holidays.
We’ve been going home every
weekend, to my mom’s hometown. Our old things are gathering soil and snakes
underneath a weathered tarpaulin. Under them, our dog Pabby lies, by now tiny
bones lying in the shreds of an old t-shirt he used to love. I had three
spinster grandaunts who died one after the other, and their things are mixed up
with ours – plastic colanders, porcelain figurines of cats and dogs, souvenirs
from provinces visited once in the sixties, beaded slippers still in their
boxes, rosaries and stampitas and mimeographed misalettes.
This year, my Lolo Ano passed away. He
was a salesman for Colgate-Palmolive, back in the day when toothpaste was still
powder. He had a shock of white, white hair that always seemed to contain more
energy than the man himself. God gave him twenty-one more years after this memo,
so perhaps memos have more power than we know.