this summer i wanna go to the drive-in and maybe bowling?
also still need to get my G1 but uhhhhhhhh
“Mind the corner where life’s road turn. You have remarkable power / which you not using like sonofabitch. For example, one way to get your name in”
Hello:
My grandmother said I have too many dressing gowns now, do you want one of them, and pulled this one out from her closet. I recognized it immediately. White with a blue geometric pattern, faded around the collar, wide sleeves, small stain near the left wrist. When I saw it I felt my memory light up like a switchboard. Hem brushing against the terracotta tiles of the kitchen up at Bethany while she bustled around, making breakfast. Tie around her waist while she drank a cup of tea at the wooden kitchen counter in Cobourg. Squeezing oranges in Florida. I had so many perfect, clear memories of her in this single piece of clothing and yet I had forgotten it entirely. You can’t hold everything in the front of your mind at once, but it lives in there somewhere, just waiting for you to trip across the right pattern. I said Oh my god okay but only if you’re sure and she said Be careful going down the stairs, it’s long. It came from the Hotel Okura in Japan, she said. They stayed there in the ‘70s, when she and my grandfather were travelling around the world to different countries on some assignment to research off-track betting. We went to Australia, she said, and there were all these little old ladies with their knitting, just sitting there watching the horses.
Every time she opens her bedroom closet to try and give me something, there’s this thing that makes me laugh: she keeps her old Kermit the Frog doll on the top shelf, next to a box that says CAPES/EVENING TOPS in her handwriting, which is not like anyone else’s in the world. He’s just sitting there, grinning, watching over everything like a cartoon angel on the edge of a cloud. This time when I cracked up she did too. Does it make you think of Granddad? she asked. It did, it does. I said so. I have probably told you before about my grandmother’s VHS collection - how when I was a kid she’d go through the TV guide every week with a felt-tipped pen and underline anything that seemed worth recording, movies and baseball games and Poirot, then tape everything. She’d organize and label the tapes with different coloured stickers, genre-wise. There was a binder with an index so you could go to the shelf and easily find whatever you wanted to watch. She had the whole Muppet Show like that, from start to finish. Everyone loved it, but especially my grandfather. The last time we watched it together I was probably ten years old; we’d been talking about it on a car trip, and then we came home and spent the whole afternoon pulling out the tapes. I always wanted to skip over the musical numbers, which I think disappointed him, but he didn’t make me feel bad about it. Now I look them up late at night on YouTube when I can’t sleep. If I call it up I can see that living room so clearly, like all their living rooms before it: the translucent iMac, enormous dictionary on its stand, the law books on their shelves, the bowl of wooden eggs, the bowl of matchbooks, the National Geographics, the lamp you could turn on by pinching a fake plant leaf at its base.
I said to my grandmother: I keep thinking about whether I want to have kids. It’s bothering me a lot for some reason, even though I know I don’t need to decide right now. She said That’s none of my business and I said I know I’m just telling you in case you have any thoughts or whatever and she smiled for a second in spite of herself and then said You shouldn’t ever do anything you don’t want to do. Never. She was still in her twenties when they had their first child. They had just come back from England and she was nannying for her old boss’s child, living in their pool house up in the country. She said the child she was looking after had “developed a fascination with the toilet” and she spent all day trying to stop him from dropping things in there. Later she would go into the city and campaign with my granddad, throw up behind a parked car before going to knock on someone’s door. When they bought their first house she got down on her hands and knees and stripped the floors with steel wool before they moved in. I asked her Did you ever feel like everything was happening too fast and she said Oh I loved it. Plus with your grandfather I never really had a choice.
Every morning since the heart attack she has to take a blood pressure reading. Lately, she has realized she can lower the number by closing her eyes and walking through their old house in her mind. She imagines it like she’s just woken up in the morning: out of bed, down the stairs to the kitchen, unlatches the door, lets the dog out, lets the cat in. The place is so clear in her memory it stills her heart. No one taught my grandmother to do this. She’s always been someone who figures things out for herself, in her own way, when she needs. I wore the dressing gown for the first time last week, Monday morning, after I had dropped the dog off at daycare and taken a shower and drank a coffee and made breakfast, before I had to go to work. I was sitting in the shade in the backyard, leaning into the tiny breeze, watching the cat watch the birds on the grapevine. There’s a music school a few houses down from us, and sometimes in the backyard you can hear their students practising, but so faintly I can never get a recording of it on my phone. Sometimes it’s scales and sometimes it’s a song. Saxophone, piano. It’s one of the most beautiful things about being here, and I always forget about it until it happens again. You have to be sitting in just the right place.
Feels like you should see Otto having a snooze next to me right now:
&&&:
In case you’re also watching it and need some company, I’m recapping every episode of Nathan Fielder’s completely off-the-rails art project/ “comedy show” The Rehearsal every week at Vulture. It has been a long time since I wrote Weekly Online Content but I’m having a nice time paying close attention to this show. (This close read of Nathan For You for the LA Review of Books remains one of the most pleasurably brain-shredding deep dives I’ve ever spent way too much time working on.)
Also my book’s still out and you can still buy it and read it? If you want?? But no pressure obviously I know you’ve got a lot going on right now.
Hey this is on a totally different note but did you know that now, if you live in Toronto, you can call 211 if you see someone in need of help and don’t want to call the police? I have only seen people talking about this a little bit. Tell your friends!
Carlo’s Basketball Corner:
Petition to secure Brittney Griner’s swift and safe return to the U.S.