“I’ve never voted,” she said. The grandmother I adored. The grandmother whose oak-like presence sheltered and grounded my turbulent childhood. During a visit decades ago, we must’ve been talking about an election, the TV news on. I remember feeling stunned, then embarrassed, and even a little ashamed at her complacency.
We often conceive of loss only as a falling away, but it is also a binding. Think of the groups whose only purpose is to bring together people who have lost the same thing.
We’re driving up to Marquette, a college town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for the beginning of my freshman year, something no other Vargo has ever done in the history of the Vargos. As we drive, I grow more ashamed with each passing mile marker. My father is old and we are poor and I am 18, trying to reinvent myself in a place I’ve never known.
Maybe, like my mother, I am not as afraid of fear as I thought. Because, right now, every part of me wants a storm I can stand before.
The brain is a funny thing. Well, my brain is. Hilarious, really. In my fear, my neurons forgot the commands for putting on flip-flops, but they could formulate the thought: I hope the newspaper will mention the lovely golden hue of my cadaver.
Nothing illuminates the beauty of the average day quite so brilliantly as the fear that the average day has vanished indefinitely — maybe for always.
