It's Been a Strange Day

I thought about driving past the old house today and decided against it. Decided against it for the lack of people inside, the absence of the ivy that used to cover the lawn and bay window, the knowledge that I would never again enter and smell the must of old cloth or homemade spaghetti sauce again, never fish in the tiny pond in the backyard for frogs.

The old house I speak of is my Nana’s – or was my Nana’s before she grew too ill to live in it alone just a few years ago. I thought to drive by because I dreamt about her last night. Or perhaps I dreamt about her because I knew I would be driving through her old neighborhood today. Or maybe I’m trying to tell myself something.

I’m not quite sure.

But thinking about it brought back memories of all the Christmas Eves, crab feasts, and Redskins games spent gathered with family, crowded on plaid couches with my aunts and uncles or under dining room tables coloring with my cousins.

Made me think of sifting through trunks of antiques and clusters of memories, sitting crouched on the floor with my mom wiping dust off old photographs and tools, talking about her life as a child and the insignificance she sometimes felt. Talking until the shadows cast from the windowpanes grew long across the wooden floors.

Made me think about the water colors hanging in the downstairs foyer, the graceful lines stroked by a grandfather I never knew, stroked as he sat confined, dying of emphysema some thirty years ago.

My grandfather was in my dream last night too.

I saw he and Nana share a sideward glance at a soda shop in 1938, saw them stroking sandy feet at the beach summer of 1940 on their honeymoon, just a year before Pearl Harbor. But it was my Nana envisioning these things in my dream – not really me. I was just a spectator, somehow granted the honor of sharing in her nostalgia as she lay dying on a hospital bed in an empty, sterile room. She slept fitfully with a vague smile at her lips, dying not at all like she really did - sitting in her chair in nursing home, eyes closed gently with her head laid back to sleep, never to awake again.

She was happy in her dream – she and my grandfather Harvey. And as she dreamt she wondered, wondered what things would have been like had things stayed this way. What it would have been like had the war not sent things so awry. Had she not fallen in love with Ray, a boy she’d known since childhood, a man who'd married another only to find himself forever at Nana’s side – dying just two weeks before she in the nursing home room next door.

And I sometimes wonder too. Wonder what my grandfather would have been like - if I would have had the chance to meet him. If he would have cared more for my mother. And I wonder how my mom would be different. How I would be different.

But as it is I sit staring beyond my computer at a desk half covered with tales of thwarted love, Nana’s Bronte collection - mostly various copies of Emily’s Wuthering Heights.

And I sit thinking of Catherine and Heathcliff, my Nana and Ray. Sit thinking of the stories of the people surrounding all of them.

I’ve been sitting a while.



And I really don’t know how this story should end.