Grandma's Apartment Mom Visits

Earliest Memories

Inside cause mom is here visiting me today and I had seen her car outside – I am always outside ever so much as I can be in any kind of weather running into apartment to hug mom grandma feeling overjoyed and grandma asks, “can you go fetch your grandpa, son, tell him it's time for dinner” and I say “sure it's never hard to find him.

As I'm running out of the apartment my mom asks curiously, “why is it so easy to find him, Honey?”

“Just have to find a huge group of little girls all gathered together and he'll be right in the middle telling jokes and doing those magic tricks like he does with coins” I say.

Both grandma and mom yell, “wait” and I stop and look questioningly at them both

“Magic tricks?” my mom asks incredulously and they both share a glance that says to me they had never soon granddad's magic tricks before. Grandma look perplexed and upset about something. I tell them mostly it's these tricks with coins, “i don't know just ask him to do one for you?” I suggest. I do sense that something is wrong about granddad being around a group of little girls just no idea what that could be? I hear grandma saying, “Dear God Ensel not again” my mind cannot connect any relationship between these things but I do feel it that there is something there and when I find granddad not far surrounded by a group of little girls mostly a few boys around for the show, I called from a distance, “Dinner's ready!” and he nodded that he had heard me and ran back to the house after looking at the little girls dressed in bright dresses, pony tails, granddad towering over them with a can old fedora hat usually a suit jacket on with slacks.

I get back and grandma and mom are not talking about granddad but I can sense something in the air. I think of granddad that he sits by the living room window and scratches is head with thick, yellow talons for fingernails making this horrible sound that was amazingly loud I learn to shut out effectively things from the environment then at an early age. He ignores me though in a consistent manner just ignoring that I exist it was as if to him he decided in his head that I just did not actually live there. As an adult now, I can well understand his sentiment on that case but I was a good kid went WAY out of my way to play along at not actually being there so as to be as seamless a presence as possible in the apartment where I lived with dying Aunt Norma as well.

Later I discovered the concept of proximity abandonment someone being physically present but not emotionally present in relationship with us. In a strange way I look back now at it all as if it were a time of divine protection as I pass through the bellow of the beast here relatively unscathed heavy emphasis on relatively there like in I recall once in grasping the full measure of it all thinking, thank God I wasn't a little girl and wondering of how such a seemingly random thing ends up making what seems a big difference in my life.