9 48 pm pdt [ dust ]
The dust of my childhood still clings to my skin, and
no amount of scrubbing will get it off. I've felt dusty all evening.
Even after showering, my skin still feels dry and my throat tight.
"I have a surprise for you," I told my mom. She
followed me upstairs. I headed up the second flight to her room.
"Not up there!" my mom exclaimed but I kept walking.
She wondered out loud what it was. I didn't answer.
She screamed loudly. It was as if I had just shown her
a dead body. Instead, I had led her to a patch of carpeting, unearthed
for the first time in many years.
The top floor of our house consists of my mother's room and
bathroom, and a loft. The loft contains a large bookshelf, and during the
big Northridge earthquake, the books fell of the shelves. Many of the
books made their way onto the stairs, and as my mom tried to flee from the
house, she slipped on the books and fell down the stairs.
A two gallon bottle of apple juice shattered on the
floor and we lost most of our dishes. The house had minor structural
damage. We were cleaning up for weeks. The daunting task of reshelving
the books kept getting pushed to the future. Nobody goes up there but my
mom, and there is always something else to clean.
I planned ahead. I bough two packs of dusting cloths
at the supermarket. I lazed around the house today, reading in the sun
and then playing solitaire while listening to the tv. Finally she went
downstairs. I was convinced that she was going to come up while I was
still working, but I somehow managed to maintain a high speed.
My mom has hundreds and hundreds of cookbooks. If you
tell me the name of a rare or obscure cookbook, you can bet money that you
will find it in this house. I found her highschool yearbook, her journal
from the months before I was born, my parents' divorce papers, and books
owned by my great grandfather. There were works by all the great authors,
including the complete works of Shakespeare. There was more dust than you
can imagine. My favorite find was a guide to embracing being dull. I
found The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, or some such nonsense.
There were subtle signs of 70's affluence, and countless books related to
various disabilities -- my mother's field.
Our next door neighbor gave birth to a baby boy at home
two days ago. This is the best neighborhood i have ever encountered in
which to raise children, and a birth at home seems very natural here. I
will go to sleep tonight in a sea of childhood memories, knowing a new
baby is sleeping next door.
