A NEW PLACE TO LAY MY HEAD

I'm moving. I'm going to gather up all my shit from the apartment (see snapshot) in which I have lived for the last three or so years and I'm going to take my balls and I'm going to go home. My new home will be my grandmother's old home. She doesn't live there anymore. She now resides in an assisted living center, at which they take good care of her and she has--I assume--some acquaintances.

I will feel, I think, like a hermit crab, in a way, shucking my old shell and moving to live in a another's. The rent that I will pay to my parents is basically the rent that I pay now (with the addition of the gas bill) and the payments shall go towards balancing Grandma's exorbitant fee for living in a place that provides 24-hour care.

I met my mom at my soon-to-be-new-digs, today, and we had a meeting with a couple of women who are going to paint the formerly off-pink bedroom into a more manly color. Like apricot. Joking. It's going to be biege. And I'm having them paint the bathroom, as well. That, too, is an off-pink color and, as Pink Floyd once sang, "That. Will. Not. Do!"

I have mixed emotions about the move. I am quite glad, obviously, to move out of my apartment, although it is a nice one, and move into a three-level home with a fenced-in backyard. Lou is doing cartwheels, too. I look forward to having more room to move around and more privacy. [As an ancillary note, if I hear, like my old neighbors, my newer neighbors making hyena-like love, replete with "Fuck me! Fuck me!" outbursts, that would mean that they were way too loud. I mean, way too loud. Also, considering that one of my neighbors is my grandmother's age...forget it, it's too early in the day for that thought process. Actually, any time of the day is too early for that thought process.]

So, hell yeah, I'm glad to have this opportunity.

Here is the flip-side of the dollar bill: It comes at a cost. The only reason I am able to move into the house is because Grandma ain't doing so well; she can't make it on her own, anymore. And, obviously, that makes me sorta wistful. Wistful for the old days. Wistful for times when my loved ones were still strong and fit and not feeling as acutely the ravages of time. I know, I know. Time moves along. The clock is always ticking. We're not here for a long time so we better damned well make it a good time. I know all of that, intellectually. It's the emotional side of life that has a penchant for biting me in the ass.

So we were there, and I was choosing paint colors for the two rooms, and the essence of Grandma and Grandad really swam over me. I could see, in my mind, the ghost-image of Grandad, at the kitchen counter, sitting on the high bar-stool-like chairs and expounding upon some point that he is making, sometimes stuttering, spittle sometimes flying, the ashes on his omnipresent cigarettes growing longer and longer until, with an expressive hand gesture, they fall to the floor. I could see, in my mind, Grandma, down in the basement, playing Ping-Pong, at age 80, serving the ball with that wicked spin that she so aptly employed.

I walked up into the attic and I breathed in the smell of Grandparent. Not musty, not offensive in any way--just Grandparent. The wall was lined with books and the old broken Zenith was against the far wall and Grandad's fossil and rock collections lay, as they have for 20 years, under dusty glass in the corner of the room. I walked across the room in which my uncle had slept as a boy, and I looked on the dusty desk and I saw the medals that Grandad had won as a roller skater back in the 1940s and '50s. Still in place under the glass, they forcibly brought to me the passage of time and the memories that get lost, sometimes.

I went back downstairs and into the basement and saw the Ping-Pong table, at which many games were played and many great shots were made. I looked at the south wall of the basement and took in the pock marks made from Grandad practicing with his blow-dart gun. I remembered the targets he used to put up and I remember how once, when going for accuracy, he shot one dart and then followed it up with another dart right in the center of the first. He had saved it, for a bit, displayed it with pride. He was also proud of the time when he had someone bounce a Ping-Pong ball and he shot it dead through the center, catching it in mid-bounce.

I went back upstairs.

"Yeah," I said to Tara the painter, "I'd like the bathroom painted in 'Alpaca Gray.'"

"Alpaca Gray," you see, goes well with the sepia-toned ghostly memories that will surround me the first week or so that I live, feeling like an interloper, there on Harwood Street.