REVIVAL

Today my head wonders what lists I might be on… all those paper trails turned digital, flushing through air like tiny fish who might never die – I will be immortal. I have mail waiting on my hall table for people who don’t or have never lived here; they’re on someone’s list. One day I’ll scribble, Return to Sender and drop them in a post box. The BBC want me on their list but can’t be bothered to discover my name to demand I pay their license fee for crap I don’t watch; in this I am a non-entity who is scandalised at the thought of all that postage wasted – I’m one of thousands who don’t view their offerings. In the end I’ll claim the right to adopt the phrase, She was here… I was, and then some.

On the 3^rd of July my mother was born 100 years ago. She didn’t get to be a flapper or a show-girl but she captured my father… reeled him right in, to live very normal lives with two kids and a dog. There was a black & white cat in my early days, and a grandmother who had a budgie named Billy who walked through my soup; Granny made me eat it anyway. She ignored all the tears splashing in it because it was only Billy. Billy swore like a trouper, and at Granny’s funeral he had to be covered up in case the minister was offended. Those were the days… not of wine and roses, but sherry, and crooners on the huge Bakelite radio.

We leave stains of our presence, will pop up anywhere and everywhere, called on or not. I sagged into tears on a bus once because I’d forgotten to put a dead nephew’s name on some list and couldn’t expel the tale properly when I arrived at my destination. Entanglement is where we live, exist in patrial obscurity for little whiles. Old teachers might’ve told us to appreciate but at those ages all we saw was the interminable path through powerless childhood. How do any of us manage the selection of incidents and adventures into memoir? Boxes: little shapes filled with episodes of us – there might be a whole city with differently-shaped windows, doors where if you knocked, one of us would peer out to ask, Who’s there?

Sometimes I see the ages my children will be when I’m not there, and my presence shrinking into fond mist where they hook out my peculiarities to laugh at, just to keep part of me around. They’ll see the same of their kids. I think of myself as a pot of soup topped up, never emptied, pot never cleaned, riding a hook in and out of a fire, changing from one character to another depending on the bones and meat scraps thrown in. Stock was everything, and dogs got to gnaw on remains after my mother’s granny had captured all the flavour she needed. I am who everyone around made me. There is a possibility I could sift my mind to collect elements to build different people/personages, multiple personalities, and after watching drama like Dexter, if I thought I had a good reason, I could become a serial killer (probably of politicians), don’t think I’d bother too much with torture. Just kill-em and sink-em. There must always be Love & Discontent: a partnership that’s been together forever, cast in bronze, placed within our sight and touch.