very mindful, very demure
“She saved everything. There are mailing envelopes with everyone’s names on them. They’re filled with cards.”
My aunt is calling me from my grandmother’s house, which she is trying to empty.
“You can toss all that,” I tell her. “We don’t need those.”
“I don’t know, some of these have photos in them. I’m going to bring them back with me.”
A week later, she hands me a pile of paper. On top: My high school newsletter with an article about the latest inductees into the National Honor Society. My name has been highlighted with a yellow marker.
“I was in the National Honor Society??” I have zero memory of this.
“I don’t know! Just take it.”
I bring the pile home, where it sits on my table for a couple days before I start sifting through it. There’s my college graduation program, my parents’ wedding invitation (?), a copy of Ska-tastrophe magazine that included my write-up of the first European tour I did with a DC ska band, and a slew of thank-you letters.
Every Christmas and birthday, my mother took notes on a Steno pad about who gave me what, so that she could make sure everyone was appropriately thanked. I hated writing these things. I didn’t know what to say, it felt like work, and there were always so many other things I’d rather do than pretend to be the perfect grandchild on paper.
I take it all back. Thank you, Mom, for making me do this.
The earliest one is written to both my grandparents. I would have been younger than 8: “Thank you for the skirt and the shirt. The minute I saw them I put them on. When we went for a walk I took my pupet (sic).”
There’s one thanking her for the E.T. in the photo above, also saying my dad got me a dollhouse. E.T. is long gone, but that dollhouse is still here, in my apartment, for my niece to play with.
From the summer after 7th grade, after I’d returned from camp: “The bus ride back was 6.5 hours and I was so happy to get back home, though camp was so much fun. I won the Silver Horseshoe Award for being the most improved rider at camp. I got a silver painted horseshoe for it too.”
All I remember from that camp is dressing up like Michael Jackson (I had a sparkly glove), being mocked by older girls for not shaving my legs, and thinking “that’s what you get” when the meanest Mean Girl cut her arm all the way open while carrying a canoe, requiring dozens of stitches.
From high school: “This summer has been generally pretty dull. I am an office assistant at a law firm which deals primarily with airline liabilities, for example, the 1983 Korean Airlines 007 case, which is in court right now, and Pan Am Lockerbie, which I do filing for at the office — complete with grizzly accounts of what various Lockerbie residents witnessed.”
Thirty-five years later, I’m still scared of flying.
From when I was living at home after college: “The whole house has been torn up — Dad decided to refinish the floors on the first floor, put in new floor, appliances, everything in the kitchen, and re-tile the first floor bathroom. We’ve been using the basement as a kitchen for over 2 weeks now. Mom hated it so much she went to my grandmother’s house for 5 days to avoid it. She was saying she was going to get a room at the Y. Dad of course thinks the whole thing is a lot of fun, and laughs at Mom and me for being so inflexible. It’s almost done and this afternoon I have to mop down all the walls to get rid of the sawdust.”
And from when my brother got his first job: “J. is finally working! How about that!? Dad and I went over to Lord & Taylor a few days before Christmas to see him in action. The place was swamped, and we couldn’t even get near him to tease him, so we just hid behind racks of bathrobes and giggled. Dad wanted to take a pair of red men’s boxer shorts that said ‘HO HO HO’ up to J. and say, ‘Excuse me young man, do you think my son would like these?’ but he couldn’t keep a straight face to do it. OK, so we’re not the most supportive family around, but it was still pretty funny.”
The point of the thank-you notes was to teach me to be, in modern TikTok parlance (MSN) “very demure, very mindful.” To show my relatives that I was being Raised Right. Turns out they had a secondary purpose: Giving me a chance, decades later, to re-meet previous versions of myself, even if the memories are fuzzy. I wonder if my mother knew that would happen.
Links
I got snipped: Notes after a vasectomy. (Paris Review)
Someone pointed me to this webinar about long-term care planning, and why you need it. It’s an hour long, but worth it. And at the end she shares her contact info. (YouTube)
After several hours on Reddit, and reading several library books on autism, this sounds like a more legit test to see if you are on the spectrum. (RAADstest)
New to me (from 10+ years ago), one of the best personal essays I’ve ever read: How can you be mad at someone who’s dying of cancer? (Full Grown People)
A full Tamara de Lempicka retrospective in SF! (Colossal)
If you’ve ever worked in an office with a food thief, you will appreciate these tactics. (Digg)
Tim Walz fixed your bicycle. Keep refreshing it. (timwalzfixedyourbicycle)
Hilarious poem about wine in a can. (YouTube)
If Joe Biden doesn’t close the border how can I comfortably live in rural South Dakota? (Hard Times)