Читать книгу Standpipe - David Hardin - Страница 12

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FOUR

An old woman quietly tends the past in her cramped, tidy home on a crumbling residential street, living room crammed with decades of cherished family mementos. Every available surface is covered with photos of gowned graduates; children’s art work curling at the edges; samplers; images of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. rubbing shoulders with Jesus; tea service; great slab of a family bible; JFK and RFK; portraits of children, grandchildren, and possibly great-grand-children suited up for basketball, baseball, and football; Frederick Douglass; figurines of Degas’s dancers; beatific images of Christ and Christ in His agony hung redundantly on the wall; Barack and Michelle Obama; shirt-board fans printed with Bible verses; family reunion panoramas, everyone sporting identical pastel T-shirts against a backdrop of towering trees and enamel blue skies.

The walls of the house I grew up in were monastically bare. It was like being raised in a small, struggling gallery between exhibits. Later, after my father retired and they’d relocated to Florida, my parents’ stucco ranch was the repository for a considerable haul of ceramic bric-a-brac from the flea markets around Orlando. The few family photos, mementos, and keepsakes on display competed with cocker spaniel-sized Bengal tigers, toucans, sombrero-wearing campesinos, and a few generic seascapes.

The walls of my mother’s condominium in the last few years of her life featured generic prints from Walmart, a few bucolic rural scenes, one or two multi-window mat displays of family photos chosen, seemingly, at random. A Hallmark ode to grandmothers occupied a spot eye level on the wall opposite the guest toilet. Fighting for purchase atop an entertainment center, a few family portraits bore cramped witness to longdistance offspring, their spouses, and their kids.

The past, our past, vied for pride of place with Thomas Kincade knockoffs and framed classic-car porn my father had clipped from magazines.

“Do your kids and grandchildren visit much?”

Her features cloud, she sags on her walker. “No. No, they don’t. They’re all so busy.”

I can think of nothing to say in reply. I stack her water neatly, inhale one last lungful of rosewater, liniment, and fried ring bologna and flee to the safety of the ERV’s cab. Remarkable, how I fail to acknowledge her uncanny resemblance to my mother until much later.

Standpipe

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