Well, that was quite a bender I was on! Nah, call it a loss of focus and confidence. I had posted three bits that I later felt were flaccid, whiny and more confessional than I want this to be.
A lot of that was the fault of the chardonnay served on Northwest Airlines. I meant to write a little riff about home-town nostalgia and how my wife and I had met in high school band, but as the chardonnay (and possibly other substances - see http://www.freep.com/news/metro/drug14_20030314.htm ) kept coming, and I kept thinking about how I’d been gone a week, and I kept playing ‘Love Song’ by the Cure on my Archos20 Recorder, things got a little sloppy. I deleted the entries early the next morning, hoping that I hadn’t damaged the internal organs of the 2 or 3 lost souls who had wandered by.
One interesting anecdote about my visit: a few weeks back, I downloaded some family tree software and set about trying to cobble at least a list of people’s names. One evening with my parents, I dragged my laptop out and asked them if they’d mind helping me with a few names. I hesitated to do this, because of the unavoidable presence of the unstated coda, “before you’re dead.” Anyway, I got about two names down and my dad spins this recollection about something my great-grandmother said to one of our shirt-tail cousins, a sweet, simple, preternaturally fertile woman: “S___, when you go to bed, you’d better put your feet in a 20-quart crock beforehand. And I don’t mean two 10-quart crocks, either.”
30 seconds to relate, at most, and my whole concept of my great-grandmother is thoroughly altered.
