life is an adventure

i spent six afternoon hours in a resort house twice the size of my own while vern golfed with his peers on dupont's dime. the views were fresh and clean. i was trumped by ornery vertical blinds and a riddle of steps. so, too, was owen. he napped. he batted the coiled door stop. i got a sunkist that now only reminds me of the three-hour gestational glucose test from the cooler. i read 'the glass castle'.

in college i would daydream in the shower about the shape my memoirs might take. how i might recognize the proper spot to stick a bookmark in it by way of a final period. being yet swept by the greatest of my family's trials and knowing there would be no happy resolution in the future, it was a challenge that perplexed and amused me. i gave my open-ended memoirs scented with pantene a title: 'blueberry'.

my brother and i often chat about how censored will be the stories we pass down. yet when we talk privately about those legacies we want to set free from our future, i always marvel in how one sibling's accounting of an event fills the gaps for the other's. a dark memory becomes opalescent in light. the left side of a frame is polished giving new harmony to the right. it ends with us. we have a pact. and we discuss how in ending it we can yet share with our children the honest totality and depth in color and sound of that which we've declared to be so. so. ended.

i would never compare ourselves to the walls'. in charm or tragedy. even so, it feels familiar, and especially so in this that the author said later in an interview:

I’m very close to my brother. He loves the book and was very supportive every step of the way. I showed him parts as I finished them because he has a steel trap memory and I wanted to make sure I remembered things correctly. It’s interesting, because we remembered the same events, but had different takes on them. For example, I think of the cheetah as being a gorgeous, powerful beast with rippling muscles. Brian said, “As I remember, that was as a sort mangy creature.” I ran that by Mom and she said, “It was both, but it wasn’t inside a cage. It was just walking around the zoo.” People remember the same things differently, and if Brian or my sisters had written the book, it would be entirely different.

when at 1 am we returned to our resort home after kabobs, cokes and a few rounds of 500 at the dupont house that evening, i stayed up two more hours to finish the piece. and i considered how jeannette's memoirs were bookmarked by the death of her dad.