On and On

Still in Sudbury, still staying with my parents, still existing in alterna-universe where most of the people I encounter have known me since birth but not so much over the past twenty years, causing me to feel like a not quite amalgamated hybrid of a number of my former selves.

Not to mention that being here, as is true to a lesser extent of being anywhere outside one's regular stomping grounds, makes me think differently, think about different things. Tonight, I took the girls over to my grandmother's house up the street to make a guest appearance at the weekly "Knitting Group" held in my grandmother's kitchen. Although this started out as an actual knitting group, it eventually became yet another version of my mother's lifelong women's-only wine and cheese and talking get-togethers, as apparently nobody even bothers to bring their knitting anymore. 

Annika had not napped and was a mess in my arms, and although all of the women oohed and ahhed over her and Lily, as propriety required, I was so tense and exhausted that our stay could not have been very enjoyable for any of us. Except, my grandmother. As I sat at the table for a few brief minutes while Annika distracted herself with a plate of spaghetti, I drank a glass of wine as though it were a shot of tequila and contemplated my grandmother. She sat at the head of the table, and it was readily apparent to me, at least, that she could not hear a word being said. At one point I asked her a question, and she beamed and shook her head as though to say, "Oh, Amy," but this was just to acknowledge that she'd seen my lips move, to let me know she was glad I was there.

Two of the attendees were two of my mother's oldest friends, women who have known me since infancy. One was my parents' neighbor at their first apartment complex, where they lived when I was born; later, she was my fourth grade teacher, my sister's, too. I overheard her telling Lily at one point that I had been "a wonderful student, the kind of student who did 'extra,'" which I let slide under the circumstances, and that my sister had "brought all kinds of of household treasures into school every day," which I also let slide. At one point these two women had a rather intense discussion about how I was suddenly "much more like [my] father" than ever before. "Do that smile again," one said, "so I can show her," and I obliged, forcing a fake-feeling grin as Annika screamed in my arms, wiped tomato sauce on the arms of my sweater, Lily beside me poked holes in a strawberry, I searched the room for what must have been left of the bottle of wine.

And just before we left, I looked at my grandmother again, still smiling, still essentially deaf, holding a fork but not eating, feeling--I knew somehow--a partly subconscious sense of relief that life--continuous and choppy, wailing and wistful, messy and dishonest and heartfelt and true--was happening still in her kitchen. And that she was a part of it too.