Here lately, I’ve been going to bed at night and wandering Grandma and Papa’s house while the worries of my adult life wait outside. I wake up in the Blue Room; it’s 9:00 a.m. and Papa insists I’ve slept long enough. I walk down the hallway, past the laminated world map with the USSR still labelled on it, through the living room with the tan carpet and the slightly purple, maroon curtains, past the basement door where I threw up once, and into the warm kitchen. The morning sun touches that one corner of the linoleum floor again while the subtle smoke of breakfast dances above it. The woods through the window are glittering over the grass that was sometimes charred after Papa, by mistake or purposefully, let the flame in the burn pile get carried away. I open up the glass cabinets and remember the bowls with the stars on them, the mugs for coffee I hadn’t acquired the taste for yet, the tall, clear, angled glasses I would pour Diet Coke into for Grandma, slowly so that it didn’t fizz too much and go flat. I take the plate of eggs and bacon and grits and walk into the sunroom, where they both sit, and eat with them while Fox News blares on TV.
I ask Papa if I can play on the computer and then go swap between countless CD-ROMs. I run with Spirit the Stallion, giggle at the characters with Reader Rabbit, shiver as Mathra flies overhead on The Cluefinders, and run from a t-rex on Dinosaur Adventure 3-D. Inevitably, I can’t sit still anymore and head outside to run the trails Papa cut in the field with the bush hog and look for rat snakes under sheet metal. When I come back in he scolds me for eating directly out of the peanut butter jar, but forgets about it when I tell him I caught a catfish in the net he had made longer by duct taping a 2×4 to it. The fish had a hook stuck in its mouth and I still don’t know if he ever figured out I had stolen one of his poles, couldn’t get the fish off, and cut the line in panic.
In the evening, without fail, Papa calls that supper is ready, and I join them for another meal. Tonight it’s “shit-on-a-shingle,” ground beef and gravy over toast. I clean my plate and put it in the washer, and as the light outside fades, just before bedtime comes and I hear Papa push in the foot of his recliner from another room, something shrieks at me- “you’re so ungrateful.”
Through the ether my peace is dispelled by the wrath of How Dare You, an invisible cobra that spits venom anytime I remember what I had and through it recognize what was stolen. It’s like she feels personally betrayed by the fact that I knew what love is, and is not, and the girl she flexes her brutish dominion over can’t find that in her heavy shadow. From light into dark, we both grow angrier, but surely I can’t understand her plight because I am so small and clueless and ungrateful and a spoiled brat toward everything she has provided for me too, right?
But dear reader I met Gratitude so early I lost memory of her first lessons, and her and Submission were never at the pulpit together. Gratitude was quiet, simple, and naked. She would often be in rooms and recognized only as the heat coming through the vents on a winter morning or that single streak of sun on the linoleum floor. She needn’t announce herself because those who knew her well could trust her to stay where she belonged, and understood the breathless language of her ever exiting the room. She didn’t leave when Suffering would scream, and merely tipped her hat when Grief walked in.
Gratitude answered to no one, and she was not to carry the burdens of service.
Nor was she a debt to be paid.
~
It’s been a year and a half since Papa died and almost 20 since I last lived with him and Grandma. A few nights ago I experienced the most vivid dream that he had come back to visit with everyone. I didn’t get many words with him before he said he had to go, but as he slipped away again I held his hands and said “thank you for being my dad.”
When I moved back in with my parents, Gratitude waited for me. She planted her feet and stared blankly despite my parents demands. She was stoic, feral, and indomitable. She wouldn’t come when announced on stage and said nothing each time the knife was held to her throat. She’d side-step every request, politely decline every invitation, and retreat into the cosmos somewhere between that moment and the next time Memory brought me back there and only on her perfect timing, came back to me in golden light.
And so now I leave the door unlocked for her to come in when she pleases, keep a mug just for her in the cabinet, and talk with her about how the smell of breakfast makes me shed tears more frequently than anything else. I tell her how on the day Papa left I had made the coffee I had acquired the taste for and left some of it as a toast to what we might have talked about over it, and then I thank them both.
I will the machine. 