A Good Day

I was going to write about all of the anti-Bush bumper stickers I've seen throughout these past eight years, and how much they pleased me and how much I wanted some but never made that purchase. And how my car has been unadorned, and how glad I am for this day, for 1-20-09, and about the bumper stickers with that date plastered in white upon a black background.

'End of an Error', and all that.

It doesn't feel right, though, and I don't have to fight too hard against that first inclination. People would correct in saying all the things that have happened to our country over these past two terms. Those are real and have happened and have diminished us.

But today I feel like it's spring. Like that feeling you get when you start opening windows and leaving them open, how the air smells like rain and dirt and grass and new flowers, and it's all slightly intoxicating. Like you're hopeful that the bitter chill of winter is behind you, and what you see now is what you can hold on to. Light and warmth and the tentative hope of renewal.

The bulbs will come up no matter what. But it feels a bit like a new earth.

I'm glad to be done with what came before, and I'm hopeful about the future.

I'm glad, too, that Barack Obama will be the first President my girls will truly remember It's a good day to be an American.

A Goodbye

On the Pennsylvania Turnpike just north of Quakertown, there is a brilliant white church that stands in the distance among a cluster of trees. I always like to look for it, and always think when I see it, that's got to be a metaphor for something, a snow-white church that looks to be in the middle of nowhere. Especially in the winter, when the branches that flank it are gray and stripped bare, and the pines that run around the back of it are the dark deciduous green of the months cold and black.

******

A week ago, I saw a moment of rare tenderness among my girls. Lillian was lying on the couch, and Hannah was beside her, rubbing her hair and murmuring in her ear. I was struck with the thought that one day, one of them would help lay the other to rest. I would have just taken in the scene and smiled -- it being one worth trying to etch forever along the wobbly confines of my brain -- if I was unaware of the labored state of my grandmother's breathing, her inability to eat, her constant sleep. She was slipping away, and suddenly I saw my girls as they were, beautiful and precious and very mortal.

******

This is one of those truths. Sometimes we are cowards. Last Easter, I had the chance to visit my grandmother in the nursing home she had been admitted to. Last Easter, I didn't. It's easy to understand the why: not wanting to see someone you've always loved in decline.

But we have to acknowledge our discomfort and move past it. Or at least pretend to, putting on the brave face because even though we're human, they are too.

******

The first time I was in the hospital, my grandmother came to visit me. Along with my mother and Aunt and cousin, she made her way up to that second floor, got buzzed through the thick door, and took a seat in the patients' dining room. I'm not sure she was the kind of person to entertain the concept of depression. I don't know if she even believed it was a real and valid problem. But it doesn't matter. What she did was sit there and tell me: "Everything is going to be alright, honey."

And I didn't believe her, but I loved her. And all the more because I knew that who would want to visit a place like that, where people wander around and mutter to themselves and throw things and need to be put into restraints? Who would want to enter that world, except for someone who loved someone else?

There is it, like soot tossed onto freshly fallen snow. I was a coward.

And there it is again, winter flowers that push up through the hard, cold dirt: she was right.

******

The story gets better. I gathered my wits and put aside my fears and made it to see her. And it was nothing like I imagined. There she was, in decline, but I could see the old her through what was right before my eyes. She couldn't speak. But she could laugh, and for some reason, she did. She kept laughing. And it was like when she saw you again, turned your way, she was seeing you for the first time, and you see a flash of recognition and a smile and a laugh. And it felt like opening a velvet box. It felt like a treasure.

******

The last time I saw her was on her birthday. We were in town for Thanksgiving, and we went to see her. My Aunt was bringing cake, and a 9 candle and a 6 candle. Grandma wouldn't be able to eat it, and we all really knew that this was it. The last time we'd put the shaped, colorful wax into some confection for her. The last time she'd see the flickers dance with the flow of the air. And she mostly slept, needing to be roused to open her presents. From the wife of another patient, she got this small stuffed bear that was holding multicolored balloons. From her sister, she got another bear, this one ceramic. She held onto each, her hands closing around as she drifted back to whatever was calling her, whatever slumber brought.

This is what I did: I held her hand and rubbed her arm and brushed back her hair with my fingers.

This is what I did: I stared at her face in profile, the closed eye, the prominent Italian nose, the straight line of her mouth, the one that used to kiss our cheeks with such force, you'd bet on a bruise.

This is what I did: I said goodbye to someone who was living, someone I had for 33 years, someone I had loved for that long, the only giant I knew under five feet tall.

******

On Tuesday, and yesterday, there she was. In a red quilted jacket my Aunt had picked out, with her hair done and her rosary wrapped tight around her folded hands.

And the men with white gloves, the rest of us with roses and carnations, with promises from the officiant that we'll see her again.

She would believe this, without any sense of hesitancy, without any ounce of faltering. Like the church in Quakertown, set alone among a copse of trees: steady, bright and true, her faith unwavering.

******

I can't even begin to describe her, because to start renders one unable to stop. She was just that big. I keep thinking of the basement freezer in her old house, stuffed to the gills with meatballs and sausages and sauce and eggplant and green beans. Or the shelves lined with cans of vegetables. Each item can be assigned a memory or a statement or a blip of personality, and the freezer is jammed and won't close and the cans keep falling of their perches. There is just too much. And all the preparation in the world isn't enough for you to organize the blessed jumble and make things tidy enough to share with the universe: the absolute feast that this woman was.

******

I had her again this morning, but it was only for the most brief flash -- a memory of her leaning in her kitchen, her forearms against the counter, her eyes looking out the large window above her sink.

And it was just like that, while I was putting the dishes away, holding onto a box grater with eyes closed as I felt her slip in and out.