Story Focus: "More Than Gone"
{I will open with an anecdote.}
Yesterday my good friend Carter had a birthday party in a park a few blocks from my house. The children laughed in the splash park. The adults behaved like adults, sitting at the picnic tables talking about their adult things. There was punch, hot dogs, chips, brownies, chocolate cake. All what you'd expect from a birthday gathering in a park. This is a boring story, really.
Don't get me wrong. It was a good time, but it makes for no good story.
{I will segue into a discussion about the story I am writing about.}
Rohan's "More Than Gone," which you can read in full and in slightly different form at Halfway Down the Stairs if you don't have Cut Through the Bone yet, follows home the widowed grandma after the birthday of her granddaughter, "her first public gathering since Albert's funeral." She carries a balloon from the party, imagining it as a friend, telling it all the happy stories of her late husband, taking care to note how passersby smile at her, "indulgently" as she puts it.
I think it's important to note a difference here between the texts. In Cut Through the Bone, Rohan leaves this here, let's us infer what the passersby are indulging--that this old lady is talking to a balloon as she walks through the park. What would you think? Of course you'd think it. Let's not try to convince ourselves that we're any better here.
In the version of this story at Halfway Down the Stairs, Rohan goes on, let's us know exactly what it is they are thinking: senile. And pushes another step with a line that doesn't appear in the book, "There are times she wants to be senile."
{I will interject some discussion about current cultural topics along with some pop culture discussion.}
There exists now a drug to help you forget. Two of them, actually, both in testing.
Immediately I think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I think of running. I don't know why I think of running. There is that scene, maybe, in Eternal Sunshine, where they are running through the snow. I love that scene, but it makes me feel so cold. It makes me want to throw snow in your face.
I can't understand anyone who doesn't want to remember what it's like to feel that kind of powdery cold love against their face.
I'm terrified of forgetting. The other day, we talked about how lies become a part of our personal narratives. I wonder how I will respond to the forgetting. I wonder if I'll simply make up my own stories to replace those lost to memory, if I'll construct an elaborate fiction of my life, and thinking of that, it's almost comforting--a daily fugue, a daily recreation.
{I will go back to the personal.}
My grandmother wakes every morning forgetting that my grandfather passed away. She thinks he is already awake, down at breakfast maybe, or in the lounge watching a fishing show on TV. I can understand that kind of forgetting, I guess.
I still remember the first time Grandma ever forgot my name. I was slicing apples on Thanksgiving, helping in the kitchen as I've done for years. I've always been handy with a knife and a spatula. Grandma was standing there, talking to my step-mother and me, and I kept hearing her say, "Clint. Clint." Eyes on my knife, I had no idea she was talking to me until she tapped me on the shoulder. She looked into my face, and laughed in her soft old lady laugh, and said, "Oh you're not Clint. Oh. What's your name again?"
I've never asked my dad if he knows who Clint might be.
{I will ask you a series of questions in hopes you will leave answers in the comments section.}
Are you terrified of forgetting? What do you want to forget? What don't you want to forget? Do you take photos or write down things you are afraid to forget, or do you live by the phrase, "Why write down what one is to remember forever?" Do you remember that time we walked through the snow, that we found the space beneath the brush of the fallen pine tree where the city seemed to disappear, where we made believe we were rabbits hiding in the underbrush, careful of the foxes and the wolves and hunters?
