The Sun Looks Mighty Red
Posted by Moose on June 26th, 2008. Filed under: Gene Pool.Freak lightning storms set off something like 800 fires in central California this week. When I woke up and left the house yesterday, the sky was tinged with smoke. I drove the 50 miles from San Francisco to San Jose yesterday afternoon under a gray haze. My brother works as a firefighter with the forest service, and methinks he and his crew have their work cut out for them. During fire season they work 16 hour shifts, take a few hours off and go back for more. He loves it. Which is only one of the many differences between us. Attempting to stifle one of hundreds of fires while hot, exhausted, and covered in poison oak does not sound like my idea of fun. In fact, it sounds rather similar to my most literal definition of hell. Which is why he does what he does and I do what I do. What I do has very little to do with fire. Unless I drop a stray mushroom into the burner of my stove and it starts smoking.
Walking into my mom’s house after the smoky drive, I was greeted not with the customary “hello” so common in polite society, but with a “Where on earth did you get those pictures?” Referring, of course, to the pictures I posted the other day of my grandmother Margaret.
“I don’t remember her this way,” my mom said, as my aunt and I flipped through the photo album. Reading your comments on that post made me realize that I don’t remember her that way either – fun, happy, and in possession of a smashing wardrobe. My only knowledge of her is based on my mom’s stories, most gathered at least 20 years after those photos were taken.
Flipping ahead in the album, my mom pointed out another picture. “This is how I remember her.” My grandmother was older and had a furrow between her brows. The laughing girl wasn’t gone precisely, but she’d been buried under the layers life tends to heap on us. Most of my mom’s stories involve a rather stern woman called “mother” – as opposed to the more affectionate “daddy” assigned to her father. But one story involves my grandma lounging on the couch in a leopard print coat, dramatically waving either a highball or a cigarette. Either way, it feels closer to the girl she was, hair wild and smile big. I don’t know what kind of life my grandmother led, what kind of pressures she was under. I imagine the pressures were many, she lived through the Depression, the second World War, and later with an alcoholic husband.
As much as I recognize myself and my family in my grandma’s smile, I also recognize myself in her furrowed brow and tense expression. There were days last year when I looked in the mirror and saw lines etched between my eyes, courtesy of many miserable hours. The hours and days and weeks when my relationship was circling down the toilet, in spite of our best efforts. Even my hair hurt from the tension. Another aunt, my father’s sister, trims my shaggy head at her salon in Half Moon Bay. A few months ago, she found my first gray hair, yanked it merrily out, and handed it to me. I’ll be thirty in a few weeks.
I don’t have kids yet and I suspect my life has been – and will be – much easier than my grandmother’s. And I want my children to remember my laugh, not the furrow between my eyes. So I’m concentrating on enjoying my life, just as it is right now, and not fretting about what it isn’t or what I might like it to be.
I also need to stop worrying about the hundreds of fires burning around us. Trust my brother and his fellow firefighters to put them out, so we can all see the sky again.
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June 26th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
It must be so interesting for the families of bloggers to read fresh angles on people and events. I would like it if more of my friends and family blogged. I think.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I trust that it will all be OK too. We had some crazy fires around here three years ago and it was crazy.
As for the furrowed brow…sometimes I catch myself giving that face to my kids and I want to take it back. I want to be a good Mom who keeps her kids on the right path, but I also want them to remember the “Fun” Mom.
Here’s hoping I don’t screw it up.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
I noticed how odd the sun has been looking, but it didn’t even occur to me that it was because of the fires (and this from the girl who was half a mile from a couple!). Very insightful, Miss Moose, as always.
June 27th, 2008 at 6:50 am
In the last post’s comments, you say that your mother was born in 1967. How on earth, then, will you be 30 in a few weeks? Your mother is only 41! I sense an interesting story…
June 27th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Hi Jen,
I was kidding. I didn’t think my mother would appreciate me telling the world her real age. Or, since she probably doesn’t care that much, thought she might be amused that I lopped 25 years off her age. I probably didn’t make that clear.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Oy I can’t believe how bad it’s been around here (I’m only 55 miles away). The only benefit I can see (feel) is that the temperatures are lower which is nice. But I would like to be able see blue sky again sometime.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:41 am
No, I don’t care if people know how old I am. So for anyone interested, I just turned 63. 1967 was the year I graduated from college. And as for the furrowed brow, I have one! Do I dare ask Moose how she’ll remember ME down the road?!?!?!
June 27th, 2008 at 9:48 am
OK, so I love your mom. And the way you tell a story.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Oh! It was the fires that turned the sun red. Silly, May. I thought it was the end of the world…as we know it. But then why were we all still here? This explains so much.
Being thirty rules. You’ll like it. You can get into gardening and ceramics and coupon clipping and no one will think anything of it.
June 27th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
“The laughing girl wasn’t gone precisely, but she’d been buried under the layers life tends to heap on us.” I love how honest and real that is. Thanks, Moose. You’re an amazing writer.
June 28th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
I got my first gray hair in high school, freaked out, and thought it meant I would be dead by forty. Then I wrote myself an eulogy. (I was dramatic back then. Clearly, so much has changed.) Hopefully, you took it better.
And, after such a packed blog, the one thing that I most want to say is that I hate it when I drop something onto the burners of my stove. It smokes and even after you clean it, it still smells like whatever you burned for months afterwards everytime you turn the burner on. It’s like the stove is taunting you about your klutziness. Like the guy who keeps retelling a joke long after it stops cracking anybody but himself up because they’ve heard it so many times? Dude, stove, it wasn’t that funny, give it up already.
There may be reasons I got my first gray hair in high school.
June 30th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I love your mom too now. Bring her to lunch!
June 30th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Well, if you do end up with a furrow, just make sure you’re wearing hot pants. That’ll draw their eyes away from the furrow, boy howdy.
And you easily have one of the most beautiful smiles ever. And I just know it through flicker. So that’s what I’m sure your kids will remember. Well, that and the hot pants.
July 1st, 2008 at 10:25 am
Loved this, this yet-another-fine-example of your exquisite writing skills. I truly appreciate the many layered and complex portrait of your grandmother, and how it affects – and continues – in two more generations (and perhaps, beyond).
Riveting reading, your legacy makes.