Only one grandparent left, after grandma followed suit in just a few weeks, and when you can codify the mourning period into a process, you know something’s off. There it sat in my inbox, a new e-mail from my father timestamped early Sunday morning–brief and cordial, yet with an undercurrent of distance. He would make sure to put my name on the floral arrangement, and that was that. I wasn’t even going to try to imagine what it was like for my old man, fresh from the loss of both his parents.
There will come a day, too, when I won’t need to imagine, because I’ll be in his shoes, assuming peril or disease don’t call for me first. That’s the bitter truth of the matter, anyhow, and I was thinking about this over the weekend. Perhaps that’s the point of grieving: to reflect. All the ceremony isn’t for those who have passed. The dead have no use for funerals. They don’t care about flower arrangements or who’s catering afterward.
No, it’s a reminder for the living. I remember being convinced, once upon a time, that my grandparents would always be there to spoil and reminisce, and here we are. It’s the slow march. It feels like you’re in line for a diving board, halfway up the ladder with no way to turn back. And if the mandate is to make your peace with those ahead of you, well, I’ve failed again. Same regrets as last time: should’ve made the trip across the Pacific, sent more pictures, or called, at the very least, but the point is moot now.
In instances like these, the English language is deficient. I could say I lost my grandmother, though that word would be wholly inadequate. You can lose your phone, or a parking spot, your wallet, or the office pool, but a person? It smacks of negligence. Other words are needed, and “goodbye” and “I am sorry” are all I’ve got.
In the four months that have intervened since my run-in with authentic Chinese food, I’ve managed to hold true to my embargo on Asian cuisine. Fortune cookies have been exempt from this restriction, however, because they’ve been critical to a longitudinal study I’ve been conducting, wherein said cookies are posited as early indicators of economic recovery.
Let me explain, at the risk of channeling a poor man’s version of Freakonomics. During the housing boom, you may recall how these little slips of paper lost their punch. Rather than predict the future, they would make lame declarative statements like “you have a great personality,” or peddle aphorisms like “the early bird catches the worm (and deposits it in the wonton soup special).” Then the recession hit, with a glacial recovery in tow, and these fortunes hearkened back to the gutsy predictions of old. Take this one, for instance: “You shall soon make a long overdue personal decision.” Earthshaking? No, but at least the cookie attempted to call it. Or consider this one, which I squirreled away in my desk last fall: “Good fortune is yours when you stock tons of fortune cookies.” It’s a promissory metacookie, or possibly a middle finger to the diner, and really there’s nowhere to go from there but down.
This one, however, was collected this week, when the Dow reached a new milestone: “Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.” I mean, double-u tee fuck? I want my cookies to prognosticate, not hedge with a self-help one-liner. Then again, the theory is that when times are flush, these printers fear the lash of legal action, and so they water down their statements. But when times are tight, and people lack the funds to file frivolous lawsuits, these fortune printers cut loose. This means I should cross my fingers for something along the lines of “you may or may not have just eaten a cookie. Either way is totally fine.”
Halfway through scanning the news today, I realized with some chagrin that I had completely forgotten, in just three short weeks, the Arizona shootings. It was shameful, really, that an event of such gravity disappeared so quickly into the ether for me, and I started evaluating my relationship with media. Usually, whenever we discuss media, the term is employed to describe the rich stores of electronic entertainments I hork down by the pound. But when we talk about media in the traditional sense, which is also readily available in great quantity, the situation is markedly different.
News is overwhelming. I’d go insane, if I had a television or radio on all day, because the steady flow of information, heavy as it may be, is downright hypnotic. I turn to Newsmap instead to make sense of what’s current. The reason why I even bother with this ritual, ostensibly, is because responsible global citizenship calls for it. It’s context, a reminder that Charlotte–and the U.S., on days when I can remember all those other states–doesn’t sit at the center of the world.
That’s the mission statement, at least, and in my heart of hearts, I know I’ve already failed. Take the Egyptian protests, for instance. I had to sneak a furtive peek at Wikipedia last Thursday night to understand what all those people were doing on that bridge. I was playing catch-up to a significant chapter in history. And you know what? One or two bylines notwithstanding, I’ve fallen behind again. For the people marching right now, this is momentous, their entire framework reset. For me, however, it remains an occasionally updated headline that’s bolded in slightly bigger font on nytimes.com.
But then I scrolled further down the page, read this article, and I was firmly put in my place. This is why I scan the news, I remember thinking. These creatures are fascinating. What was important for me was realizing that before the recession, before shoe bombs, before full body scans, before whatever happened on The Bachelor last week, these little fuckers were going MacGyver with leaves and twigs, and they’ll be doing the same thing long after all this passes. That’s comforting and, you’ll have to excuse me here, the bird’s-eye view. Now, all I have to do is figure out how to lure a New Caledonian to my computer and then, using only a stick, a small bolt of cloth, three pieces of duct tape, and my keyboard, teach it to post every Tuesday and Thursday. Puzzle me that, crow.