Bittersweet

Pierre Fontenot Thursday, June 23, 2016 Comments Off on Bittersweet
Bittersweet

I remember a day in my childhood, at my grandmother’s; it’s her, my aunt, my first cousin, and me, the little boy kid. They were going through a photo album, mostly black ‘n white, page after page was Remember Them, Remember When, and every time they’d flip to a new page it was “ahh” and “awww” and “ohhh”. I didn’t know what bittersweet was, but I was hearing the sounds pronounced.

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Bittersweet is being old enough to notice you’re getting forgetful, yet still remembering your childhood landline phone number. It’s remembering calls on Christmas day from faraway relatives, passing the phone from person to person, with urgency, because long distance was expensive. It’s when “work” was a few Saturday morning chores that interrupted your real job, playing. Bittersweet are memories of childhood summers of gone-all-day, peeing outdoors, the adults not worried, because they knew you’d be home for supper. It’s driving by your first grade teacher’s house and remembering teachers who were mother/teachers and teacher/mothers and grace o’ God, good for you… There’s a house that mattered, and it’s still there, but the people that made it matter are no more…and you’d have to knock on a door that once was never locked for you, and let strangers peek through the little hole… It’s an empty lot, or a WalMart, but it used to be something else, something special. You’re getting old and realize that almost nobody that drives by knows what it used to be. Bittersweet is seeing your high school class on a billboard as you enter town, District Champs, State Champs, O what a time, and then doing the calendar math…and then remembering crazy still-keeping-his-secret, who climbed the water tower with a can of black spray paint, to say Class of 19xx We Were Here…and smiling at the irony, that now he’s the mayor. Bittersweet is remembering early bouts with death, a goldfish on its side, a moment of silence and then down the toilet, or the puppy that got buried in a shoe box in the shade of the oak tree. Their death was a Big Deal at the time but nothing like hearing Taps at your grandfather’s funeral and Amazing Grace at your grandmother’s… Bittersweet is watching your parents get old. Momma might have hid the gray, but there’s no hiding the wobble in her walk. It’s being the first one in the family with a fancy answering machine, and the last to get an iPhone, which you use to call youngsters, for help, to install a weather app.

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I remember in my twenties, my antennae up for change, open to fad, hoping for cool, but when I went home to Maw Maws I wanted everything JustTheSame. She had a yellow cookie jar, a little woodpecker toothpick holder, and some tourist souvenir, a piece of cedar with a thermometer on it that someone had brought home from Hot Springs, Arkansas; there was nothing to covet, but I’d have mourned if any of it had been rearranged. Home was home, and solid, until I left, and the leaving changed me, and I found it true, that you can never go home again. You don’t want to undo the growth in you, but there’s a cost to new rings on the tree.

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Bittersweet is remembering your grandmother’s favorite lipstick and perfume. You’d never wear either, not once, but for her, all the decades you knew her… Bittersweet is the smell of your grandfather’s denim work jacket, or remembering how he spliced the broken laces on his work shoes rather than buy new ones, or the empty nail on his garage wall, where his old wooden handled hammer used to hang. It’s remembering the first time your grandfather let you hold a silver dollar, or the way your grandmother kept coins in a little leather coin purse, or the little widow down the pew in your childhood church, who used to give you a Dentyne gum after church if you’d behaved, and the way she reached into her purse just before the deacons passed the plate and untied a knot in a handkerchief and plucked a few quarters and dimes and put them in the offering. Bittersweet is Something Happening and back in the day you knew just who to tell, and how’d they’d react, but now it’s life without them, and there’s a hole for things-like-this, and nobody to fill it. Best you can do is say At Least I Once Had It. I don’t know if envy is the word, but it’s in the vicinity, when I’m around people who are still friends with people from childhood. And by friends, I don’t mean acquaintances, but friends, like it used to be, like it’s been through all these life stages, like it still is… We all grow, and change, but all I’ve known is growing taking me away, from what I was, to what I’m meant to be. My path, my pace, my pulse: they don’t tell you that all that go-find-yourself is each-to-his-own. And there’s a cost. I’d pay it still, but it’s not cupholder and ashtray change. Bittersweet is having a big table in a room rarely used; most meals are on the couch, with the TV for company…or the opposite, trapped in a large gathering and feeling that worst kind of loneliness, invisible within a crowd.

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Not a day goes by on Facebook where some mother isn’t posting a picture of a child, with a caption wishing time would slow down. I don’t remember the exact moment when I quit sitting in my mother’s lap, but there was one, and as I aged she kept reaching for contact, come-sit-next-to-me, come-gimme-a-big-long-hug-like-you-used-to, let-me-scratch-your-back-like-when-you-were-little, but I was too wanting-to-grow-up, then too teenage, then I was too young adult, then I was too adult, and what had been…never was again. She never wanted me to stay a child, but there was a cost to raising a future adult.

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Bittersweet is going to church and figuring that God’s still as here as He ever was, but all the old songs you knew by heart are no longer sung. Bittersweet is a couple celebrating an anniversary and it’s all going-through-the-motions. There was a Was and now you wonder if it was true, and if so, could be again. And so you pray, because what else can you do, as looking-for-love as you ever were, so why not reach out to Him with the corner on whole and lasting love… When you were young you never understood why your mother wasted so much time tending plants and here you are, about the age she was, tending an heirloom from her, and wondering who’s been nibbling on the leaves in the night. A tomato is a tomato is a tomato, except for you, because it reminds you of your father and his garden, the smell of turned dirt, and the cat that used to rub up against his leg when he went out to check the rows in the morning dew.

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The Cushion Of Grace I think God is kinder than we know. We get all on-our-knees when something big hits our attention, but I think His hand is always there, even for those who never pray. Sure, we can be mad at ourselves for not smelling the roses when they were blooming, but God understands us, and allows us to not-see-it-coming and then once change comes, we find that God has already installed a great reserve of strength, to help us absorb the blow, and then the healing, a slow motion miracle, and there we stand, on some new plateau, a new view, a new us, and an opportunity to get this stage right, where we see what is, for what it is, and treat it with respect and honor. I also think He does not heal us of bittersweet. For the having we owe the not having. It seems a fair deal; my bitter cannot fill a coffee cup – my sweet cannot fit in a stadium. As I get older the subtleties of God are more obvious. What else to do, as I go from here, but to trust that the Giver of Life intends on a sweet ending?

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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one, where we think a sentimental heart is worth all the having and the memories of having.

Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories can be found on the Eighty-one Facebook page. Any did-good and keep-doing messages are welcome at 81creativity@gmail.com.

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