reva

Thoughts run deeply on Saturday mornings. Always have. As soon as I let that first sentence find its home, it drifts back to Nicholson and sometime in high school during the school year. Five days of classes and getting up before seven. The pattern takes hold and I am up early.

Times at home were rarely filled with any semblance of family. It seems that it was all individual relationships. Reva, my maternal grandmother, lived with us since I was in about the 3rd grade. By the time I am picturing, she and I were good friends. We always had an easy relationship. With others, her ties were filled with negative emotions. I could never understand why people would act in such a way. Reva just wanted to exist. She expected little but her tea and toast in the mornings, which she always made herself, and to just sit and talk with whoever made themselves available.

She loved the gossip magazines. Hollywood was her thing. Loved going to the movies. It always made me cringe when her daughter would make a point of telling me that every time she purchased People or the National Enquirer at the grocery store that she made a point of telling the clerk that it wasn’t for herself. Like a grocery store jockey cares? Why on Earth would someone be so concerned about their self-image that they would speak such things to strangers?

I remember Reva aging, and a magnifying glass hovering over the magazines, then large print and a glass, and, finally, no magazines at all. She would sit there for hours. I should have given her a day in which I did whatever she desired, but I never did. Her days became increasingly filled with television. Morning game shows added to her always present evening dramas. Her rocker moved closer and closer to the screen, and the volume increased. I wish she lived in this time with hundreds of channels, big flat-screens, and home theaters – and the audio version of People Magazine. She died ugly and confused.

I don’t want to write anymore.