days could maybe be weirder-

I am not sure.

I think a thunderstorm will start up any minute- I cannot really tell.  The sky gets dark then clears… over and over.  My son and I went for a very early morning walk and had a little talk about how my sister will be over today and she will be very sad.   We then talked about how it is my mom’s birthday today and she will also be very sad.  I told him that his great-grandmother went away but where she is she can recognize people again… hmm.  I didn’t tell him that his uncle’s step-father died… I just don’t know what he knows.  I think he thinks death is something that happens to bad robots or something.  He cried when he saw an owl die in a cartoon once… This is the rough part of the parenting thing.  Death and potty training, man.

The easy part?  We are back in our apartment singing to the Kinks and Tegan and Sarah and eating strawberries.  I feel so a little guilty lately because I think my life is, in all ways but financially, easier than most.  Maybe it could be complicated, but it isn’t.

I spent the weekend listening to drunk guests spill their guts.  Maybe I should be a bartender.  For some reason people want to tell me things.  I sit there and let them look through my mp3 player.  We watch documentaries and syndicated television and they ask me about my son and my husband and tell me about whatever sordid things got them to where they are now and I solve some of their problems and hook them up with fresh towels… In some cases save our company a lot of business by calming down freaked out people.  This weekend I prevented a small racially motivated crisis.  Maybe sometimes people just need to listen to those poor drunks far away from home.  Trinidad and Tobago is pretty damn far from here.

So I am going away.  My son and I are heading up ‘home’ to see my parents, pay my respects to my late grandmother… just be in that place I never go to anymore.  We have to leave my husband behind (and on Father’s Day!) because he has to work (the job is brand new).  I was feeling very weird about all of this until I saw some pictures early this morning. They were pictures of endless green fields and deep, deep woods- all of the things I don’t even realize how much I miss.  I felt something sort of heavy in my chest.. homesick! I got homesick.  Homesick just in time! Just in time to take my son out to the middle of nowhere and show him the trails in the forest that were mine when I was just a little older than him.  It makes me feel so strange.  Maybe it is because I miss my grandmother?

I wonder how much more of my father’s side of the family I will ever see or hear of again now that my grandmother is gone?  They are such a mystery to me: Waco cult, restaurants I never really patronized, the Blue Oyster Cult? A lot of things are the stuff of legends… slightly unconfirmed legends.  Some are confirmed legends and just as strange.  Maybe I will make good use of my visit to learn a thing or two.

It sure is hot and humid today!  I think we will go get ice cream.