Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Family Travel / 26

No, let me start again. I made her into a cipher--Aunt Gale—hollowed out by age and grief and cancer. Certainly there was something unearthly about her. Something of the scarecrow, of the ghost, or of the angel.

What I’ve missed—forgive me I’m new at understanding—is her force. I would have sat with her sipping tea until the end of time. As it was, when she had delivered her message she relaxed entirely and her face lit up. “Now I can die!” she said.

She is Consolation. According to my dictionary, consolation is 1. a source of comfort. 2. a game for earlier losers. Either way, I’m not about to turn it down.

Consolation. Worn-out, forgetful, fragile. But real. Alive, dammit. My mother’s sister that I thought I’d never get to see again unless it was in the casket. Aunt Gale, in whose whisper I can still hear my mother’s voice. She came back to me. Came back and we are both alive.

Another word is grace. Small actions by fallible people. Small actions--on the force of them we mount a full-scale defense of the universe.

Aunt Gale came back. She has something to tell me.

Monday, October 30, 2006

Family Travel / 25

I asked my father once why Mom didn’t have an open casket funeral.

“She did,” Dad said. “The casket was closed the moment before you entered the room.”

My father had gotten into a fight with Aunt Gale. He said open; she said closed. Children should be protected, my aunt believed.

It’s with excuses like these that my mother ducks out on me. Refuses to answer questions or put in appearances.

Family Travel / 24

My mother recovered after many months but her pancreas had been damaged and she became severely diabetic.

She never spoke about her diabetes to me and was determined that I would never see her inject herself with insulin. In this, she succeeded.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Family Travel / 23

Time slipped, a little, and Aunt Gale began to tell me about the accident. When my mother was twelve she got hit by a car. Her father found her unconscious bleeding into the gravel and he, a kind and decent man, decided to do what any reasonable father would do in the situation: kill the driver.

Somebody knocked him out and father and daughter were taken off together to the hospital.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Family Travel / 22

I did see my Aunt Gale once, about a dozen years after my mother died, at Dawn’s funeral. Aunt Dawn fabulous in her casket. She’d been made up with lots of rouge in a gorgeous dress. She wouldn’t embarrass anyone now, with stumbling gait or garbled talk.

Aunt Gale looked gray and regretful; she hardly spoke to me. I couldn’t say much anyway, so strange was it to hear, in her polite dismissal, my mother’s voice.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Family Travel / 21

My mother’s family believes in hiding things. Sometimes entire people. I remember when I read in the Guinness Book of World Records about the world’s oldest mother. “What about Nana?” I said. Nana was eighty and had a very young daughter. Someone must have explained to me then that Aunt Dawn wasn’t really a child, she was mentally retarded.

I remember Dawn wobbling cheerfully through my elegant grandmother’s shadowy house. I don’t think she ever left it. When my grandmother became too ill, Dawn was taken away to the state hospital.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Family Travel / 20

My aunt told me that at the funeral she kept wanting to take my hand, but my uncle said it wasn’t her place. He said my brothers should hold my hand. Or my father. But she wanted to hold my hand herself.

I pitched a fit at the grave, I remember. Somebody told a joke and I was outraged.

I don't remember if anyone held my hand.

My aunt said, “I wanted to take your hand. I felt you were mine.”

Friday, October 20, 2006

Family Travel / 19

I remember my last visit, as a child, with Aunt Gail. I must have been nine. I’d spent the week in Maine where my aunt was a third grade teacher.

“What can I do?” I asked and she never ran out of answers. Storybooks and coloring books, cable TV and tidal pools, hermit crabs and what does that cloud look like to you?

Now it was the last afternoon and I was making pictures with graph paper and colored pencils.

The growl of my father’s diesel Rabbit. I swear I could hear that car coming from ten miles away.

I tried to explain I couldn’t possibly go with him. Not that day. Too much to do.

He’s standing there in some other language. The car’s running.

My aunt lets me go.

Monday, October 16, 2006


Family Travel / 18

For the record, my father is not a bad person. He just has no idea other people are real.

Family Travel / 17

For twenty five years after my mother died, my aunt had nothing to do with my family. She refused visits and did not answer letters. I still don’t know why.

Some possible reasons: my father in those days was a first-class bully, famed for tyranny and rages.

Six weeks after my mother died, my father announced his remarriage. He called up my mother’s mother--a bedridden woman who'd outlive my mother by less than a year--to ask for her blessing.

He didn’t end up getting married, but still--he’d pretty well blasted through his popularity.
Stories Available.

When nothing appears on this site for a long time, it generally means that I am working on stories. (Lately it seems to me that nothing is more interesting than trying to puzzle out a story.) If anyone is willing to be a reader for a new series of short stories, please send me an email. I will happily send a few.

Readers who offer suggestions will receive their choice of the following:
a) a sushi dinner
b) fellatio
c) eternal gratitude

Thank you always.

Respectfully,

G.S. Das

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector, Selected Cronicas, New Directions, 1984

I've recommended this book to several people and none of them have liked it. They were all wrong.

In the late Sixties an inspired newspaper editor turned to Lispector, Brazil's great experimental novelist, and said, essentially, "You're our genius. I'm gonna give you some space in the paper and you can do whatever the hell you want." She filled that space with these cronicas, a form peculiar to Brazil that includes intimate essays, sketches, complaints, aphorisms and meditations.

Lispector digs for truth with a determination I've rarely found in print. Reading "The Egg and the Chicken" I feel like I'm drawing extraordinarily close to what can never be said in words so that when she says something as simple and playful as "the chicken is the egg's disguise" I want to cheer.

This book is one of my all-time favorite train companions, perfect to dive into in spare moments and let Lispector's intimate voice jolt me into being more entirely alive.

from Selected Cronicas, page 9

YES

I said to a friend:
-- Life has always asked too much of me.
She replied:
-- But don't forget that you also ask too much of life.
That is true.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Family Travel / 16

God speaks to Aunt Lucy.

Some of the things God has to say are very perceptive.

“Don’t you know?” “Don’t you know?” Aunt Lucy intones from a cloud of menthol smoke. “You’re all leprechauns.”

(Nagusami 35) illustration by Akemi Shinohara.
See her work NOW at Fujimamas in Harajuku.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Family Travel / 15

Even if Aunt Gail did appear out of nowhere after 25 years, gentle as a ghost in the afternoon—I can’t very well ignore the rest of the family.

I have other aunts, after all, and no less noteworthy.

Aunt Lucy is my father’s sister. She spent most of her life in the state mental hospital. Now she lives in a halfway house but she always comes home for the holidays.

Aunt Lucy lost her mind half a century ago, her breasts and teeth more recently, and remains a singularly lovable person, body odor notwithstanding.

Aunt Lucy, who is admittedly a little musty, always wants a kiss, believes in lipstick and hand cream and menthol cigarettes. At holidays she could never sit still very long, she was up circumambulating the Thanksgiving feast, pausing to kiss our cheeks and mutter in our ears. . .

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Family Travel / 14

Every year my cousin’s husband sends out a ten page single-spaced Christmas letter of prodigious honesty. The year before last was particularly awful. There were three deaths, two of them sudden, there were cancers and surgeries with lingering complications, as well as knee injuries and a house fire that nearly got out of hand.

Then, in November, their beloved Golden Lab Muttlee died of kidney failure at age 10.

God. I couldn’t help it. I laughed until tears streamed from my eyes.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Family Travel / 13

The night before my mother’s funeral I insisted on going trick-or-treating. Doubtless no one was in the mood to refuse me anything.

I was a ghost.

I got so much candy I could hardly walk.

Family Travel / 12



I shared a room with the neighbor lady’s son. That night when the light was turned off I rolled over and told him, “My Mom died.”
He said, “Yeah, I know. My Mom told me.”
I remember lying there in the dark with my pal Chris and his cat with green eyes that shone in the dark and what I thought more than anything was that it was all incredibly interesting.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Family Travel / 11

The neighbor lady took me into her parlor, sat me on the white sofa used only for guests, and told me my mother was dead.
I cried. I did the math. This leaves Dad, I thought. And cried some more.
Then I went back to the TV room and watched Halloween specials. Raggedy Ann and Andy. Someone was saving Halloween.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Family Travel / 10

A pacemaker, the doctors said, but when they opened her up there wasn’t enough heart muscle left and so my mother died on the operating table.