Tuesday, 23 June 2009

• MCO Again

  I don't even know what to say, really, other than that I have to go to Orlando and I am dreading it.  Real, bone-dread.  Not because of the company necessarily, but because of the thing itself.  And the company is such that any weaknesses are pounced upon, seized, amplified into reasons for greater, other failures.

  The last time I was in Orlando was in 2006, and I swore I'd never go back.  I stood in the airport, dazed, looking at racks of candy, salt-water taffy, nut brittles with pictures of reptiles on the packages.  My mother asked me if I wanted anything, and I said I had a headache.  I remember buying a bottle of water, a packet of Excedrin, and buying a packet of one of those Crystal Light things to put in the water.  They were new, then, those flavor packs.  And I remember leaving Orlando, then, smelling like the soap from the store out in the concourse--the same store they have in Soho and Herald Square--with my bottle of flavored water, and thinking that it would never be the same place ever again.

  Orlando was where we flew into to visit my grandparents, after they'd moved from the Philadelphia suburbs to Florida; a stop-over en route to the wilds of the central part of the state.  We weren't really a Disney type of family--in fact, I hate most Disney things, much to the chagrin of my in-laws, who fetishize their annual trip with their mid-twentysomething daughters.

  In 2006, my grandmother died.  We'd gotten warning a few days earlier, while I was out visiting my parents in California for a wedding.  My mother and I had left the central coast of California to go to the central coast of Florida on a moment's notice to do the work of mothers and daughters.  To wait. 

  And I waited.  I sat and I held her small hand, and I watched the ministrations of the LPN, caring for my grandmother's small, precious pinkness in her last days.  I watched my mother clearing her things; touched the curves of the deco bureau I loved so, so much.  I lingered on the last of the physical remnants of the house outside of Philadelphia, then the house in Florida, then the small apartment--chairs, tables, lamps--and then finally, the things left in small room she was sleeping in, resting in, dying in.

  The night before the end came, the series finale of Will and Grace was playing on the TV, and some one of the characters played, "Unforgettable" on the piano.  The sounds of the piano on tinny TV speakers echoed through the emptied room...mother, daughter, grandmother, strains of significance on an otherwise insignificant program vibrating through the room on a Florida night in May.

  She died the next morning.

  And we left that day.

  That was the last time I was in Orlando.  And I had no desire to ever go back.  To be in that airport; to see the happy Disney families and sad adult children coming into town to do the work I once did with my mother, or leaving dog-faced from having done the thing people always come to Florida to do.

  I'm sure it will be fine.  I'm sure I'll walk through the airport, not noticing the same things that once struck me; that the gift shop will somehow be in another terminal; that the soap store will have closed down.  I am sure things will be different.  Things are always different.

  But in these moments--these tender moments, in particular--I miss my grandparents.  And I wish I were going to Florida to see them, not for any other reason.  I wish I were going to pick up a car and drive to the middle of nowhere, and I wish I were going to be greeted with those terrible pancakes in a package that my grandfather used to force feed me.  I wish my grandmother were going to tell me about how scared of the world she was, and demand I drink a glass of orange juice.

  I had these thoughts just the other day--on Friday--as I was driving the turnpike.  I thought that things would have been so different these last few years if my grandfather, who I called Bop, had been alive.  He always had strong opinions, and even if he wasn't always right, and even if he interfered, at least he set a boundary.

  No sooner had I thought that than a car passed me with the license plate, "HI BOP"

  Sometimes, it is hard to miss them.  But the greatest thing, I suppose, is knowing that they are always there.

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