Written In November 1979, At Twenty Years-Old
(Today’s clarification is in parentheses).
My roommate sits and watches t.v., and talks about people on Welfare and how people try to squeeze money out of the government. What a shame! I sit and laugh, and cringe inside. I think bitterly – accusing her, in my mind. You try and raise four children on your own. Clothing, feeding, helping them grow, doing everything possible to help them grow in a Catholic, private school. Tuition and uniforms for each child. You try to make them happy on Christmas and birthdays, and the first day of school. It’s hell.
Welfare is the worst thing on earth, and the best. Best for helping people, worst for tearing apart personal lives. Making each person a status quo.
My three sisters and I were on Welfare when my parents were divorced – when I was 10 years-old. But, this isn’t what this story is about.
I have chosen to write about my mother, the parent that brought me into this world, and the parent who brought me up. (Raised me).
I felt in my heart that I should write about her all of the time. (Only write about her, and not my father). Yet, my mind always said to write about my father. My mind said he was the one you never knew, the one you loved as a child, and the one you want to know as an adult.
My mind is a terrible thing to listen to. All of my life, I wanted to write about my father because I loved him. Even though I never heard from him, even though he never supported us with anything, even though I never saw him. I loved him and that was enough.
Last week, my father died. Eve of Halloween. Halloween shall never be the same.
I am in school. I go to college in New Haven, CT. I am a Junior, majoring in Studio Art. I love ceramics and graphic design, and I am still confused as to which direction my life should lead.
Anyhow, last Tuesday, my little sister, Maria, called and said he had died. A policeman had come to my mother’s home and had told her. The policeman had gotten a call from the police of a neighboring city, saying that the body of my father was in the city’s morgue.
Anyhow, I am off the track. Details don’t really matter. It doesn’t matter how he died. He was an alcoholic.
jeannebirdblog 
October 18, 2013 at 1:03 pm
You have thoughts going in a different direction in each new paragraph. I feel like I’m in your brain!!
October 18, 2013 at 1:42 pm
Ahhhhhhhh. It does matter how he died! If he had died in a clean white hospital it would have been different. I’ll hit the bars with you to look for elderly men. Why the clarifications? I don’t like the words never and always. I never use them. There is always an exception. 🙂 Aunt Sabina was murdered on Halloween. My grandfather died on Halloween when my mother was 9 and a generation later the grief blanketed the holiday.
You keep in touch with the roommate. I don’t keep in touch with any of my college roommates. I’ve kind of given up on my high school friends. I want friends. I’m willing to do the drive since I did for 40 years. There is no intensity, no reaching out. Except sometimes, then I long for more.
Matt’s wife’s best friend, currently and since grammar school died suddenly of an aneurysm on a work trip to Paris yesterday. Matt is torn apart. She may have been the guardian for the kids and god mother. Certainly the holidays was be hard for Leslie. Sally lived in New Orleans. They talked daily and saw each other several times a week. I didn’t like her. She was downright rude to Wayne and I. And to her mother. We called her “the slut.” She once bought a very drunk boyfriend to Christmas dinner. I think she contributed to Leslie’s bad behavior toward us. Still I am horrified at her death. 43. The suddenness of it. Having to tell Brittain and Cooper. The pain for Leslie who doesn’t get along with her sister and whose parents have died. God, this is going to bring up all those losses.
Sally also told Matt that my book couldn’t get published and no one would be interested. Still I mourn her loss.
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