Knuckles and bones, paper and ink.
May. 5th, 2008 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jacktellsliesMy great-aunt died quite recently. She'd had a few bad falls. We're all a bit unclear on details, but word is coming through my grandfather, her brother, the naval captain. His missives, even his phone conversations, are short as telegrams to this day. I doubt one could get information from the man with hooks.
My great-aunt was smart, and well educated, and moved to the city on her own to get a man's job in advertising well before one did such things. She was remarkably successful. The University of Pittsburgh attempted to name a building after her, but she was too modest for it. Feminist organisations liked to have dinners in her honour. She lived in a goblin's lair on the side of a mountain with her brother, a small and dark place made of dust and spider webs and a hundred menorahs and countless old books held in cases behind glass. They fed me strange food when I went to visit. She mailed me a book, her preferred biography of Shakespeare. There was a wink in it, like she recognised something in me. I'll toast to intelligence, then, to seeking out strange cities on our own.
My grandmother and grandfather are leaving their old house, moving to a community near Washington DC and more of the family. That house was built by my grandmother's grandfather with his hands, an old Victorian thing in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. There are French doors, crystal doorknobs, the china and fine silver that had been given as wedding gifts. There are albums of antique photography, serious but confused bearded immigrants and children in frocks blinking into time. (They don't look much like me. I got my father's blood.) There are fantastic books, bound in leather and bearing some relative's initials. The house is filled with strange artefacts of scattered points in time and space. Several generations and extensive travels are represented. There are large porcelain elephants from Vietnam, rubbings of dancing women with exposed breasts from temples in Thailand, funny German clocks, hideous drinking glasses from the sixties. As a child I believed the jetsam to represent some single zeitgeist. The basement is an old coal cellar. The floors aren't paved, and the ceiling beams are entire halves of trees, the bark still on them. Bits of my family were born and died in the bedrooms. I've always thought the place felt haunted. The garage in the back was the old barn, still filled with impossibly old tools and children's sleds. There are secrets scattered and forgotten in the hay loft: suicides and trysts.
My mother and aunts and uncles are there now, helping to pack. I asked them not to scavenge for me, but that if any of the old books were going to be left or thrown away, I'd very much like to have them. I suppose I'll never see that house or that town again. It was the centre of an otherwise scattered family.
When my great-grandfather died residents of the entire town and surrounding areas marched in his funeral procession. I'm told there were hundreds of them. He was thought to be a great man: not the town's founder, but in many ways its heart. The ghosts of that march walk past the house again now, I'm sure of it.
My great-aunt was smart, and well educated, and moved to the city on her own to get a man's job in advertising well before one did such things. She was remarkably successful. The University of Pittsburgh attempted to name a building after her, but she was too modest for it. Feminist organisations liked to have dinners in her honour. She lived in a goblin's lair on the side of a mountain with her brother, a small and dark place made of dust and spider webs and a hundred menorahs and countless old books held in cases behind glass. They fed me strange food when I went to visit. She mailed me a book, her preferred biography of Shakespeare. There was a wink in it, like she recognised something in me. I'll toast to intelligence, then, to seeking out strange cities on our own.
My grandmother and grandfather are leaving their old house, moving to a community near Washington DC and more of the family. That house was built by my grandmother's grandfather with his hands, an old Victorian thing in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. There are French doors, crystal doorknobs, the china and fine silver that had been given as wedding gifts. There are albums of antique photography, serious but confused bearded immigrants and children in frocks blinking into time. (They don't look much like me. I got my father's blood.) There are fantastic books, bound in leather and bearing some relative's initials. The house is filled with strange artefacts of scattered points in time and space. Several generations and extensive travels are represented. There are large porcelain elephants from Vietnam, rubbings of dancing women with exposed breasts from temples in Thailand, funny German clocks, hideous drinking glasses from the sixties. As a child I believed the jetsam to represent some single zeitgeist. The basement is an old coal cellar. The floors aren't paved, and the ceiling beams are entire halves of trees, the bark still on them. Bits of my family were born and died in the bedrooms. I've always thought the place felt haunted. The garage in the back was the old barn, still filled with impossibly old tools and children's sleds. There are secrets scattered and forgotten in the hay loft: suicides and trysts.
My mother and aunts and uncles are there now, helping to pack. I asked them not to scavenge for me, but that if any of the old books were going to be left or thrown away, I'd very much like to have them. I suppose I'll never see that house or that town again. It was the centre of an otherwise scattered family.
When my great-grandfather died residents of the entire town and surrounding areas marched in his funeral procession. I'm told there were hundreds of them. He was thought to be a great man: not the town's founder, but in many ways its heart. The ghosts of that march walk past the house again now, I'm sure of it.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 02:08 am (UTC)But it does, doesn't it?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 04:15 am (UTC)At a similar period in my life, mind, I decided to use the analytical skills I'd been able to amass by that time and determine the historical order in which the following things had existed: dinosaurs, cowboys, Jesus, knights and princesses, cavemen, Indiana Jones, the Greek gods, ninjas, and pirates. I was very, very young.