2001-06-14 - 13:01
it's always blood

Here are two things I wrote on Sunday that I haven't gotten around to putting up here until today.

6/10/01

Brothers and sisters are the forerunners of strangers.

--Japanese proverb (as translated by Guy A. Zona)

Today is my grandmother's birthday. I often forget how old my older relatives are, but this is easy to remember: This year, I turn 19, my father turns 59, and my grandmother turns 89. Hi ho.

We visited her this afternoon, and my dad warned me that it might be a disaster, since she had had several visitors yesterday and was probably exhausted. As it turned out, it was a very pleasant visit. She's been looking forward to her birthday for many weeks, and she was as lucid as she ever is these days--which isn't very, but she was pleased to see us. She managed to tell about 60% of a story related to some people she knew as children many years back, who had sent her flowers for her birthday. Apparently, one of them called the other day and they had a fifteen-minute, coherent phone conversation. While she was talking about them, she mistook me for the eldest of the siblings in the story.

My uncle Mark called the other night to talk to my dad, and also asked me if I had any idea why my grandmother seemed to particularly like talking to me, and what he could do to keep her attention like that. I didn't know then, and I have a theory now, but I don't like it... I suspect that my grandmother often thinks I'm somebody she knew 30 years ago, and when she can do that sort of time-travel in her head, it makes her more lucid.

Anyway, those of us who could keep up with the pace of a normal conversation (me, Mark, my dad, my grandfather, and our cousin who made a surprise appearance) had a nice talk about politics and education and, for some reason, Alaska, and why all the best books in my grandparents' house were hidden away in the basement. Our cousin, whom I haven't seen in donkey's years and didn't even recognize when she first came in, told us about how her son just won some important environmental case against the federal gov'mint. My mom and my brother wound up in the kitchen talking to my grandmother's caretaker.

My father and my uncle are quite a case study, when you look at them together. The lifestyle and lifelong inclinations of each have written themselves all over his physical appearance. Mark is the older brother by a couple years (I tend to forget, since he never celebrates his birthday, but I think he's 61), but in early pictures, they look pretty similar. My grandmother has a lot of pictures on the cabinet by her bed, and one is a twin set of frames with pictures of her two sons as teenagers. On the right, a fresh-faced 15-year-old Brad Majors; on the left, a slightly better-looking, almost effeminate, 17-year-old Brad Majors.

Today, Mark lives in the woods up near (maybe in; he's moved around in that area a little in my lifetime) Leggett, CA, which is where he's lived for the last 20 years-ish. When I visited him, he was living in a teensy house with no phone and minimal electricity. He's a political activist and local radio show host; also good at fixing up cars and motorcycles. He's had an active, relatively uncomplicated lifestyle for many, many years now. He's still slim and very strong, with tough skin several shades more tan than mine or my dad's, and while his hair isn't getting any darker, it hasn't gone as white or receded as far as my dad's yet.

Twenty years ago, when his brother was getting settled in the woods, my dad was working long, hard hours alongside other crazy young visonaries (in those days, a 40-year-old who worked with computers was not yet considered a venerated old coot) to found a software company. He made the company very successful, and himself very comfortable. He's been retired for a few years now. Since, as far as I can gather, he's never had to earn his living by the sweat of his brow in his life, he's gained a little pudge along the way--just enough to be soft and cuddly, and concerned about his cholesterol. During his career at The Company, he was a vice president for a while, which probably contributed to his hair now being almost entirely white. Standing the two of them side by side, you would guess that it was my uncle, not my father, who was the younger brother.

I never got around to finishing the piece that afternoon, because I had to go to work. After work, I found myself with an extra hour to kill before I was supposed to meet up with some old friends. I walked down to the water, a couple minutes' walk from work, and took a little time out, which I then reflected on in my notebook.

I lay on my back on the low wall of the Sausalito pier, with my backpack for a pillow, and listened to the tide and looked at the stars and at the bay and the lights of San Francisco in the distance. A lighthouse blinked off and on. The colour of the water was uncommonly beautiful. I felt I could lie there forever, sleep under the stars, something I'd never done before. I thought about my own wanderlust and how it related to feeling this contentment so close to home, and then I saw an intimate connection between this and a piece of fiction I'd been working on, and then I realized something I'd vaguely known but never really thought about before, which is that all fiction writing is really a way of talking to yourself, taking different bits of yourself and letting them work something out for you.

The waves against the pier got louder, as if they were trying to get my attention, and the wind, blowing in from the bay, got colder. I moved a few paces away, to a bench lit by the balcony lights of the Sausalito Grille, where it is warmer than at the water's edge, and where I am writing this. It has gotten darker in the time I have been writing; the water is now almost black.

The next time Brian suggests a sailing expedition, I will definitely take him up on it. And I will dress very warmly.

A party of mixed company just came out of the Grille and walked out onto the pier. One of them, a young woman who must have been cold in a t-shirt and jeans, walked along the low wall, then hopped off and conversed briefly with another member of the party, a middle-aged man--looking more closely at them and at the rest of their party, who were wandering off, I could see that it must be a family dinner and he was her father. The girl wandered a few steps away, then scurried back to him with a childlike motion, linking arms with him and hanging off him like a restless kindergartener. He put an arm around her, said "C'mere" and kissed her on the forehead. They turned around and walked up the pier to catch up with the rest of the family.

test - 2017-10-08
boing - 2003-06-07
walk walk trudge trudge slog slog travel travel - 2003-05-21
ob-la-di - 2003-05-18
not dead. - 2002-12-08