I hate sentimentality. I really do. Nothing is worse than burying yourself in the icky funk from opening up old birthday cards. It’s a kind of romantic induced memory mining that reduces a human being built of memories into a collector of their own past.
But laying on that couch I was unable to escape the glue-like force that sentimentality yields. Soaking me in the realization that I would not see my grandparents again. There would be no other special occasions to draw me back, except for the single inexorable event that would have me drowned further into the bottomless pull of that short itchy gray couch.
But laying on that couch I was unable to escape the glue-like force that sentimentality yields. Soaking me in the realization that I would not see my grandparents again. There would be no other special occasions to draw me back, except for the single inexorable event that would have me drowned further into the bottomless pull of that short itchy gray couch.
Its impossible to resist that force at the death bed of a loved one, or at the door steps of a foreclosed childhood home. The juicy center of the human brain in those places whips and grasps wildly at any memory to summon a sense of closure. At that moment we are desperate beings like that cartoon coyote prolonging his grand collapse into that hollowed canyon.
We woke up early, sometime before seven o clock and my grandfather was already up preparing for our departure. We had to leave early enough to get to my afternoon job, so we were hustled out at the break of dawn. My grandfather helped us pack up and gave us a cleverly simple drawing depicting how to escape Broken Arrow. No clumsy print-outs for us. My grandmother was saddened by our departure, but only mentioned how much fun my childhood visits were.A feeble shrinking man, my grandfather put his hand out for goodbye. I had been secretly staring at him the entire trip. I felt ill and saddened by his state of frailty, his eye were starting to sink in, so you could stare into the corners of his sockets, and his clothes laid on him like an under stuffed scarecrow. But as his hand clasp around mine it was as an iron vise rapped around my soft pudgy digits. Ouch! Coddling my hand we hopped into the car and drove off. With the two of them waving behind their screen door, we waved back and drove off into blue hue of the early morning.
