What grandfather offers through his stories, especially that of the shaft collapse, is not only an awkward sort of counsel, but also the continuation of a legacy. With each story of his past, I begin to make sense of the man who sends me holiday cards and specially produced coins from the Franklin Mint. It is my task and my brother’s task to interpret his foreign life as we will. While I write essays that attempt to come to terms with the melancholic sense visiting brings me, my brother turns his stories into poetry. Once, he wrote on the shaft collapse not from my grandfather's perspective, but from his mothers' perspective. She, ignorant to the collapse, moves through her day as her son teeters on the margin of death. In this way, we become storytellers in our own right—daunted, uncertain, and naively discriminatory in our selections. Our whole visit is full of stories and grandfather's tiny side remarks about his waning health; how he just cannot do what he used to do. June tells us he thinks he is dying, but I acknowledge that I am dying.
After breakfast, we pack and give our goodbye's. As our car pulls down the dusty lot, grandfather and June wave from the porch. Half-way off of the plot, I look back to see that while June has gone inside, grandfather stands on the porch, his gaunt face shrouded in tears. Dad turns on the radio, snow falls, we drive forward.
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