I am at the library after milling about on Broadway. I noticed a LinkNYC device with part of its cover removed. I thought it had just slipped off on its own but then I noticed an individual nearby talking on his cell phone and then taking pictures of the Link device. He appeared to be a contractor, and his partner was in a van nearby. Side of the van said ALLIANCE FIELD SOLUTIONS. One of the guys appeared exasperated about something but I did not listen in on his conversation.

Funny how he chose to use his cell phone and not the Link device to make his phone call.

A little later I saw the same two guys further up on Broadway, doing the same thing with the Link at 29th Street. Just taking pictures of it and letting the device’s innards show by taking part of the cover off.

Nothing to see there, I don’t guess. Just two of the reported hundreds of jobs created by LinkNYC. Hah.

…

The folks at the Hour Children shop were unloading a monster “donation” earlier. I put that in quotes because I think their acquisition of some things is not so much a donation but what amounts to junk removal or clearing out the houses of the dead. Whoever owned these couches and boxes of dolls  likely had no say in where the stuff went upon their passing.

I remember my mother once saying that she wanted her mother’s stuff to be taken care of and distributed among the family. She specifically added that “she (meaning her mother) would be horrified to know that the neighbors just came in here and picked through her stuff.” I don’t know if my mother was aware of this but that is exactly what happened. A handful of items from her mother’s apartment made it to our house but a majority o the stuff was just left there for the neighbors to scavenge. That was something of a morbid ritual at that apartment building, which housed nothing but retirees. People died every day, it seemed, and every day thus brought a new batch of free shit for the living to pick through.

I can’t remember now the details of how it came to pass that my mother’s mother’s stuff was left up for grabs like that. It might have been my fault, but I seem to remember it being something that just kind of slipped through the cracks. It was, explicitly, not supposed to happen like that. But it did.

My friend Pete helped me clear out a portion of the stuff from that apartment. I forgot about that night until just this moment. I evolved over the course of those few hours into a bossy, order-barking commander.

In one of the kitchen drawers I found a nice pair of scissors. I fawned over the scissors just a little too long, and Pete grabbed the opportunity to mimic me saying ”Nice pair of scissors!” Everybody laughed at this when we brought those nice scissors home. That nice pair of scissors might still be at the house in Tampa all these years later.

I don’t remember now if Pete was there when I found the “HATE-GRAM”. If he was present I likely would have avoided showing it to him. It was a handwritten note from my grandmother to herself. Have I written about this here before? Well, if so, here it is again. The note started by saying she had heard someone on television say that it was healthy to write down on paper all the things you hate in life, and the things that make you angry. So with that my grandmother wrote about what a disappointment as a daughter and what a horrible human being my mother was. It was nasty and, as far as I could tell, completely untrue. But now I don’t remember every word as clearly as I might have 30 years ago, which is approximately when this happened. It made me sick to read this stuff but, to possibly give the therapeutic value of it some credit, I noticed that after a couple of days of filling page  after page with this stuff she could barely summon more than a couple of sentences.

Months later, when I was back at college, I called my sister and told her about the hate gram. I had kept it. I never read the entire content of the note to my sister but she got the idea. We decided I would destroy it, and that is what I did. I held the phone to the paper so she could hear me ripping it to shreds. It was a strange but cathartic little ritual. I guess it’s not a ritual if you only do it once, but it had a ritualistic feeling to it.

Funny thing was that in that garbage can into which I dropped the torn remains of that note I found something more interesting. A pornographic magazine the cover of which read “CORN HOLIN’ LESBO SLUTS!” That little item became quite the fascination at the dormitory.

My grandmother truly does seem to have been a loathsome person, as evidenced by the emotional and family carnage in her wake. My mother was the last person on earth who still wanted anything to do with her, and my aunt (my mother’s sister) would later fill in a lot of the blanks as far as who their mother alienated and how. My aunt’s advice to my mother regarding how to cope with their mother’s death was to just “put it behind you” and “don’t ever make a mistake like that again.” The “mistake” was simply letting that woman back into her life.

My aunt always seemed to have the freshest, most unassailable perspective on these things. But I wonder about her feelings regarding her and my mother’s father. She seemed to consider him an equally loathsome excuse for a human being, a sentiment which showed itself sometime in the 1980s when she answered the phone and it was him. She hung up. It was the first contact from him in decades.

He and Gladys (my grandmother) had been divorced at a time when such proceedings were rare. I don’t think I ever saw the paperwork but my mother described it as acrimonious and nasty.

When my mother died the death certificate had a spot for the deceased’s father’s name. It said “UNKNOWN”. It is true. We never knew his name. Among the few words my mother ever said about him were that he sang songs in the kitchen when he made breakfast. It was actually a nice memory, one which came about in one of those conversations of the “son now that you’re grown there are a few things about the family you ought to know” genre. She missed having him in her life, missed having a father.

In that same conversation I remember how her voice changed when she talked about her father. It was almost like the cooing of an owl.

However my mother felt about grandmother after she died I remember that Christmas when grandmother gave her a set of tiny bread tins. My mother reacted to this gift like she was 8 years old, stomping her feet and relentlessly repeating “this is the best Christmas present ever.” I remember my sister looking slightly miffed at hearing this, perhaps thinking her gifts were actually the best ever. I don’t know what connection between my mother and grandmother made that gift so spectacular  but it seemed to have been just the perfect thing.

On an anniversary of her mother’s death I remember my mother taking those little bread tins out and baking several little loafs of bread. Her demeanor was not it normal calm self. She was almost giddy, happy to have those bread tins.

If I could challenge my aunt on her comments about her father it might be to simply ask if his actions were not at least somewhere within reason given what a nasty woman his wife was. But now that I articulate that question I think she had her point. Her father abandoned the kids altogether, and that’s not acceptable. It seems she had other grievances with him.

Yeah.

I mean, No.

Why am I thinking about this? Aha, stream of consciousness from the Hour Children people dancing with the jackpot of the possessions of the dead.

I did find the guy’s name a couple of years ago (my grandfather) through ancestry.com. I don’t even remember it now. But I remember looking at the census record from 1940, listing the husband wife, and I think there were 4 kids. I looked for the street address on Streetview but I think all I came up with was a shopping center.

I remember looking at those lines in the census and thinking “There’s a little window into the life of an unhappy family.”

…

p.s.: I woke up screaming three nights in a row. There was a herd of buffalo coming right at me and I had nowhere to hide. I was standing under some flimsy little structure, looking for a boulder to hide behind. Same damn dream, three nights now.