Papa, how does Goldie work?
I don't know.
But you built her. How can you not know?
What she was in my hands, and what she is now, two different things.
But--
No buts. We could take her apart. Deconstruct her. Lay out all the pieces and examine them in the closest detail. Then lovingly put her back together. And still, Goldie is something other.
I don't understand.
Then work harder.
But--
No more questions!
"You know Von, I don't know to this day if he was teaching or just angry. And I'm not sure why it bothers me, all these years later that I don't know."
"Why do you suppose?"
"I don't know. Perhaps because I think he was angry. With me. At me. And, on certain days, I can't carry the thought."
"I know these thoughts."
"Yeah?"
"Like lead. Heavy. Poisonous."
6 comments:
An exchange that makes the blood freeze in its tracks: fear. The Beloved's mounting anger, don't know exactly why, afraid to know. Whatever it is, it's my fault.
Will there be a soon sequel, I wonder; seeking redemption, whether or not it is there.
Constance, I heard a man say recently that he knew his brother by five stories; and he wondered, what if those stories were not true.
I believe we only know facets of others and from these facets we weave a narrative. This post is a facet. One of Papa, another of Kyra and a third of Von and perhaps a fourth of the object Von implies. I don't know if we will see another tile of the mosaic laid sequentially here. Probably not. But I make no promises.
What I like about this chapter is the tension we see within Kyra as she tries to hold, unable to let go, of a 'facet' of Papa that seems not to fit her narrative; yet, she is a first-hand witness and cannot deny the event. Still, there is the questioning, the lame attempt at rationalization that even she can't buy. So there is this muddiness, the kind we all live with, that we all all are.
This is a wonderful post for so many reasons.
Beautifully presented and a marked example of how ingeniously multifaceted your writing often is, provoking considerations that can be wide apart in substance. Encompassing words battle to stand as header, as soon as one stands, another inches its way into the position. Exciting wins at this moment for the undeniable trait forever present within your writing is the great gift of honing, of the kind of simplicity that only the greatest of expressors know how to achieve, of suggestiveness and being able to write without words. It seems your work to me will forever be a tree, rooted and reaching, alive and growing, an endless array of branches. Any one of them might exceed a lifetime were one to explore in full. The wonder is in standing at the stem, close enough to see the lines and markings in the bark, to turn ones face upward to where stem divides into boughs, framed only by the heavens, at that moment the single tree fills all of one's horizon. The thought/image that comes to me, when I read your posts is of bottle, the kind one associates with potions and such and I imagine, when I allow the images to continue playing that you might let one droplet fall from the bottle into a small ceramic dish over a tealight, the aroma flavouring, texturing, covering every word written within its haze. Nonsense of course, but as though you had bottled it, the words that flow from you is from the heart of us all, the essence of our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our desires. I read this post and it whispers to so many things within my soul, memories remembered, memories forgotten. I love what you wrote in your comment, in the way, for better or worse, truth or untruth, it speaks of how we come to know one another, what moments have defined us within the heart and mind of another. For the question, of the man with whom you spoke, for Kyra, the heart knows honesty, only the mind questions, and we forget that what might be true of yesterday, may not be true of today and something else entirely tomorrow. I've had but 2-3 minutes consecutively before the monitor this morning, thus I am sure the above is a series of first sentences placed one after another. I had no intention of writing the following originally, but prominence of this memory in Kyra, whatever Papa felt at the time and regardless of Kyra's interpretation and uncertainty about whether it was one thing or another, is testament to everything that we have learned about Papa, as a man and especially as a grandfather, one solitary memory outstanding amongst every other that she has of him, so 'out of character', so unusual, that even after having travelled the road to adulthood, she is uable to simply let it go.
Haven't had a chance to continue, so am posting as is, to start anew.
My own father was not a very likable person and he seemed to struggle to know what to do with a child, even his own. As a grandfather, I could see him making a second go at it, as if he knew he had blown his first shot and now he was going to make up for it. He treated the grandkids in a way, even to the very end, that he never treated his own. And I remember how it used to piss me off to no end.
As we know from The Story, Papa is somewhat estranged from his own son and there is a bitterness there, mainly from the son's view of his father's absence, of having chosen, so to speak, his vocation over his child. Papa has his regrets and I think part of the energy he pours into Kyra is a second wind. Just thinking out loud. So nice to see you commenting again.
I can point to many, many occasions when I felt so grateful for my father's treatment of Amber, but wondered, "Why didn't I get any of that if he has it to give?" Not my most admirable moments, but that's how it was.
Limes, I know the feeling. Doting on a grandchild is one thing; but to see a complete change of behavior and position is quite another--and the change is not universal, but rather very singular and I think this is where the pain resides and this is the territory so rich to explore, to look for where one gets stuck in ideas and images to the point where a 60 yo adult is still seen as a child by the parent. The joy of meeting a new friend, i think, is in part that they see us without any baggage, without any ideas of past failures and successes, without a narrative history.
I would like to be hugged for who I am, not for what I was or was not. Yet, so many in our lives treat us as the photographs in their minds. We are the football player from HS or the good little boy who made good grades and never got into trouble. I may have been those things at one point, a long, long time ago, but I am no more that today than the water I fished in on the river thirty years ago is the same water I'm fishing in today, name notwithstanding.
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