It's been a bleak holiday season with/in my family. Doleful is the word that kept coming to mind. "Forlorn! the very word is like a bell"--but I thought forlorn was not exactly right, so I looked it up & found for the phrase "forlorn hope": "originally denoted a band of soldiers picked to begin an attack, many of whom would not survive; the current sense (mid 17th cent.) derives from a misunderstanding of the etymology."
In forlorn hope, some people in the family read the book on suicide. It was on his kitchen table. I finally read The Year of Magical Thinking. Managed to meet necessary deadlines. Fell further behind in correspondence (in both senses). Mostly I've been sick, twice since Thanksgiving, just now getting over my last weeks-long bout with the flu. Influenza, from influence: "the power of persons or things to produce effects on others by intangible or indirect means."
I wasn't strong enough to ward off the influence. After a while, you can start to feel that it will just be this way from now on. The line, maybe from a George Jones song, "I've aged twenty years in five" comes to mind. (This must be a list of visitors to my mind.)
"I don't know if you've noticed, but the family is shrinking." Right before the funeral, one of us slipped and broke his leg. "Many sitting in darkness." Some people in the family believe in things that they want the rest of us to believe too. Could be found in books. "Everything was there to teach us." Of suicides, only 15% leave a note. (Learned from a book.)
"This is the worst thing that's ever happened to this family." Yet somehow those of us who had quit didn't start to smoke again. The ones who really can't didn't drink or get high, though the subject was "on the table" a few times. A wooden chair was smashed in anger, but that was later. Its leg broken, this time unfixable. No rewind.
Stuff about our childhood and adolescence came up with my brothers--more than usual, I thought. Or maybe it was just that some of it was about me. Dancing with my friends to records in the basement back in Yonkers. And I remembered sitting on the swings with a neighbor girl, singing the new songs, talking about what the words might be. Not yet ten.
"Music--that's all we cared about then." "I think art, as we knew it, was just designed to get us through our twenties. After that, you're on your own."
Like any artist, I'm looking for something. Consistently. Devotedly. I look for signs as if they were signs, it's a habit.
. . . . .
