February 24, 2006
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The reason why I love my fellow humans is that we are such complex animals. I wrote the following prose for my great-grandpa. And the sweetness that I write with in no way betrays the anger that I lashed out with in my previous entry: I am capable of feeling both tenderhearted and disgusted at my great grandpa, just as he was capable of being both a monster and an innocent. And so, to embrace the wholeness of humanity, the complex landscape of the human heart, I’ll share with you what I wrote:
Lines
When I think of my great grandpa, I see him standing in a glorious garden, ripe and pulsing with life. His skin is the soft palor of beeswax, rife with thick lines that trace the squints and smiles of countless sundrenched summers past. He wears jean overalls, a straw hat, and thick, square glasses. His eyes are green and they look like grandma’s; they look like mine.
“Why there you is True Boo,” he says. His laugh is a fishtail slapping water, a cricket cricking. He lets me pick cherry tomatoes from the vine and when I bite down on them with my baby teeth they are warm and cooked from the sun.
For the longest time, my cousin and I thought his name was “Lines,” perplexed by the Alabaman pronounciation of his name. “It’s not “lines,” it’s Lines,” great-grandma told us. The giddy girls that we were, we wanted this phrase repeated–an endless chant, a brazen billboard: IT’S NOT “LINES,” IT’S LINES!
Later, when a decent grasp on American venacular set in, I understood my great grandpa’s name was Lawrence. But the Michigander sound of the name reverberating from my nasal cavity sounds unfitting, untrue. He is Lines to me.
Lines who eats buttered biscuts and chocolate pudding pie. Lines who wears gray polyester suits to Sunday service. Lines who cans his own fruit, who knows the names of the birds who drink from his feeder.
He is Lines to me.
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When have you reckoned with a particuarly complex relationship?
Comments (2)
I think you accurately point out that people are complicated. All relationships are complex on some level … although there is no relationship in my life that even remotely compares to this. So I won’t even try. I’ll just appreciate how well you’ve expressed such a complex sentiment.
At different points in my life I have had to reckon with the relationships I have with both of my parents. They are very complicated. I keep feeling like the difficult part should be over already and they can just be the way that I want them to be now that I am older, which obviously is not the way of things. I have a lot of resentment towards both of them, for different reasons and do my best to accept them as people instead of what I expect them to be in their role as my parents. I’ve found that it is hard to be compassionate and forgiving – or at least accepting – when the patterns are repeated and I feel as though I’m dealing with the same stuff I was ten or twenty years ago.
My name is Erika, by the way. Glad to meet your acquaintance.