...but She Breaks Just Like a Little Girl
Reminding me of the important things - which I seldom write about in here.
Now you no longer will look for someone to discover life with, she told me, but someone to share it with.
I told her I had read in Kudera something that was almost the same...
Of course you did, she told me.
The best advice never comes without confirmation from other sources.
Kundera spoke of young lovers spending time finding together the definitions for their world: letting the world make sense in context of their relationship. They can be in love because they both have the same lack of understanding.
Then, after the individuals are older and have formed their definitions of words - answered their personal questions - then they're attracted to people with the same conclusions.
I know what I know because I've seen what I've seen not because I was told what I was told
Mama is stressed out pretty badly right now, though, and I think she had been worried to talk to me. Our conversations are commitments because they are anything but casual.
See, her older brother passed away last week, my Uncle Virgil. He's the first of the five children to pass away, and my mother is not deserving of all the death she's seen in her life. She seems too young, to me.
So last week she saw her brother lying in his coffin, and saw him placed in the ground beside her parents: I imagine the black sand, humidity and Spanish moss from the live-oak trees which are indicative of Amelia Island and three other siblings. She told me what she thought:
His body was a curse to even him, but now he's free from his own addictions which afflicted him worse than it did others. She wished for him heaven.
But Virgil Claude Eunice, Jr. did not deserve it: just like his father didn't.
The last time I saw him was nearly four years ago, on that same little Floridian island where he now is burried. I was lying by the pool when my mother signaled to me from the balcony and she hand-signed the letters spelling "V-i-r-g-i-l". I dressed myself completely before seeing him, and gave him only my hand, but no hug. Mama didn't talk to him at all.
Even though it had been years since he'd been out of jail for molesting that little girl, which was even decades earlier than the conviction, he always seemed stained.
He never was the Junior our family wanted. He was the runt, and not at all dashingly handsome like my war-hero grandfather (monster of a man though he was). Virgil's little brother, Walter, my tycoon uncle, is the Golden Boy.
Virgil tried to make ammends in the family, but my mother would have nothing doing. She knew how those swamp-country sonsofbitches liked the little girls, because she used to be one, and she'd be goddamned if she started feeling sorry for them: brother or not.
One family reunion I remember the bluegrass band played, and Uncle Virgil sang out in his baritone, "I saw the light... now I'm so happy, no sorrow in sight, praise the Lord..." The family was quiet and clapped with shifted glances.
My cousin Randy summed it up by exclaiming that evening, "Virgil ain't never seen no god-damn light!"
Mama told him he was not her brother, and that she would talk to him after he was castrated. Her sisters ridiculed her for this stance, despite their own lost childhood, and their own daughters.
But mama didn't wish him death. And at his funeral she knew at once that the desires in his body were dead with that body, and she believed that some part of him was redeemable, and that part has life yet.
Sweet mama!
She left home at 15 on her road to Find Out, and she never returned. She left behind her the pain and ignorance which are portrayed cinematically in regards to the Deep South. In her heart, though, she brought with her the beauty and strength that are rarely seen and hardly understood by anyone outside the family. She rebuilt each relationship with her (other) brother and two sisters. She retained the recipes, the songs, and the stories of her family while discarding their shame, their cycles, and their destruction.
Oh, and the accent, too, is conciderably lessened in her speech, and even moreso in mine.
She left, she learned, she bore four children and raised them with both hands, alone, and instilled in us a respect for where we came from, and no first-hand knowledge of it's ragged under-belly.
She saved me.
Do you understand graduate school? Do you realize that this is not the goal of the people I come from? Do you see how the generations of poor, white trash are stacked against me?
Mama made all the difference. I love her so much...
it has now officially been one year since I last saw Amrin Anastasi... and I think I'm finally getting the hang of these right-now-and-never-forever kind of relationships..."
