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Forgotten Friday: Sister, Single

March 27, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

A week from tomorrow, my sister will be married.

She’s incredible, as far as sisters go. Sure, she used to beat me mercilessly until I was old enough to fight back, and then continued to psychologically torment my teenage years in that special way only an older sibling can. But our spats, never truly serious, built a foundation for mutual respect as adults, taught us each other’s strengths and weaknesses, gave us insight into each other very few can ever match. Becca is my sister, and yet, on another level, she is me, and I am her.

Excitement buzzes around the nuptials like worker bees returning to the hive, spindly legs covered in potential future sweetness. The stress of months of planning fades, leaving behind a warm, heavy blanket of exhausted joy. My own wedding felt like a drop of water on a hot skillet; beautiful to watch dance and sizzle with frenetic exuberance, but gone much too fast. A few hours on a single day doesn’t seem to do justice to the proverbial ascension into a combined tomorrow, but it’s all we’ve got, so it’s what we do.

A sibling wields a unique kind of love; one born from a nearly identical shared experience. A companion to all those stories lost behind closed suburban doors, a peer like no friend or fiance can be, if only by virtue of the length of the relationship. Not even a very close parent can understand the generational, cultural, and emotional ties that tether brother and sister. Your sibling knows you at your very best and very worst; the haven of your home where you hid your fears and hollered you successes was theirs too, after all.

The wedding will be wonderful. I have no doubts. But a part of me selfishly mourns. A week from tomorrow, the last bastion of the life I knew as a child will be gone.

The house we grew up in was sold years ago, and I can’t bring myself to pull it up on Google Maps, never mind actually drive by it. My cleats have long been hung up as soccer made way for computers and paychecks. My father’s strong hands and voice no longer fill my days with mentoring and humor. All the pieces of youthful vim I cobbled together into the collective tale of my upbringing have melded into the flat pages of the family’s history book, save for my sister, and those tangible, living memories that still swirl around her.

Becca is finally happy, after a long stint of what one could argue was decided unhappiness. Ian’s a good dude, and their future is more than bright. Marriage is what we expect anyway, right? That step that solidifies romantic success, forever friendship, societal acceptance as a lovingly legitimate couple? It’s a major milestone into adulthood, one undertaken by serious adults seriously planning the rest of their lives. Children don’t get married; they shoo it away with cootie-laden ews. To be married is to be mature, or at the very least, brave enough to peek tentatively into the future while holding someone’s hand.

When I walk her down that aisle playing impromptu patriarch, I’m walking us both down an inevitable, unchangeable path. When she says “I, do” the echo will resonate through all our lives, signaling the beginning of an era when we’re all finally free from the fetters of nostalgia, free to appreciate and acknowledge the source while actively moving towards the destination. My dad’s motto was, “never look back,” and now, on the verge of having the freedom to relish in all the possibility wrapped and bundled in each tomorrow, I realize that his words didn’t mean “never remember” but instead “never dwell.”

I mourn, because that’s what you do when you lose something. But the death of one thing often means the birth of another, so my mourning is tempered by the celebration that my sister, the female embodiment of Gray, flowers anew, in a garden of her own tender creation.

A week from tomorrow, my sister will be married.

A week from tomorrow, I can finally let the ghosts of the last thirty years rest, while the spirits of the next sixty come out to play.

Forgotten Friday: My Sherry Amour

January 24, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

There are few things that simultaneously sting and soothe as much as sorting through the assorted material detritus of someone’s life. All the papers, the scribbles, the notes left hanging in the pulpy ether, inken echoes of a person’s voice on every leaf. Even the things that don’t bare their literal mark carry grainy nostalgic gravitas, reminders of how that person drove down the highways of time, what prosaic hour-fillers caused a traffic jam of commitment and desire in those relatively few moments we’re blessed with consciousness.

I was helping my mom with some simple jobs at her house, changing a light bulb here, replacing a battery there, organizing her transition into fiduciary executorship even farther over there. After I’d gotten the smoke detectors to screech their new battery announcement through the whole house, she asked if I’d take a look at a box in the garage. A box filled with wine.

I expected to find some store-bought merlots and cabernets, maybe some of the proverbial “good stuff” that my dad had hoarded away as an apocalyptic just-in-case. She pointed me to the decaying ruins of a red and white cardboard cube with eight emerald bottles sticking out like prairie dogs viewing the plain from the safety of their holey home. The bottles looked familiar, but distant, that friend from elementary school whose face changed just enough from the evolution out of childhood and into adulthood that you only recognize them after a few minutes of guarded, remote study. I knew these bottles at one time, maybe even filled them and corked them, but couldn’t triangulate when, or why, or how.

They were unlabeled (the hallmark of Gray family breweries), covered in silky webs and solid dust, and gave no hint of their contents. My dad had been as eccentric in his brewing as he had in the rest of his life: there was equal chance this was carrot wine, rhubarb wine, banana wine, or possibly even sour apple.

The only way to find out was to pierce the cork with silver spiral.

As the soft cylinder popped out, I was hit with oakey, odd aromas. Out of the bottle it was brandy-brown, liquefied caramel, chicken gravy made from homemade stock. Syrupy legs slipped their glassy nylons, slithering seductive and sexy. This was no normal wine. Suddenly, as woody wonder hit my tongue, I remembered.

When my parents moved out of and sold my childhood home, my dad had found a carboy deep in the under-stair recesses of the basement. The airlock was Sahara dry, and we assumed the six or so gallons was lost to oxidation and history. He had no idea what it was, or why he’d forgotten about it, so before we poured it out on Dionysus’s grave, we sampled it. Turns out he’d made sherry. Possibly accidentally. Accidental sherry that had aged for five plus years in quiet, unmolested darkness.

I helped him bottle it, and just like he had, let its existence slip the fetters of my memory. By the time I found it, it had lived another five peaceful years, watching, waiting.

To sip a ten year old sherry, made by your father’s hand, is to reconnect to the way he spent his time. It’s his last vintage, the final fading fermentation of a life that reached full attenuation months ago. And now it’s all mine, salvaged from a dusty garage, plucked from my memory, planted in front of me to raise in cheers of life gone and life yet to live.

My dad's ten year old sherry in my grandma's (his mom's) hundred year old decanter.

My dad’s decade old sherry in my grandma’s (his mom’s) century old decanter.

Beer Review: Sam Adam Blueberry Hill Lager

April 12, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

“Have I ever told you about Blueberry Hill?”

Edgar sat as Edgar liked to sit, in the almond slices of afternoon that came through his window like a star forced through the slats of a wooden park bench. The light caught him, processed him, and charged him. The verdict: guilty of age. It glanced off his head, peeked through his little white hairs, those few near-translucent hangers-on, stubborn and unwilling to finally just give up, poking up from his saggy head-skin like defiant sign-waving protesters.

His eyes fixed on the sterile room’s only window, he went on, his voice an anachronistic skip like the hand of a record player stuck in the same groove, repeating the same sounds, desperately needing to be reset.

“Sheila always reminds me of the hill. She comes to my house to get me, loitering at the end of my drive. From my front door she looks like a tiny flower dancing on the wind. My dedicated daffodil.”

Despite the medication and the careful care from his well-trained and well-meaning attendants, earthquakes still raged through his nerves, the epicenter his cracked and faulted brain. As his hands involuntarily rattled against the wheels of his chair, his eyes remained still but squinted, shielding themselves from the barrage of rays.

“She sure is something. Those sun dresses she wears…” he closed his eyes, savoring the memory, chocolate on the tongue of his mind, “…the wind catches the fabric and her hair and blows them all around, and she giggles. She likes to wrap as much of her hand around mine as she can, and then we walk towards the hill, just the two of us in love, not a care in the world. Yes sir, she sure is something.”

A cloud passed between man and sun and the stream of light flickered like a memory captured on film, replayed so many times that the vivid colors of youth faded to grainy black and white. The cloud lingered a moment longer and the room showed itself true: not haven or refuge or sanctuary, but a grey and gruesome headstone. It was not here that he lived, anyway. Edgar resided in a Massachusetts that no longer existed, a home remade perfect and pristine by those few fleeting snapshots that still remained intact. It was a place of another time, one he could always, and never, return to.

“You know why they call it blueberry hill? ” A few-toothed smile climbed up onto his face. “The blueberries bushes! Dozens of them, randomly growing on the side of the hill. In summer, they’re packed with so many of those juicy little things. They look so nice, sometimes I feel bad about eating them and ruining the perfect scene. Everyone always says that wild blueberries are too sour to eat but, oh, not these. These are perfect. Just like my Sheila.”

Leaning forward in his chair, trying not to let the wheels slip out of his achy grasp, straining against the ichor in his bones, Edgar longed to see a little further out the window.

“That hill, let me tell you, it isn’t just a hill. That place is love incarnate. I stole my first kiss there, a few years back, but Sheila didn’t mind. I was lying next to her, laughing that we forgot a blanket again, and as she smiled, staring up at all that blue and white, I rolled over and kissed her cheek. She didn’t pull away, didn’t laugh, just turned and looked at me with those eyes and I knew. That grass and those bushes. That’s the place.”

The hill. Sheila. April blueberries. Teenage love on a spring day. The world he saw out that window was an invisible paradise.

“Can I go outside? It’s such a beautiful day, I’m sure Sheila’s already waiting on me.”

It was an involved process to get him ready; his lungs couldn’t muster any defense from the onslaught of pollen and pollutants, and he could barely move under the weight of the oxygen tank and UV blanket. He was proud, but in his protective suit, looked more machine than man, more artificial than real.

He blinked, staring out over the poorly kept courtyard, staring at the lone gnarled stick that masqueraded as a tree and the dozen bluebells that struggled up through the sun-scorched ground. After surveying the landscape, his shoulders sagged and he rolled his head back slightly, blue-green eyes looking into mine past the molded clear breathing mask of the respirator. Those eyes, with longing spilling out as tears, flashed for a moment, his computer rebooting as if it had hit some unrecoverable error upon seeing this ruin of nature.

“Have I ever told you about Blueberry Hill?”

Forgotten Friday: Cataloged

March 22, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Humans have an odd obsession with organization. Our science is built on the idea of discovering and evaluating the world so that we can properly quantify, classify, and put nature into little understanding-boxes. Spirituality is bent on finding and filtering philosophical explanations for the absurdity of our existence so we can codify, mollify, and beautify the unknowns of life.

We’re taught from as young as we can remember to be tidy and clean-up after ourselves, and as adults we pity anyone who can’t seem to organize themselves correctly. We have so many things for organization: desks, bookshelves, and libraries; computers, servers, and databases; boxes, closets, and warehouses. We even have organizational tools for highly specific kinds of items like tool chests and jewelry boxes and card catalogs.

Clever contraption for cataloging categorized cards.

My neighbor won this great metal beast at a Prince George’s County fairground estate auction. He’d bought it for his wife (who apparently had always wanted a card catalog, because hey, they’re sweet) and I helped him unload it from his pick-up truck.

First note: card catalogs weigh about 4500 pounds. Second note: when you buy a piece of furniture at an estate sale, you get everything inside of that piece of furniture as well.

Before we carried it inside the house, we riffled through each drawer, looking for trash and treasures and trinkets. From first glances it appeared this catalog belonged to a handyman of sorts; someone who needed a crude filing system for his assorted pieces of string, metal, and wood. We found all kinds of random things inside: old paint brushes, six balls of twine, four small packs of copper rivets, two small boxes of brads (that spilled everywhere), a half-used can of saddle soap, an old manila envelope full of tempered steel nails (slightly rusty), a large timer in a metal case, a very old Honeywell wall-mounted thermostat, and five random, non-matching gloves.

We also found 3 bars of FELS-NAPTHA heavy duty laundry soap (often used as a home remedy to treat poison ivy and oak), each in different states of deterioration.

Stain pre-treatment for the handyman who wants to keep his clothes fresh.

Stain pre-treatment for the discerning handyman who wants to keep his clothes fresh.

Fascinated by the cross-section of life that these tidbits represented, I began to wonder who had owned this, filled it with his junk without purpose or reason, left it full of junk to be sold at auction at some random point in the future. After searching all the drawers, we finally came across another envelope – this one filled with other bits of metal – with a name written in stylized pencil: John Stubbs.

Using the age and packaging of the FELS-NAPTHA soap as a rough time marker, public records for Maryland show two John Stubbs this catalog could have possibly belonged to, one living (age 81) and one recently deceased. Both lived close to where the catalog was purchased, and worked in fields (power and tractors) that could have led to the collection and accumulation of so many random pieces of repairbilia.

Stubbs. John Stubbs. I’ll take an old card catalog, shaken, not stirred.

It is simultaneously creepy and cool to dig through items that belong(ed) to a complete stranger. You get to build whatever stories about their life you want: who they were, what they did, how they did it, why it ended up in your hands. You get a tiny, untainted view of a part of a life, a connection to this person without bias or structure or presupposition. This card catalog contained more that just assorted crap, it contained a microcosm of John Stubbs, an everlasting, undying reminder of the years he spent through the stuff he used.

We’ll all leave behind card catalogs of sorts. An echo in our possessions Boxes of old, unlabeled photos, notes in the margins of our favorite books, tooth marks on the end of a careworn pen. It will be the legacy of who we were to the people we never met. A final footprint that can’t be so easily erased by time. Our final chance to organize the memories of our time on the planet.

What will be in your catalog?

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver