Missing Pieces

Last night, I could have wept because my grandfather is dead. I can never go to him, sit with him again in his brown living room, with NASCAR on the TV. I can never ask him his side of the story. Who was he – to himself?

No one will tell me what he was to them. There are too many past hurts that they can’t get beyond. I cannot blame them; they suffered too much, too many memories piled up, and it would be more hurtful to them to break open those wounds again, just for the sake of my curiosity. They cannot tell me – and he so he is completely dead. I can never know him at all. He died when I was in tenth grade, and I am only mourning him now.

Back then, a teacher thought to console my grief. But there was no grief in me then – only anger and shame. He couldn’t understand. I only met my grandfather three times in my whole life. I didn’t know him, only vague allusions to the things he had done to hurt my mother, my grandmother. I only know the whispers that surround the story of his life, not the life itself. That’s worse than nothing.

And yet even the whispers are fascinating. Who was he? He was a logger; he had a bad leg from an accident working among the rolling logs. He couldn’t write his full name, only his initials. He was a hard bargainer; he had a violent temper. He set me to ride a giant plow-horse when I was only three years old; he drove a semi-automatic, back in the days when they still made such things.

If I understood him better, if I knew who he was, would it make me understand myself any better? Would the knowledge of him help me to know who I am? I don’t know how it could, yet I am afraid that the loss of that knowledge is somehow a loss of myself. That somehow, a part of the puzzle has been lost, and so can never be the way it might have been.

A Bear Day

Everyone has those times when it seems that one chore after another is the kind of thing that you'd rather put off so long that it doesn’t get done at all! When I get a stack of disagreeable errands that all have to be done about the same time (and there’s no getting out of them) I take what I call a Bear Day.

You know that old joke: Where does a 300 lb. grizzly bear sleep? Anywhere he wants to! I take it for my motto for the entire day. (Or at least as much of it as I can lay claim to.) If I want to sleep, then I sleep in. If I want to spend the day "hibernating," reading in bed, watching TV, and generally being pretty lazy, then that’s what I do! Natalie Goldberg talks about this as a necessary step in the writing life in Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind (though I’m pretty sure she doesn’t call them Bear Days!) She talks about how it is important to be balanced – and that means that sometimes, you don’t have to be productive. Its enough to just be.

Amazing things can happen when you claim a day for yourself once in a while. I never make myself write on these days, but I’m not a writer for nothin’. Sometimes, writing is all I want to do. The last time I had a Bear Day was on the Fourth of July, Independence Day. I thought it was a perfect time: I had the day off from school and work, but since it was only one day, in the middle of the week, I really couldn’t go anywhere. It might have been a disappointment, but I turned it into a Bear Day.

I brewed a pot of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table in my pajamas, and journaled for a while about what independence meant to me, what I felt I had gained independence from. I moved into the living room to read for a while, then came back to write for another couple hours. In the evening, I watched a video I had rented the night before in preparation for my Bear Day. (You don’t want to run errands and pick out movies on your Bear Day!) The movie reminded me of an old friend, and I wrote an Unsent Letter to him. At the end of the day, I was astonished to find that I had written ten pages – on a day that I wasn’t going to make myself write at all! Sometimes just knowing you have the freedom not to do a thing helps you to be able to do it.

When was the last time you gave yourself a Bear Day – and freed the writer in you to be lazy, kick back, and dream?