A Gout Out for the Mix Tape Universe

Love

Seventy eight years on this planet and my grandmother Shirley has earned a Whiskey Tenor voice blessed enough to do some classic voiceovers in Hollywood and a spine curved enough that it would put the Riddler’s question mark logo to shame. Yesterday I stopped by her duplex in the Platte Park community to drop off her birthday presents (she’s a fellow Capricorn.) I could see the final days of dementia kicking in. Her white hair is this cotton-ball mane, very mad scientist-esque. Her dense wrinkles are amassed with paper thin skin. She looked me over with her one good eye and demanded a kiss. I lean over to get a whiff of her permanent Marlboros and coffee scent. Red wine stains, coffee stains but now I would have to urge the world to advance its horizon and realize that smells stain. Her smell is a stain, something not original but an accidental part of her forevermore. Her mind picks up on topics and takes them on a free fall of association as she grasps onto nouns and digresses them into anything she can spontaneously attach it to. I guess that’s nothing new in the human skill of conversation but while we journey down the road of communication she will stutter kick the topics into la la land. My aunt (her daughter) said something about this place call Del Mar’s that she ate at on 17th and Larimer. Grandma Shirley grabbed the wheel of the conversation and said, “You remember…Elmer? I used to work with him in that grocery store. Wasn’t he my boss?” It’s crazy to watch a vibrant personality like my grandmother’s as it gets roped down by time. It’s been a difficult year watching my Grandmother Jackie (Grandma Shirley’s daughter) slowly dying with emphysema. In one little duplex in Denver you have a combined history of over 130 years between two women. These years are winding down for them in some god awful race to the end. Who will it be? Grandma Jackie or Shirley, its daughter against mother and the world as I know it will be rearranged. I sit here struggling with my job my art my schooling this rat race and years are slipping away from our relationships rendering my soul with a helpless feeling of guilt. Is it enough for me to sit here bleeding through my words…with thought and memories of these extraordinary ladies? Is it enough to keep doing my thing with this periodic scream in the ear of cyberspace?????? HEY GRANDMA JACKIE….HEY GRANDMA SHIRLEY I LOVE U!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!I look at my family’s life. The whole lot of us lower middle class Denverites and I wish it would have been better. Not that there are regrets just that somehow things could have turned out better. We could have learned form all the financial, emotional and relationship mistakes. We could have somehow risen above them learned form them and become stronger. My family is so utterly awashed in their sadness and mistakes…they are drowning in their inadequacies that they forget their strengths and have no hope for progressive change. We all know we love each other but we are all so juxtapositioned into our stations that I have no clue I how I can cement the power of that love into their heads…So I guess I can just keeping screaming into cyberspace and see if there is any lucky magic in this whole binary universe.
FAMILY I LOVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEEEE U!!!!!!!!