Saturday, January 7, 2012

Memory & narrative

This is 2012 and I have a personal trainer at the gym. Twice a week for 30-minute sessions. Thursday was our get-acquainted session. Liz is a nice young woman and good in the enthusiasm/cheery/friendly mode.

While I warmed up on the treadmill, she asked me about me, my interests, etc. Kind of like the dentist asking same while you have a mouthful of gauze. I talked, jobbed and puffed, watched by Liz's very bright blue eyes.

I love to take walks, that was one of my interests for Liz. I got to explaining how Dad's mom would drag/march/accompany us kids all over D.C. when we were little. Not for the purpose of dragging or marching, but for pleasure and enrichment. Gram loved D.C. and she loved exposing her grand-kids to its treasures.

So few of the memories Grandma and Washington remain with me in full. So many years later, they are impressions.

A Marine band concert on a summer night.
The fountain of Mercury at the National Gallery.
The heart tree at the Library of Congress (we called it that because it had a scar in a heart shape).
The furniture at Gram's apartment at 215 C Street; the ladderback, cane-seat chairs from (I think) Aunt Clara's house in St. Louis. The heavy jar of change she kept in a bureau drawer, which she brought out for us to count on every visit.

Such tiny fragments. I don't remember Gram's love, or attention, but I hang on to those fragments so I can keep telling that story; a story that has helped build who I am. Someday the story may become part of Brynne and Henry and Louis and Graham, and it will get distilled and changed again.

Another memory, prompted by my evening ritual of braiding my hair:

My mother's mother, in her 70s and 80s, with a thick grey coil of braid wrapped around her head. Watching her plait it, the coil pulled around front to her chest it was so long. I thought it was beautiful and I loved that she tied it off with a strand pulled from her brush, wrapped tightly around the end of the plait.

After GrandDad died, she cut it off, Mom says. It was too much to take care of. I don't remember that at all.

Carl & I went to "Laugh Out Loud" by the Second City comedy group Friday night. (Wow, the improv was impressive and funny! I cannot imagine thinking that fast on my feet.)

We had a nice dinner, went to the show and chatted briefly with friends afterwards. It was really a lovely evening; a date, something, like traveling, we have gotten away from in recent years.

On the way back to the car, I took this shot of a pop-up art installation on 6th Street. Fraley's Robot Repair.

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