They should make reunions with old parts of your life a thing. Like you should get to do a day a week, going to visit someone you pinned your hopes and dreams on who now knows nothing about you. But who WAS you intensely, for a few pictures in your photo album.
I remember once when I was making a resume for a job I was trying to get I was wondering what to do with the huge gaps and I realized I needed to make an Emotional Resume to explain many of the gaps in my workforce eras. Because working is definitely not the only job. You are always chasing some guy or some feeling or getting over some break up or wishing you were dead while eating a bagel which then makes you not want to die anymore.
I'm going to make a boysiloved photo album. There might be some girls in it.
My path has been so much fun. I see now why I want to fill it with sheep and needlepoint. Because I am running to keep my body and mind going even though I'm not using much of me, I'm a mom, I am still that girl and I was that girl
and we played
Speaking of old, every year at this time I go and hang lights at my old boss Lou's house. This year I just dawdled, I got there, I dragged out the lights that I labeled in ripped bags, I saw my note from last year at this time, which lights go where. I thought about how I'm not the person I was when I wrote that note 12 months ago, I'm way more tired. I took my time pulling the light strings out so they didn't break. I cursed the bushes that are like safari thick and impossible to get through to staple gun to the roof. I dawdled. The trees had pretty light in them. So I stopped to look at them in the dapply sun. I wandered over to where I could look up and only see trees. I hung a few lights and then I smelled some roses. I noticed that even though Lou has been needing 24 hour care and the cost is so huge, his yard is still Hearst Castle manicured. His house is freshly painted. Everything in his yard is growing abundantly and neatly trimmed. The only mess in his yard is my ripped bags.
I get back slowly to stringing the lights expecting every staple gun staple to pierce the string and electrocute me. I get carefully on a ladder. I finish the job like I've done every year but this year I feel tugged, like time is pooling around my ankles, I wish there was a ladder that climbed me out of that rushing time river. I feel the gravity of things beckoning.
But then I go into Lou's and he's in bed under cozy comforters, and my neighbor is his butler right now, getting him breakfast like Mr. French on Family Affair. Lou has no shirt on and maybe actually nothing on, but he is wearing his big Oklahoma hometown grin.
I sit with Lou and we just talk a bunch of shit, and he can't hold onto much after five minutes we sometimes tell the same stories, but it doesn't matter, in each new moment he is funny and vibrant and quotes Hamlet - he is the Oklahoma actordirector king of Burbank. He tells me when he was driving in a convertible with Robert Wagner one day Wagner said this might sound weird but I love you
and Lou said I love you more
and Wagner said ahhh but I love you better
I said was he a good guy and Lou said ah he was the best.
Lou held my hands and we talked about kids and moms being sick and moms dying and how he was with his mom when she died. He said she was the greatest mom. He said she had a plum tree and a squirrel was eating her juicy red plums and so he waited out there as a kid with his six shooter and finally shot the squirrel and he said momma didn't say a thing. She just skinned that squirrel and fried it up. Man, she was the greatest.
He talked about Peter Bogart, an AD we both knew and that I knew briefly a little more sordidly. Lou talked about how Peter wasn't really the greatest guy, advice from Lou back then that I never heeded but understood now. He said his father Paul was a terrific guy, a softer guy, a kind director. He said you gotta love the kind ones. You know the ones. You know the ones you don't always pick. Those ones. Am I right ladies.
Holding Lou's hands though, even if you pick the wrong ones and go down every possible frolicsome wrong path, you get some right ones, sometimes you wash ashore at some christmas lights that you don't wanna do and you end up laughing with an ancient naked director with memory issues who is one of the good ones, and who reminds you that you're one of the good ones too. I like when you can see beauty and worth in yourself. In your ripped bags. In the ability to climb down a ladder to seek out and find rich intense laughter. And belonging.
Anyway, then I came home to where I know my job and I like my job, loving my ailing mom, and when she saw me she (who has only so many words) said, smiling big, oh GOOD
We all give all we have don't we. I see it guys. I see what you're doing out there. It's not lost on me, all your effort and beauty in a sometimes seemingly silent movie world.
I was wheeling Mom out to bed and then this piece of furniture got delivered in a minivan from San Francisco by some people I didn't know. They were friends of my dad's cousin. His cousin had a hat stand that belonged to my dad's grandfather and grandmother, JBA and Hattie Mae. So Nathan, their great great grandson, helped load their ancient wooden hat stand from minivan to golf cart to ferry it to our house. This hat stand bench that they sat on to put on their shoes, and that they passed every day without thinking about, that they maybe saw when they were newly married in Arkansas and thought hey let's get that - let's get that for Nathan, our far off little great great grandson who we'll never even know who is carefully angling all our memories lodged in this hat stand wood, here to listen to our new voices added now.
I wrote my dad's cousin and said tell me the whole history of the family life lived around this hat stand so I can print it out and put in the bench seat box so the future can know how comforting it is to belong to something, and what it's like to have this tribe.
