Faulkner imitation for class
lately i've found in myself the need to write and write and write, to more than myself, to just know that there's a possible audience even if they never read it
November 24, 2008
It was at the late lunch following the doctor's appointment she had been waiting for since she first fell ill almost seven months prior that my mother told her, over the bites of chicken sandwich almost identical to those she had hastily eaten on her (my sister's) lunch breaks over the summer when she first found her body was no longer her own. "You have your Dad's cowlicks," she remarked. It was a passing comment, a synthesis of two pictures held in her mind, only one of which she could call her own, due to the fact that she had only really possessed one in real life, that being the picture of her daughter then sitting in front of her across the molded recycled plastic that formed the fast food restaurant's table. The other one she held dimly in her recollection like a shadow - a picture of her late husband as a boy on a two-sided wallet keepsake (the other side holding a similar picture of her husband's sister) that her mother-in-law had shown her almost three years ago, almost a year earlier than her husband would become "late". She recalled that now and that same shadow of memory fell over her daughter, until the image conjured in her head also, projecting in the air in between the two of them, altogether affecting though not sentient, above the many-times-reincarnated plastic of the table where they sat.
She didn't know then how that little token of observance would later take root in my sister's heart in the hours to follow, flowering into a glorious, unexplainable happiness that could be harvested over and over as a mobile memorial for the years to come when the remembrances she used to cling to - like the timbre of our father's voice - had dissipated and diffused so far-reaching into the atmosphere that a tangible amount could no longer be collected from the air which she breathed in.
The cowlicks, as trivial as they seemed, were perhaps even more puzzling in their memorial quality because she (my sister) had never even seen him with them in her still quantitatively young life. They had disappeared much like (though before) the dark brown - almost black - shades faded from his hair; she had only witnessed them in the pictures of him before she knew him, back before his hairline had gone the way of the recent economy (that was now threatening the very life my mother and father had saved and planned for) - deep into recession. But it was likely the physical proof of inheritance, tiny though it was, that elated my sister so deeply. To be told finally that she had somehow retained unchangeable substantiation of a relationship, that it was in her blood more than just in her nurturing, was a beautiful generosity from the world. After years of never being told of a likeness between her and her hero, this unlikely gift was finally given: in the midst of searching for something to cling to, in the midst of frustration and depression and need for change, she had somehow unearthed a treasure with just the help of a friend and a razor on her head, and our mother's realization and passing comment of that likeness eight days passed. And now the strange confrontations between two opposing directions of growth stood up tall (quite literally) and proud like the rest of her to find that at her most honest (the kind of brutal physical honesty that only a shaved head could leave a person with), she was her father's daughter. She wanted to scream it, to tell everyone, was so overwhelmingly dizzy with inexpressible joy that she found herself tempted to bring them into all of the next twenty six conversations she had, just so she could vocalize and attempt to share the all-encompassing pride she felt by saying, "They're my dad's cowlicks."
November 24, 2008
It was at the late lunch following the doctor's appointment she had been waiting for since she first fell ill almost seven months prior that my mother told her, over the bites of chicken sandwich almost identical to those she had hastily eaten on her (my sister's) lunch breaks over the summer when she first found her body was no longer her own. "You have your Dad's cowlicks," she remarked. It was a passing comment, a synthesis of two pictures held in her mind, only one of which she could call her own, due to the fact that she had only really possessed one in real life, that being the picture of her daughter then sitting in front of her across the molded recycled plastic that formed the fast food restaurant's table. The other one she held dimly in her recollection like a shadow - a picture of her late husband as a boy on a two-sided wallet keepsake (the other side holding a similar picture of her husband's sister) that her mother-in-law had shown her almost three years ago, almost a year earlier than her husband would become "late". She recalled that now and that same shadow of memory fell over her daughter, until the image conjured in her head also, projecting in the air in between the two of them, altogether affecting though not sentient, above the many-times-reincarnated plastic of the table where they sat.
She didn't know then how that little token of observance would later take root in my sister's heart in the hours to follow, flowering into a glorious, unexplainable happiness that could be harvested over and over as a mobile memorial for the years to come when the remembrances she used to cling to - like the timbre of our father's voice - had dissipated and diffused so far-reaching into the atmosphere that a tangible amount could no longer be collected from the air which she breathed in.
The cowlicks, as trivial as they seemed, were perhaps even more puzzling in their memorial quality because she (my sister) had never even seen him with them in her still quantitatively young life. They had disappeared much like (though before) the dark brown - almost black - shades faded from his hair; she had only witnessed them in the pictures of him before she knew him, back before his hairline had gone the way of the recent economy (that was now threatening the very life my mother and father had saved and planned for) - deep into recession. But it was likely the physical proof of inheritance, tiny though it was, that elated my sister so deeply. To be told finally that she had somehow retained unchangeable substantiation of a relationship, that it was in her blood more than just in her nurturing, was a beautiful generosity from the world. After years of never being told of a likeness between her and her hero, this unlikely gift was finally given: in the midst of searching for something to cling to, in the midst of frustration and depression and need for change, she had somehow unearthed a treasure with just the help of a friend and a razor on her head, and our mother's realization and passing comment of that likeness eight days passed. And now the strange confrontations between two opposing directions of growth stood up tall (quite literally) and proud like the rest of her to find that at her most honest (the kind of brutal physical honesty that only a shaved head could leave a person with), she was her father's daughter. She wanted to scream it, to tell everyone, was so overwhelmingly dizzy with inexpressible joy that she found herself tempted to bring them into all of the next twenty six conversations she had, just so she could vocalize and attempt to share the all-encompassing pride she felt by saying, "They're my dad's cowlicks."