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Apr. 27th, 2019 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseMy grandmother the actress is leaving soon. I was there last weekend, but she resurrected on Easter and ate a whole breakfast, so I came home. I'm crashingly busy and tired, but still battling the impulse to fling myself back on the South Shore and go back to her tonight. If the weather wasn't so dreadful I think I would, but it looks forbidding out there and no one needs to be driving late to pick me up. I'll go in the morning, belike.
So instead I'm sitting in my room crying and thinking about her, and if you all don't mind I'm going to share, because she was the most remarkable of the remarkable people I've met so far, and I don't think I'll ever meet her like again.
She was a woman of great achievement, but she didn't go out of her way to lift a finger. She was charismatic like a cat, would lie in wait for her moment to come and then shine out brilliantly. She never got up before 11 am if she could help it. I fucking honor her success in dodging the housewifely role, and her prioritization of her own creative idleness.
She was the womb of every holt, the refuge for every lost child and queer kid and washout in her world. She loved them with a perfect acceptance that could be maddening, it seemed so unsafe at times, but I fucking honor the purity of her spirit in that absolute and unconditional capacity to love. It was a thing I relied on; when I felt most defeated and repulsive, she was safe, because not only would she not chose to judge me, it would never occur to her to think of it in the first place. She might be the only person I've ever really believed loved me just for me, not for being good or clever or successful.
She told me, once, that she used to tell her kids at the Children's Theater that she was 14 years old. They'd ask her, a little old lady, how old she was, and she would say oh I'm 14. And they'd protest that no she wasn't, but she wouldn't crack and never gave them anything more. I have a hard time remembering how old she is in years, because I think of her as just 14. There's a picture of her at about that age she keeps framed; she tinted it herself, with a home kit, and her mother was snapping angry but she likes the way it turned out, you can tell.
She liked Peter Pan and Barack Obama and David Mamet. Peter Pan was the first play she ever saw at the Goodman here in Chicago. She told me I should marry the guy who plays the piano on Colbert's Late Show. I made her a recording of the Limberlost Swamp when I visited, Gene Stratton Porter was always her homegirl. One winter, I would have been 15 or 16, I bounced in excited to share a poet I'd found that semester, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she said oh Vincent, yes my girlfriends and I wore black armbands to school the day she died, we just idolized her. She liked the Nancy Savage biography a lot, it's one of the volumes she took with her into the nursing home.
Her politics were revolutionary to a degree I can only aspire to, sometimes a long way to my own left; she was a communist in the blacklisting days, a Brechtian to the core. She trained herself to lucid dream in the 80s but said it was boring and made her too tired. She gave me Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook as a college graduation gift.
I'm worried tonight about her little-girl spirit having to go on alone; but she's also got a powerful, unhurried, deliberate aspect. She's held back from crossing for a long time, more than a year; she keeps wanting to hang out and join the party, she's always loved a party. I'm hoping that that little-girl spirit feels like she can run off, just like going barefoot down the dunes. I know she was always a little shy in her body, never liked to romp and run wild, felt unsafe in her physical incarnation; but it's time to transcend now, Joey, you've got us all around you, always and forever touching and untouched. Grandfather on the other side, we'll make you a good safe bridge. Midnight Special coming for you, it's okay to get on and go
eta: on she went, a little after 3 this afternoon. blessed be
So instead I'm sitting in my room crying and thinking about her, and if you all don't mind I'm going to share, because she was the most remarkable of the remarkable people I've met so far, and I don't think I'll ever meet her like again.
She was a woman of great achievement, but she didn't go out of her way to lift a finger. She was charismatic like a cat, would lie in wait for her moment to come and then shine out brilliantly. She never got up before 11 am if she could help it. I fucking honor her success in dodging the housewifely role, and her prioritization of her own creative idleness.
She was the womb of every holt, the refuge for every lost child and queer kid and washout in her world. She loved them with a perfect acceptance that could be maddening, it seemed so unsafe at times, but I fucking honor the purity of her spirit in that absolute and unconditional capacity to love. It was a thing I relied on; when I felt most defeated and repulsive, she was safe, because not only would she not chose to judge me, it would never occur to her to think of it in the first place. She might be the only person I've ever really believed loved me just for me, not for being good or clever or successful.
She told me, once, that she used to tell her kids at the Children's Theater that she was 14 years old. They'd ask her, a little old lady, how old she was, and she would say oh I'm 14. And they'd protest that no she wasn't, but she wouldn't crack and never gave them anything more. I have a hard time remembering how old she is in years, because I think of her as just 14. There's a picture of her at about that age she keeps framed; she tinted it herself, with a home kit, and her mother was snapping angry but she likes the way it turned out, you can tell.
She liked Peter Pan and Barack Obama and David Mamet. Peter Pan was the first play she ever saw at the Goodman here in Chicago. She told me I should marry the guy who plays the piano on Colbert's Late Show. I made her a recording of the Limberlost Swamp when I visited, Gene Stratton Porter was always her homegirl. One winter, I would have been 15 or 16, I bounced in excited to share a poet I'd found that semester, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she said oh Vincent, yes my girlfriends and I wore black armbands to school the day she died, we just idolized her. She liked the Nancy Savage biography a lot, it's one of the volumes she took with her into the nursing home.
Her politics were revolutionary to a degree I can only aspire to, sometimes a long way to my own left; she was a communist in the blacklisting days, a Brechtian to the core. She trained herself to lucid dream in the 80s but said it was boring and made her too tired. She gave me Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook as a college graduation gift.
I'm worried tonight about her little-girl spirit having to go on alone; but she's also got a powerful, unhurried, deliberate aspect. She's held back from crossing for a long time, more than a year; she keeps wanting to hang out and join the party, she's always loved a party. I'm hoping that that little-girl spirit feels like she can run off, just like going barefoot down the dunes. I know she was always a little shy in her body, never liked to romp and run wild, felt unsafe in her physical incarnation; but it's time to transcend now, Joey, you've got us all around you, always and forever touching and untouched. Grandfather on the other side, we'll make you a good safe bridge. Midnight Special coming for you, it's okay to get on and go
eta: on she went, a little after 3 this afternoon. blessed be
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