~inner monologue extract~
~I remember sitting inside my grandfathers office
Solitaire on the COMPAQ
Smell of cigarettes lingering
Rays of sunshine touching my skin
Watching him play a game I still do not understand
That version of me is five
He does not know the pain of loss yet
He does not know that he will soon pass away deteriorated by dementia
It will take everything away that he knows
the mathematics, the art, the growing up in Queens
and you’ll never truly know him, because only you as a young child did
you’ll just know that you were named after him
and then ten years later the same thing will happen to my grandmother
the inability to play piano anymore, the forgetting of those who are close to her, her no longer remembering who I am as I say goodbye to her on her death bed
~
I think from time to time on how I miss my grandparents on my mothers side, knowing I had a close bond with each but I never got to see those relationships carry through my adolescence or adulthood. Earlier this year, my mother gave me a copy of a journal my grandfather written describing in impressive detail, memories of growing up in Queens and his life up until having children. Reading it in my late 20s felt like connecting to my past and to the man I’m named after, in some ways reclaiming a relationship I never had the opportunity to develop.
I read of how his life shaped out to be. Born in Manhattan, raised in Queens. How his father and grandfather were both stained glass artists, until the war in which they became workers in the Brooklyn navy yard. Stories of him growing up in South Ozone Park, how much he adored school and how he excelled in it. How the day he turned of age, he went to Manhattan and spent 8 hours waiting in line to enlist in the Navy. He would go on to become a “Pharmacist" (a medic essentially), and serve in World War II. How they one time encountered a German ship and didn’t have any gernades so they threw potatoes at the ship to fool them. But beyond these memories, he also made light mention of what would be known now was generational trauma, his family was plagued by alcohoism, predominately through the men in his life. Drinking to stow away anger, only for it to erupt as they did not know how to express their emotions outside of that as it is the only way they were ever taught or shown. That to be a man was to be angry and that was the only avenue in which you could express how you felt. I know little of how much this would go on to affect my own grandfathers life, but I know it existed. His journal was immensely detailed up until his early 20s whenever he began to have children, he makes note of having my aunt in New York before moving to Texas in which he would go on to work in mathematics at places such as Texas Instruments. He makes note of a family tree of which is expansive, suggesting the idea that I still have distant relatives in New York whom I don’t know of. Maybe in a small way this created further validation for my want to move there, as if my being his namesake I’m fulfilling some form of destiny. Completing a cycle and closing the circle.
I’ve thought about taking up painting, my grandfather painted a lot before he passed. I have one of his pieces and have had it since I moved out and went to college, and it has moved with me through many stages of life. It’s a large ship, cascading through waves, reminiscent of his love of the ocean he painted many ships. If you look closely, you can see the parts where he went back in on his paintings with sharpie before he passed as he was dealing with dementia, to outline certain elements and ‘improve’ upon. You can see his life in these paintings, what it was when his mind was full, and what it was whenever it began to leave him. Each stroke represents a piece of him since each was created with such intentionality, even the sharpie marks when he went back over them. Even in his addled mind, he sought reasons to improve his work, and who’s to say it was anything but improvement for the artist to go back and edit or add? He was still himself whenever he had dementia, even if he lost parts of himself, a version of himself was creating those outlines. My mom used to tell me that in his final years and during the peak of his illness, he and my mom ended up watching the Titanic four times in theaters, because he kept forgetting that he had seen it. She’ll be insistent about giving me things that he used to own, the colander I’ve used to drain pasta for the past seven years is one he had, a tiny cutting board that I’ll press my tofu on.
I mourn the loss of never having truly known my grandfather or grandmother, I grieve the fact that I wasn’t able to have much of memories with either of them and that they were taken from this earth before I could appreciate who they were. I wish I could ask them stories of them growing up in Brooklyn and more of their life. I wish I could thank my grandmother for teaching me about how to eat spaghetti properly, with a spoon and fork. Or how she told me about our Cousin Vinny who worked in New York in the ‘diamond business’. I wish I could go over to her house and watch Dragon Tales in Spanish again, or all of the old shows like Golden Girls or soap operas that would run on her television all the time. I wish she could make me crackers with butter one more time. Or see how she would not let a single leftover go to waste because she grew up in the depression and knew what it was like to be without food. I wish she could teach me how to play chopsticks one more time on piano as I’ve forgotten after all these years. I wish I could hear the oldies tunes she’d play on her CD player as she would do a jig. I loved my grandmother deeply, though I did not know how to express it at that time. I know how she went, not gracefully, and how her struggle with dementia took the joy from her life.
Life is a long series of grievances of which we can draw joy from if we find a path to see it that way.
~notes app poetry spill~
~from Escapril Poetry Challenge 2024~
4/14/24
Day 14: a recurring dream
You showed up again last night
The same spot
The steps of that brownstone apartment
Greeting me with warmth and comfort
Your smile illuminating
Your touch a homecoming of renewal
And then I awake
You’re not here, nor were you ever
When will I find you?
~slice of life~
~a slow sunday
~throat and nasal congestion is leaving day by day
~ate two pints of ice cream this week, oops
~Finally started watching Sex and the City, furthering the fuel for wanting to move to nyc
~techno~
Mix Rec: billbo | Gas Station FM
~Sorry, I had to self-plug my new mix. Pretty happy on the selections with this one and won’t be the last time, I love what Gas Station is bringing to Austin and am excited to see how it grows.
EP/Single Rec: Dreamscape | Jardinage
~’Groove Just Around’ is an absolute heater of a track and I am going to spin it to death.
~indie~
~Revisiting my beloved old playlist created in 2016, that encompasses a main character energy.
*general recs*
~ableton dump~
~Focusing a bit more into a directed sound with my production and trying to create cohesion between it.
Thanks for reading billingwords! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.