Memoirous

Possibly because I’ve been reading the letters of poets Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge (SEE link my last post, http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2023/06/all-this-thinking-correspondence-of.html ) between the two, I’ve been dwelling in the past. Add to that I’m old. Not old old, but thumbing the pages of social security mail sent to me, encouraging me to sign up for Part B—or is it A, and is it Medicare or Medicaid, is it anything? What are we assured of? I’ve been dwelling in an existential crux, thinking about mortality, the passing of an age. Maybe family makes us/me think about all this. I remember after both my parents died within a span of months, going back to Ohio to clear out the dregs, the last of the last at their extended living facility/house in Canal Fulton. I thought it was no big deal. I had a car, gas money, the time—all the factors that have usually vexed me in getting away from my “normal” life in Chicago. My plan was to stay at the house and slowly unwind e...

I remember, growing up in Centerville, Ohio, near Dayton, going to department stores. You could spend the day shopping at Rike’s, then have lunch in their restaurant and get your hair done at the store salon. Elder-Berman was possibly one step down, but a notch up from J.C. Penny. Unbelievably places where you placed orders and had the products delivered was not considered as classy as actually shopping. I still have a fancy hand-painted hairclip manufactured in France that I bought at Rikes one day on a whim. Rike’s have now gone the way of Field’s, consolidated into a Macy’s. Which will probably go the way of all things. One day there will just be Amazon. To shop local we went to the hardware store. The hardware store was where we bought most of our stuff. I was reminded of this when someone wanted to know where they could buy some ice skates. I bought my Huffy bicycle and ice skates at PK Hardware where my mother worked as a cashier and, thus, we got a store discoun...

So I was at my parent's house clearing stuff away. This was WAAAYY harder than I thought it would be. It's stuff. It's life. It's gone. Pretty much all the furniture had been either divvied up or taken to storage. What was left was just a bunch of little stuff. You know what I mean, all that stuff you put away in closets, under the bathroom sink, etc that can take a whole other u-haul, twenty more boxes, we're always SHOCKED at how much of the small stuff there is. Well, this was no exception. How many plastic space organizers can one woman have? The answer is innumerable. My mother had a capacity to save space by taking up space with plastic bins, drawers organizers, etc. After I emptied them half of the garage was space organizers. And plastic bags. My God! Did she never once throw one into the garbage?! These were good for stuffing, for wrapping around glass and breakables, but it was again beyond me how much trash she kept. Of course both my parents were t...