Kick Drum Heart

The sky is a heavy, soft blanket, speckled with stars and a glowing violet moon. After such a gorgeous day, it’s an entirely perfect finish.

I completed the staining of the barn today. I didn’t know it was possible to not repeat Avett Brothers songs after five hours, but mixed in with Corinne Bailey Rae, Heart, and Anna Netrebko, I had a steadily churning playlist from three thirty until eight.

I’m a little sore from all of the painting but satisfied. I think my grandpa would have been pleased to see the barn looking new and solid again, as opposed to the faded, sad state it had been in before.

I had never known my grandfather collected railroad lanterns. The day I clambered up to the storage space up top, I counted eighteen, and a little midget lamp.

There were tens of softballs up there, too: he’d been an umpire. I’d known that of course, but until I was working in the barn I hadn’t been aware of the items in it. He was a mechanic; there were hundreds of items that I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with scattered in that old barn, collected dust and debris and age. He’d known what all of them were for, though.

All I ever hear about my grandfather was that he was a good man. He was solid, he was loving, he lived a good life until the brain tumor got him. I wish I’d known him! I had years with him, but I was a little girl and had seen him with the adoring eyes of a granddaughter. I will never know for myself how great a man he was. Since I was three his mind had been riddled with cancer.

With the thoughts of lobotomy fresh in my mind, I can’t help but wonder: did the tampering the surgeons do with my grandpa’s brain affect him? I mean, obviously brain surgery would affect anyone, but did it mess with his brain function?

My grandma told me yesterday that he was belligerent toward her near the end. He’d acted… not like himself.

Grandma and I agreed that any addling of the brain tissue was bound to make someone a great deal out of it, and that we would rather just die than have anyone poke around inside our skulls.

Inwardly I was thinking, I’m sure he would have rather just died, too. And his angry behavior toward her when he was completely out of his mind might have been the reaction of a man with self-control stolen away from him by disease. He may have acted so “belligerently,” as she put it, because she’d treated him like a child throughout their marriage– at least while I was alive, and old enough to know the difference. He may have acted so out of turn because she may have been cheating on him while he was so, so sick with the dumb racist ass she’s with now.

I’ll be happy if they sell the barn I just painted and move away to Florida. If someone else moves in next door, the house I will always remember as Grandma’s, good on them.

But if the woods that I know as Grandpa’s is sold, before my dad can purchase it, I’ll have different feelings on it.

My strange, selfish grandmother can have her sexy man with white fluffy chest hair (kinky?) and move away. She doesn’t even know or care what I’m majoring in or whether or not I want to go away for college (she thought I was a homebody). She doesn’t know or care what Michelle likes to be called, or what instrument she plays. The other day, when I mentioned to her that Emma (Steever) is extremely talented, she was quick to jump in with, “Well you are too, chicky, you play the flute very well.” Because obviously I was comparing myself to Emma? (Um, no… there is no comparision to a piano master who lives and breathes music every second. The fact that she’s fricken phenomenal is just that: purely fact.)

And, hello, since when do I play the flute?!

I just have to smile and laugh and savor the time she does have with me. I’ve never been deprived of love–ever–in my life. So it’s a weird, twisting and stinging kind of feeling when a grandmother who once babysat me and loved my grandfather (or I’d thought she did) is so absorbed in her own adventures that she doesn’t even bother to know her only grandkids who live in the same state.

But the moon is lovely, tonight, anyway, so I’ll focus on that and not the cranky disposition this muggy heat has brought out in me. I don’t like the humidity in this house right now. Too oppressive, and depressing.