When we were kids my Grandmother used to send us looking for rocks for this rock garden she was going to create in the back yard. I can't recall ever seeing my Grandmother do more than receive and water plants, nor did she ever create a rock garden. As a kid my fathers mother could do no wrong as an adult I think for her, watching us collect her rocks might have been something like a small scale version of the Egyptians and the slaves. She didn't treat us badly, she simply manipulated us into thinking we were building something beautiful. The rocks were probably still in the corner of the yard in milk crates when she sold that house.The lessons I learned from the Queen of Cards, heavy as those rocks but in their own way far more beautiful than any garden. She was poison dressed in chocolate, the dark kind, bitter and sweet, and dark as night. She was a lovely kind of cruel and like anyone I have my doubts that any 2 people really knew her the same. While she was dying I went through every picture book I could find, among the hundreds of old pictures I barely found ten where she was smiling, really smiling, before retirement. Even when she did start smiling, somewhere around 45 or 50 and the majority of those pictures where she is smiling, she was anywhere but here.
I've done so much of my smiling here and a little there and a whole lot of everywhere. I have so much smiling left to go and I wonder so many things about what my pictures will say to whoever goes through them when I die. I hope whoever gets that job gets a kick out of it all and I hope they knew me, all of me. Some where in the future there is someone who knows me inside and out, who I've told all of myself to and who will be there to go through the rough spots with me. My Grandmother was a few different people, to a few different people and to each she gave and was a different part of all of her.
Over these past few weeks of doctors appointments and politics and employment changes and just plain living, I've been forgetting and re-living and realizing so many new things about who I am and what I've come from. I'm not sure of anything but I am sure Its time to grow up. Not become some one else or anything, just a more adult version of myself, this will be an interesting ride, a strange new internal adventure. No one really knows how and when this adulthood and appointments and politics and money making really became the cornerstones of their lives. I submit that for some of us those stones were always there, for others of us they were a long time coming or a short time coming but we got there and for a few they will never be there.
A year from now I have goals and like all the ones that came before, I have no idea where they'll lead me. For the first time in a long time, I have goals, the broken winged dreams are flyin around again and makin a ruckus. For the second time in a lifetime I am ready to start checking things off of my list. Debts paid, lets do this, stay in the same home for a while, ok sure lets do that too, Money in savings, Car paid off, I'd love too. Work out every day, eat healthy be healthy, LIVE, hell yea, great idea. None of these goals are impossible, none of them outlandish or radical. They're reasonable, possibly even rational, maybe not so simple but all attainable.I am many different people, too many different people, but eventually I always get where I'm going. I smile because I love the people in my life, I smile because I'm taking a mental picture of the beautiful moments that are my life, and I smile because it confuses the hell out of strangers and friends alike. I am not always smiling and to some, I'm never smiling but to those who know me, really know me, I am exactly who I always was.
Who the fuck are you?
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