Tag: family

546: “Your Grandma Made That Quilt” (R. Kikuo Johnson)

                “Hold on, bud, your grandma made that quilt…” – R. Kikuo Johnson, No One Else, p. 96

                What work did I do today?
                Some emails, yes. There are always more of those. Some writing toward one research project, some reading toward another. A couple phone calls. More emails. Teaching a long seminar, and last preparations before it, and notes afterward on how I might lead it differently next time. Follow up emails from participants’ questions. And washing an apple, cutting it for my beloved on the cutting board they got me, arranging the slices in a wave around some peanut butter. A snack for partway through a busy afternoon.
                The systems around me keep insisting that work is what I do for payment. In the face of that noise, R. Kikuo Johnson’s No One Else paints with all the hidden, submerged work of families, communities, overlapping lives. At the heart of the book is all the years a woman spends caretaking her elderly father. After the first page, we never see that. Not directly. We feel it: a kind of haunting inside the pages, inside the house’s walls. We hear it mentioned once. We see so little of the grandmother’s and grandfather’s work in shaping the world their family lives in, so little of the kid’s work in trying to care for his mother as she cares for her father. It hurts, all this work that goes unread. And it lifts up lives like sap lifts the leaves of a tree the kid stares into, searching for his lost cat. 
                He finds the cat. It snuggles in his lap. No One Else turns me toward all the work that goes into an ongoing moment, and suggests that seeing might mean opening to what’s outside the frame.

by Azlan

543: “Willful Forgetting” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Of course we all engage in willful forgetting all the time […] If we get a new phone number, for example, the old phone number must be forgotten or else its retention will keep rewriting the new one. Learning in fact is part memorization and part forgetting, part accumulation and part erasure.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 83

                Two days ago my love and I were at the coast, listening to the water on the rocks, the murmur and wash of the waves. Long slow dances of gravity, motion, erosion. My love said, “I love the sound,” and we stood waist deep, listening.
                Earlier that day we played Pokémon Go. It’s a game of accumulation: just now my character’s carrying 2,780 pokémon. It’s a game that, like so many of the capitalist productivity narratives I’m enmeshed in, keeps promising more, and better, and hold onto this. One of the reasons Pokémon Go keeps appealing to me is that it promises that you can catch everything, have everything, hold onto everything, level everything up. Though of course, that isn’t really what I want at all. Or rather that’s one way I’ve been taught to want, but it’s not the only one, or even the one I most often choose.
                The light played in the water. The water washed among the rocks. Of course learning—being—loving—take time. I usually think they take time because of the hours that go into love unfolding. Into learning sinking in, like water into earth. Into being. Re-reading Halberstam, I think they also take time because of the uncounted ebb/flow in which ideas wash away, get lost, mingle back into subconscious and beyond before rising up in different patterns. A wave. A sound of rock and water. I let myself forget to post this yesterday, as I sat and laughed and talked with the part of my family that is close by. This morning I sit and forget the distance between me and other parts of my family who are far off, and for a moment I forget all the miles between, like we’re looking at the clouds together. I wonder: how often do we find our way to our loves and our families, in part, by letting some things slip away?

by Azlan

539: “A Good Recipe” (Lara Pickle)

                “Oh, I love a good recipe!” -Lara Pickle, I Feel Awful, Thanks, p. 11

                Yesterday my partner and I and another friend were over at Hannah’s apartment, making dinner and chatting, chatting and playing games. Hannah moves in January. At the beginning of the night they gestured at their book shelf. “I won’t have space to take those with me. You all should pick what you want.” We felt sad, I think. A reminder of our friend moving away. Repainting the beautiful pink wall of their livingroom with something more common and driving off to another state. And we felt excited. We love books, carrots were roasting in the oven, and Hannah had already made fruit pie. Later that night Hannah said, “I like how books come into your life like pieces of you, and then you give them to friends. Like pieces of them.” I didn’t know how to say that warms my heart. I took a little stack including Lara Pickle’s I Feel Awful, Thanks. 
                Last night for dinner I made cranberry sauce. It’s the time of year where I make that, washing the cranberries, going through them one by one to pick out the ones that are already brown. So it’s the time of year when I remember that I never remember my mother’s cranberry sauce recipe. Much, much less sugar. Much more red chili flakes, ginger, and orange juice. Maybe I don’t remember the recipe because my mom doesn’t really have a recipe. I always reach out and chat with her. We talk about how we’re doing, and I ask about the sauce, and my mom says you can make it lots of ways. Spices are good. She likes red chili flakes. Fresh ginger. Orange juice. Maybe that’s my favorite kind of recipe. Add a book gifted from a friend. Add a livingroom wall, hand painted and still bright pink. Add friends on a winter evening. Add chatting. Add cranberries. Add time. Heat, sir, and let sit.

by Azlan

536: What “I’m Asking” (Tochi Onyebuchi)

“Hell yeah, I’m lost. More lost than I’ve ever been in my damn life.”
“I don’t have the answer you’re looking for.”
“Answer? I don’t even know what question I’m asking anymore.”
“But you’re still asking it. That is the important part. That is always the most important part.”
                -Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season, p. 178

                I just got back from a walk with my mom. Well, my mom’s some thousands of miles away, actually, so what I had with me as today’s 68 degrees dropped toward tonight’s 36 was my jacket and my phone and her voice, walking along with me. And the blowing leaves. And the shadows of someone else at the park, also talking to someone on their phone. And the trees, the clear skies, the moon. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.
                I’ve lived far away from my family since I was seventeen. For whatever reason, this year’s been especially hard. There are probably several good reasons for that, but instead of trying to lay them out, I’m thinking about the leaves that swirled by with our voices on the evening wind, and the little chill in my fingers, almost pleasant, that’s drifting away now that I’m warming up inside. I think years ago I started wondering what happens if I turn less toward answers. (I know I miss you). I think, these days, I’m also letting go of questions. (What can we say to connect?). Or some of them, at least. There are still the questions that we can’t put into words, and whatever is between and through the questions. The rustling leaves. The wind. Someone else on the phone, talking to their loved one. The branches drawing pictures in the sky. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.

by Azlan

534: “Much Together” (D’Arcy McNickle)

                “Even then, it seemed, they said but little to each other, yet nothing went unsaid that needed saying.
                In those days they were much together.”
                -D’Arcy McNickle The Surrounded

                My sibling’s visiting for a week. In the kitchen just now, actually, baking bread. Ten minutes ago we were lounging on the couch together. Earlier today we were walking beneath sycamores. (I love sycamores: the patterned bark, the broad leaves, the nobby branches like fairytale walking sticks or heretale hands waving hello). I think I feel a pressure, when I get to see a loved one again after a long time apart, to try and say everything. To talk it all out: the catching up, the reorienting, the worrying, hoping, planning, sharing. And I really do like talking. I am, I think most of my loved ones would agree, a talker. But I’ve also been sitting—or walking—with the limitations of all that saying. The saying (for me) can be a way of trying to undo the distance we also live in, our lives growing in different places. It works in some ways, and in some ways it doesn’t. More than words, what I want is our connections. And when we also live far apart, when we are together, I want that time together. Here is still a distance, not undone but not all-doing. And here’s our closeness. And here are these walks beneath the sycamores, shared steps, shared stillnesses. We are much together.

by Azlan

523: “Comes Back” (Hap Palmer)

                “Sitting in a high chair, big chair, my chair, sittin’ in a high chair, bang my spoon!
                -Hap Palmer, “Sittin’ in a High Chair”

                “She always comes back, she never would forget me…”
                -Hap Palmer, “My Mommy Comes Back”

                This week I’ve been showing my beloved Maria José some of the places where I grew up. 
                The path outside my dad’s house, grassy now and scattered with dry pine needles, but deep with snow midwinter when I’m 9, stepping outside to help him shovel. 
                The pier at the lake where we jumped in, the cool dark breaking open to hold us.
                The beach where, at 16, I built a warm, dry little driftwood house with my best friend.
                The pool where my mom held me in the water, and later I learned to swim, somewhere back before my memory of years and ages.
                The hills where I watched tadpoles and frogs, always unsure how one becomes the other, already waist deep in the wonder of mud and algae. 
                Tonight, inside after these places, we listened to songs I remember from before I remember. I’m struck by how lush and joyous such childhood tastes of the world could be. Worlds so full of flavor. I sit with how scary, how sad, these tastes could be. I was a kid sometimes so lost. And grounding. A little more than a year after our wedding, it’s a delight to be sharing these children we were, these delights and uncertainties we’re rooted in, these places we grow.

by Azlan

520: “I hold onto her foot” (Louise Erdrich)

                “Sometimes I look at men, at the way most of them move so freely in the world, without a baby attached, and it seems to me very strange. Sometimes it is enviable. Mostly, it is not. For at night, as she curls up or sprawls next to me and as I fall asleep, I hold onto her foot. This is as much for my comfort as to make sure that she doesn’t fall off the bed. As I’m drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way, holding onto her baby’s foot. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books.”
                -Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, p. 53.

                For the last several nights I’ve been having pretty intense nightmares. And when I do, when I wake up at two and three in the morning, my thoughts spinning in ways I don’t know how to sit with, I reach out and hold my beloved’s hands. Or wrist. Or shoulder. Sometimes knee, if we’re all puzzled on the bed. It varies, like the sense of love and peace and connection varies, and it also flows along to a related touch.
                Perhaps that’s different from what Erdrich is describing here. I also remember holding my little sibling when they were one and falling asleep. Or holding my brother’s children when they were infants, and older, remember their small limb nestled in my hand. Dreaming. I remember being a place where they could sleep and dream. In another way, I think I remember and still feel my own small wrist or ankle or arm held in someone’s caring hands. My mother’s. Father’s. A family friend’s, which means family.
                A lot of my cultural training emphasizes freedom as being not responsible for others, as being free of other people, to choose and do as you want. Whether or not you want to call that freedom, that’s not what I’m seeking. I don’t think I know anyone who’s been made happier or more vibrant in spirit because of such lack of responsibility. And I know too many people who are sadder or lost or frightened from searching for it. So I want to be held, to reach out, to be holding.

by Azlan

516: “Emphasis on Personality” (Chana Porter)

                “Trina moved into performance, both sound and video, involving her own body in the practice. She got a little bit famous and had some minor love affairs, made Deeba proud of her celebrity wife. Then she got bored of the art world; of its pageantry, its emphasis on personality.”
-Chana Porter, The Seep, p. 14

                Almost a decade ago (wow! Time sure washes along) I wrote about Julie Lythcott-Haims and the way passions are commodified into something we have to find—and perhaps sell. Six months ago my partner and I read Chana Porter’s The Seep. And I laid in bed, wondering if cults of individuality lead in part to this dead-end emphasis on personality.
                These days that’s often staged on social media: the influencer’s brand, and how whatever else they’re selling—investment software or skincare serums—they’re selling them. Their energy, fast and larger than life, homey and honest. I think it long predates social media: think of Hollywood stars. Think of celebrity artists. Think of politicians. Think of me, a teacher, told to develop my “teacher persona” and consolidate it into something authoritative and approachable and boundaried and wise and easy to understand and consumable. If individuals are so important, the most important thing around, then a distinct personality has to mean something.
                For me, I think, it means very little. I’ve been reading Moses Ose Utomi’s novellas, but I don’t think it’s his personality that I love. In part it’s the way his imagined world pulls at, reveals, and complicates the world I imagine to be true. In part its the sensory rhythm of sounds. And in person—well, is it really my friend’s personality I’m drawn to, the performance of a particular self? I think it’s more specific: this conversation. This walk together. This game. And more general: this shared gentle silence in which we care for each other. It’s at once more action and more being, and less a pageantry of self.

by Azlan

509: “Become Slow” (Thích Nhất Hạnh)

                “Breathing in, I notice that my in-breath has become deep. 
                Breathing out, I notice that my out-breath has become slow. 
                Deep, slow. 
                Enjoy.”
                -Thích Nhất Hạnh, in this guided meditation

                A long time ago, in trying to help her two kids stay calm and engaged on long car rides, my mom brought along cassette tapes of guided meditations from Thích Nhất Hạnh. I don’t think I remember them. But I absolutely remember being told how much we objected to them. It’s part of our family lore: my mom puts in the tape, and then young voices from the backseat are shouting no, no, we don’t want this tape, turn it off.
                All that makes me smile. Perhaps because, one, as life goes along I connect more and more with my mom, trying to support her kids as they shout back nos (which she listened to, by the way—turning off the tape, though I think she tried again after a while). And two, because I recognize the love in it, the love that tries and struggles and offers and sometimes doesn’t go how you expected (and keeps trying). And three, because my partner and I just shared the Thích Nhất Hạnh guided meditation linked above. Listening to his voice—I was wrong, I do remember it, as we remember childhood before the actions and images of storied memory—I enjoy breathing. Enjoy it like leaves drinking in the sun. Enjoy it as lungs sipping at the sky.
                Breathing in, I notice that my in-breath has become deep. 
                Breathing out, I notice that my out-breath has become slow. 
                Deep, slow. 
                Enjoy.
                I love how some seeds take a long time to grow.

by Azlan

506: “Mi Vida Les Agobia” (Alaska y Dinarama)

“Mi vida les agobia
¿Por qué será?”
[My life overwhelms them—
And why is that?]
                -Alaska y Dinarama, “A Quien Le Importa”

                My love and I have been watching La Casa de las Flores (The House of Flowers), mostly because it’s so much wild fun, and so good to lie down and snuggle at the end of the day. Last night the third episode finished with my favorite scene so far. A young man coming out to his family takes advice from a queer performer, and so sings his coming out. But (as his sisters remind us, when he stands up to start) he’s no singer. The show’s filming blends from the awkward, uncertain beginning of his song to a color-washed version of the same performance, the young man shifting from hesitating to alight. From awkward to alive. And then we go back to the first, reserved version. The bright version was “in his head,” you might say. (In that version both his parents are joyful, supportive). Or maybe we were seeing for a little while with our hearts and our hopes and our delights.
                I love when art blends these two: a world “a camera might capture,” you could say (though it’s not that simple), and a world inside. Blends them, and shows how interconnected they are. Last year I learned that broadleaf plantains are edible, and so these days I walk around the neighborhood, and where before I saw weeds, weeds, weeds, I see foods, salads, delights.

by Azlan