Boxes for Air

Driving to work on Tuesday, I saw a PACE passenger shuttle like the ones that used to pick my Uncle Michael up for doctors’ appointments and health stuff on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The shuttle sighting was a reminder of all the things I won’t see in Maine that make me think of my grandmother and uncle, who lived together their last decades and died within days of each other over two years ago. It’s a time that feels like it didn’t happen because Henry was barely a bump and I barely remember not being Henry’s Mom. Not because life started with him or I was incomplete without him, but more that I haven’t slept much in the last two years and my memory is suffering.

For the last year, we’ve been living in my parents’ house, down the street from the house my grandparents owned for fortyish years. The house I went to after school during elementary and high school, to wait with my grandparents until my parents came home. My grandfather and I would watch the Golden Girls and my grandmother would take my money after beating me at gin rummy. There used to be a deck in the backyard that overlooked the canyon and freeway. My six-grade science project on water quality based on the proximity to pollution consisted of glasses of water in their backyard, inside and front yard that I would take drops of and look at under a telescope and then draw the squiggly blotches of “pollution.” The highlight for me was decorating the 3-fold foam board with cut-out semi-trucks. This is the house where my uncle hung out in the back TV room and shouted the answer to final Jeopardy down the hall to whoever was watching in the front living room. This was the house that always had chocolate in jars and orange juice and white albacore tuna. This was the house I lived in when Henry was born. Where I went into labor in my mother’s rocking chair in that front living room while watching a Hugh Grant movie.

This is the house I walk past every night with my husband and my son on our way to the park. And half of my childhood is looming there behind the windows that never have lights in them anymore. And that’s just my grandparent’s house! There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of my childhood lurking around San Diego, like ashy remnants from fires. My high school of white buildings on a cliff over the freeway. My grade school next to church with tolling bells. The park where I learned to ride my bike and performed an innocent dance to a mildly inappropriate Whitney Houston song at a party for my father’s 35^th birthday. The hill where I used my heels on pavement to stop my Big Wheel from crashing. The mountain I spent over a decade of holiday weekends camping at. The El Torito where we went after I graduated high school and I wore my first little black dress and felt pretty without my braces. The house on the canyon where I spent Thursday nights for almost five years huddled with other writers who told me when I wasn’t funny and when I was trying too hard with my words. The bar on Clairemont Mesa Blvd. where I took the stand-up comedy class with the friend who started out as a grumpy girl with a frantic dog. The balcony of the apartment where my husband proposed and we watched a family of raccoons shimmy out of a bush and down the sidewalk to the carport. The movie theater where I worked when Run Lola Run came out and I took pictures with co-workers who weren’t really friends, except that we were all wearing red wigs. The hospital where I was born and 30 years minus a month and three weeks later my son was born. The zoo where we go several times a week and it seems like there is always a baby giraffe.

And I’m realizing that living in Maine means NOT living in San Diego. People have asked if I know that it snows there and if I like lobster. But they don’t know to ask if I know that my grandmother has never been there. There is nothing of her there except what I bring. Except what I can remember or fit in our five designated feet of ABF moving truck. Except what I write down about her and send to my mom in sporadic emails that I can picture her reading in her Southeastern Alaska Island office with the Klawock River lapping out her window. And my grandmother passes like a wind between us. Something only we can feel in the windy ways that mothers and daughters feel things. Because all of my memories I can rethink or write down or forget, but to hold on to my grandmother feels like air in my fingers. And I don’t know how to get air in the moving truck.