March 18, 2009

I was dreaming about possible children & their possible fathers. When I see a pretty little well-dressed child in a playground, I imagine she is my child and I take strange pleasure in it. Because I am imagining she is an extension of myself. And her father will be very handsome no matter who he is. And she will have a handsome well-dressed brother. And they will be smart & funny.
These little lives I dream about can only be my little life, right?
My little life is red-faced & greasy right now. Bored with herself and thigh-chafed from walking. Tomorrow I will write about something else besides myself.

The forsythia bloomed first. That is to say, the first forsythia bloomed. And while now I am in a place with forsythia, it still doesn't feel familiar. Must be that grandma uprooted the two bushes in the driveway years ago, and I don't think there's any more in the backyard.
Though, when I dreamed of a joyful Aunt Betty-Ann, she was wearing all yellow in the garden. The first flower to bloom. The first flower to die.
I can't help forgetting her when I look out the window to see Baltimore backyards made of stone and slate and such things.
It is only Wednesday.
I remember the blacktop backyard & the ancient wild strawberries we'd put in little green baskets and hang on the clothes lines.
The rope swing, then the hammock, then the tree stump and the perimeter fence.
I went out into the backyard last summer and read three lines from a book. I sat under a tree and marveled at the grass & the house. This was the grandma's house of my own legendary memories. I can't believe I was really sitting right there, where my famous childhood self once played games with my famous childhood brother.
Grandpa once told me what the hole in the basement wall was. He said it was a coal shoot, and I still think it's vaguely obscene.
And even though he said it was for coal, to make heat, in my mind I can't help conflating it with the idea of the ice man & the ice box, though obviously no blocks of ice would fit through that tiny hole. And when I see it, I see a shovel and think of horse shit.
When I smell hay I think nice things about you.
When I walk in the sunshine my face always feels hot in the shade.
And my grandfather's father built that house a hundred years ago, and it's the only place grandpa's ever lived.

That's not precisely true, because he was born without medication in an apartment in Manhattan, which is, incidentally also the city Grandpa Kephart lived in and also where Michael was born, though none of them at the same time.