Missing Roses

So I've been on a bit of hiatus. Not from writing, but from writing here. I could offer up my excuses and say that I've been pursuing credits toward my B.A. in Dance for the last three weeks (which is true). Or I could note that I've been taking notes as a reporter and photographer for a couple of local bi-monthly papers (also true).

But to be honest, I just haven't written--haven't known what to write (perhaps untrue).

I still don't, but I do have something to share. It's a piece of writing I tinkered with over Spring semester of last year, a piece about my grandmother Rose who passed away this week. The piece remains unfinished, but since its beginning, it has functioned as a lens with which to view what was happening to my grandmother's deteriorating health. To consider how I might write the scene I was living was my way of getting beyond what was really happening.

And even in the quiet of Thursday's dawn, as she lay in lavender pajamas, breathing shallowly beneath a hand-stitched quilt, I was writing. Taking notes, remembering times, smells and the way the light shone on her quiet face. I was writing from a fragile necessity that morning.

But the piece. It was edited some for a space constraint and I haven't refilled in the spaces I cinched together for class. But I'll stop with the explanations and excuses.


From "The Destrcutors"



Last Christmas Eve, the house had been filled with family and friends who appeared annually for the holiday. From my seat at the bar I spotted my grandmother and my uncle’s mother in a corner where both women seemed younger versions of themselves.

Lois and Grandma were perched on the couch, their arms entwined. I watched as they laughed; their heads of grandmother curls doubled over and the women came up with wet cheeks. She looked different from the way I remember her as a kid; she looked different from the way I had thought of her lately. Her wrinkles and frailty had recently overwhelmed me. And she had finally succumbed to the idea of Chandler place.

Jan walked to the center of the room and tinkled the glass containing her own drink, “Rosie has a little something to say to everyone.”

The men in the room began to shout obnoxiously: “SPEECH! SPEECH!”

“OOkay, Shutchyour damn mouths.” Grandma spoke from the back of her throat and ambled to her feet before laughing and then letting tears fill her eyes as she looked around the room. Her lips pursed and her face smushed in creating the kind of silence that exists before a child cries after he falls.

She sniffed and her words came in spurts. “I just… want to… wish everyone a Merry Christmas… and… thank… you all for… coming.” She’d had a speech prepared, but faltered. “You all know what you mean and you all have the memories so I don’t need to bring them up.” Looking small and frail, she raised her drink in the middle of basement. Her clothing was rumpled as much as her face, and the tears trickled down before her last sentence came out in one breath. “You all have a good time,” she said and eased slowly toward the couch before collapsing onto its cushions. Lois patted her on the back. Her voice sounded naturally congested.

“You did great Rose.”

That was to be the last Christmas Eve at 3511 NE Main.


I sighed and rubbed a finger through the dust on the horn-rimmed glasses pinned to the bar by a thumbtack. They had brought on the memory and their joints had been crudely repaired with stiffened hot glue. The hardened material held them open as if Grandpa had removed them for a moment to chew on the edges while he mixed a drink. They remained the glasses Paul Auster’s father left behind: “scattered throughout the house: on kitchen counters, on tabletops, on the edge of the bathroom sink—always open, lying there like some strange, classified form of animal.”

“There is a poignancy to it, and also a kind of horror. In themselves, the things mean nothing, like the cooking utensils of some vanished civilization. And yet they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself: whether to color his hair, whether to wear this or that shirt, whether to live, whether to die. And the futility of it all once there is death.”

I read these lines only a day after my aunt’s voice pulled me from the place where the glasses hung near the bar. I climbed the carpeted stairs to the kitchen.

“Grandma wants to know if you want her china,” she asked. The kitchen was filled with boxes and the cupboards were wide open, their gutted insides spread over the countertop. Newspaper and old towels were intermittent with vases and candy dishes.

“Sure, but you’ll have to send it with my parents. I have no room for it in my apartment.”

As Grandma pushed on the table’s surface to stand, her navy corduroys fell back around her ankles and re-covered her bony legs. She carefully started in the direction of the adjacent living room, clinging to the walls and its doorway for support.

I said, “Thanks Rosie,” and she turned to me.

“Oh you’re welcome.”

“How’re you doing?” I asked, rubbing her back.

She answered with a singsong, “Oh I’m fine.” But as she turned on the TV, I can only presume how she really felt. Perhaps that she missed my grandfather more than I’d ever understand. Perhaps that she was giving up, surrendering to the move. Feeling obligated after such a stroke.

She’d be giving up her car, no longer trusted to drive. Giving up her house, where she’d raised two children and buried and third, days after her birth. Where she’d washed dishes and forced my father to eat beets at the kitchen table after they’d gone cold. She was always cold now, wearing sweatshirts year round. There was a time when climbing the stairs was not an event and she made kool-aid in a crystal pitcher on summer afternoons for her kids.

As she looked up from the television, she might have remembered a time when she could see for miles from the front window, before someone from train yard across the street had built up the earth and created a man made hill to deafen the sounds of trains at night. But the freight cars on their tracks were still audible during the early hours of the morning, even though it was decades ago their whistles stopped registering in her ears.

• • •

The huge prints of Grandma and Grandpa on their birthdays’ were framed in the basement and hung above the end table holding an old rotary telephone. On her head of curls, my grandmother had a birthday crown made of tin foil. In his, Grandpa was wearing an enormous sombrero and grinning. Though the photograph is noisy and soft, the black frames of the glasses on his face seemed to jump out of the relatively gray scene.

I twisted the screwdriver to the left, loosening the lower corner of Grandpa’s frame on the wall. The rough wood poked a sliver into my palm and I held the frame steady. It left a growing red spot as I ignored it and continued to dismantle the frame, detaching it from the wood paneled wall.

Screw after screw, I loosened and removed, until I could no longer reach the tip of the Phillips flush into its screw.

I dismantled the frame in a methodic nature that reminded me of Graham Greene and Mr. Karn’s tenth grade AP lit class. We’d read ‘The Destructors” during the term, and I would recall it six years later when I was dismantling my grandmother’s house. Though my father and I had not been destroying the floorboards of an old man’s beautiful house, new paint covered cigarette-stained walls and the year-round tinsel and Christmas lights in the basement has been thrown in the trash.

“Dad, will you help me with these last screws? I’m not tall enough.”

• • •

“I went down to dinner today,” Grandma told me over the phone. “But it wasn’t so great.” She’d taken to eating dinner with a new group of women. They flock down to the ornate social room for happy hour, but Grandma turns her nose up at the fact she’s only allowed two vodka cokes.

“How are your new lady friends?”

She giggled, “Oh they’re fine. Just fine.” Even though she was in her apartment alone, her voice dropped, indicating gossip. “But there’s the one lady… oh she bugs me. She’s just a little bit… slow, you know. And I know I shouldn’t say that, but every time I see her I just get so upset. She’s completely senile…”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “Did you go down to happy hour today?”

“No, that’s only on Friday. So tomorrow the Helen and I will go. We like to get together and… toss the air. So what are you up to tonight, Kels?”

I briefly recount the relentless details of my semester’s end and three jobs.

“Goodness. Don’t get yourself all tired out now. You’re so busy, I just worry about you sometimes.”

And they say it's not just a trend.

I found this in Wednesday's edition of the New York Times.
























UPDATE: Yesterday, (meaning Friday) I mentioned this to my coworkers at the restaurant in which I work. One particular coworker seemed he would defend the organic vodka to his grave - that it not only greatly differed from other vodkas, but that even after the distilling process it was more fresh. (Though when I think of vodka in general, I have to say that fresh isn't among the first descriptors that come to mind). It's too bad I prefer rum, otherwise I'd challenge his theory. Well, that, and the fact that drinking alone implies certain social shortcomings from which I'd prefer to stay dissociated.

eavesdropping in the waiting room

"I bought a great vintage frame in a rummage sale a few weeks ago, and my husband needs to finish building my new commuter bike. But in the meantime, I'm riding this heinous dog-walking mountain bike."

And then I looked at the cover: the yellow margins, the date.

I've just begun reading Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: Travels through small town America.

After what is a standard beginning for most books--acknowledgements, publication, dedication and title (each prescribed with a miniscule roman numeral)--Bryson's prose begins on page three. By page seven he has managed to successfully coerce an audible laugh from me (which, when you're reading amidst a group of people in a crowded shop is a commendable feat in itself), and bring me to a place it seems all young kids avouch for early recognition of the larger world around them: National Geographic.

Though Elizabeth Bishop certainly published this notion years ago, its validity remains universal without epic or further publication; I am writing here, in an untrafficked place, with my own modest memory of the magazine.

I played piano from the age of six until I was a sophomore in high school, and practicing the keyed instrument was my least favorite part of the day. I'd tinker with Bach's Minuet in G, and thereafter avoid my Suzuki book entirely. Instead, I supplemented the classics with rags or jazz I'd memorized months or years before, and afterward, would slip from the corduroy cushion on its bench to the storage cupboards next to the piano. In addition to old photo albums from my parents' college years, the cupboards housed an archive of National Geographics aligned by date. Their spines created an overwhelming rectangle of gold when I climbed atop the bar's counter to open the narrow door next to the windows of the wine cabinet.

One afternoon, as I avoided Vivaldi and went to the cupboard, a Kayan woman with golden rings around her neck stared at me through the golden frame of the cover. As a child of probably six or seven, I was astonished. The necks of her and the other women were "wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs". Sitting cross-legged on the carpet and devouring other photos of the giraffe woman, I didn't understand the physics or the medical nightmares that occurred when the clavicles of the woman were crushed and the apparatus rendered her neck muscles so weak they could no longer support her head without the device. This beauty was painful, but I only imagined the place in which she resided. It was so far removed from anything I'd ever seen, its actual existence was unfathomable.

When I asked my mother about it, I'm sure her reply was something about other cultures having different perceptions of beauty--which is why even the small children in the magazine had pierced ears and I had to wait until my eighth birthday to have my lobes punctured. But I considered myself lucky because my best friend Karen was waiting until thirteen, an age tardy by both her standards and mine.

When my time came, I discovered my allergy to nickel and other inexpensive metals and the healing process had been a mess. My ears became pussy, bloody and painful when I exchanged my original stainless steel studs with golden ballerinas, and, from then on, I was forced to don the plain jewels reserved by the "sensitive ears" section of Claire's.

But I've digressed from the point.

The floundering magazine that was created in 1888 to increase the "diffusion of geographic knowledge" was supported by Alexander Graham-Bell's father-in-law, and originally read like a textbook. It wasn't until photographs were a haphazard addition to an edition in 1905 that our country, from Bill Bryson and Elizabeth Bishop, became and remained entranced by the worlds in its pages they would have otherwise never been able to see. And that's where Bryson left off when I bookmarked page fourteen to write this: with his desire to leave his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa and move to England. And he did. But his following pages are not of the places he discovered in his years abroad; they are a rediscovery of our own and his own small town escapades.

But perhaps I'm making a grandiose statement prematurely. Giving a book fourteen pages is like judging its cover, even though I'm looking forward to giving Bryson a few more days.


" I began to read--no, I began to consume--National Geographics, with their pictures of glowing Lapps and mist-shrouded castles and ancient cities of infinite charm. From that moment, I wanted to be a European boy. I wanted to live in an apartment across from a park in the heart of a city, and from my bedroom window look out on a crowded vista of hills and rooftops. I wanted to ride trams and understand strange languages. I wanted friends named Werner and Marco who wore short pants and played soccer in the street and owned toys made of wood. I wanted my mother to send me out to buy long loaves of break from a shop with a wooden pretzel hanging above the entrance. I wanted to step outside my front door and be somewhere."

a comment on impossibility

Paul: Does he know who you are? Then the feeling's mutual.
Me: What do you mean does he know who I am?
Paul: If he knows you by name, then the feeling's mutual is what I'm getting at.
Paul: Maybe that was a stretch. You know, I don't know, I just live in China.
Me: That doesn't make any sense.
Paul: Yes it does!!
Me: How?
Paul: To know you is to fall madly in love with you.
Me: You are ridiculous.
Paul: C'mon. Think with that brain of yours and understand me.
Me: Well you're writing in complete sentences, and those I understand. But your theory is seriously flawed.
Paul: It might not be true. But as a hypothesis, I think it's solid.


This happened back in March, but I found it in the small pile of school things on my desk during my scuffle to shorten it this morning.

apples to apples

Recently, I have taken to buying yellow apples from the grocery store. Even though I prefer Fiji or Braeburn, these golden friends have been the least expensive denominator as of late. And, because I generally eat a ton of fruit, that's a good thing.

Every time I bite into one, I think of Beth Lehman, my childhood best friend. As a kid, I found it particularly special that Beth's full name was both my middle name and the name of my godmother in Wisconsin. We both had blonde, bobbed hair and blue eyes and were confused for sisters whenever we spent any amount of time together (that time being every possible moment between the ages of two and eleven). Though Madison Elementary and Sts. Peter, Paul and Michael Primary separated us only by a city block and two playground sets, I attribute our high tolerance for one another to the fact that we went to different elementary schools. We spent long weekends in the woods at her cabin with her dog. We played dress-up with her old skating costumes and my sequined-lined leotards and tutus. We watched hockey games and swam in her pool when she moved to a new house after we turned eight. Our fathers were colleagues in the same dental practice and we'd never had cavities. Before I was in preschool, I spent afternoons with her mother, Kris, while my own mother worked part-time as a dental hygienist with our fathers.

Though her favorite color is yellow, my mother only bought red and green apples and grapes; yellow fruit only came from the Lehman kitchen. Beth and I would be called into the house after running through sprinklers in matching hula skirts and bikinis on summer afternoons, leis askew, the fabric flowers in our hair matted and frayed. We spent hours gyrating our hips, practicing the perfect hula, and I'm certain the afternoon humidity bore down like it does during all Minnesota summers: so thick that it's hard to breathe. But kids, tuned only into their work of play, never notice these inconveniences and surely we cared more about the dandelion butter we rubbed on our wrists than the soppy air of afternoons.

So we'd run inside, stepping on old towels with our wet and grassy feet in the entry way of the kitchen, which, as I remember it, was a replica of the kitchen in my parents' first house. Kris would be standing at the counter with a knife, slicing yellow apples as MPR murmured Reagan policies the background. The linoleum was a muted mustard with a pattern from the seventies and the oak country table fit the country kitchen well, its chairs cut in a synonymous design. But we always snacked at a playskool table instead its proper relative. Its plastic legs and crayon-yellow miniature chairs sat in the adjacent living room, just near enough to fake a semblance of belonging amidst the dining room set. We'd engulf our plate of apples and cheddar cheese before racing into the heat once more.




But while I'm still eating yellow fruit, the best friend to whom I'd promised a spot in my wedding, and who had told me the truth about Santa Claus in the pop-up back seat of my mother's wood paneled station wagon, seems to only exist among the semi-fabricated vignettes of my childhood memories. It's been more than ten years since we've spoken, and while our fathers still reside in the same office on Northway Drive and Kris makes it to office functions and smiles and says it's so good to see you, Kelsey, and I still have the Lehman's home phone number memorized, I didn't even think to ask of Beth when I ran into her older sister in Barnes and Noble on Thursday. Perhaps I was merely preoccupied and trying to avoid the former co-workers and managers with whom the place was crawling. But more likely, as ten years implies and as a wedding for which I'll wear white is currently and thankfully unforeseeable, we've just become too old to run through the sprinklers in grass skirts.