may 6, the 2015.
there are pieces of me that i’m learning to question & parts of my past that i’m learning to rewrite. i started a journal again, without the capital letters, which feels like an appropriate tribute. maybe it is worth it to think about how you feel sometimes. maybe i could do well with the therapy. maybe it’s not a weakness to give parts of yourself to other people.
“you’re in an interesting position, you know?” mara told me after the police had left & the dust had settled & it was just the two of us, left with the journal my grandpa had left behind.
“i know,” i said. “but i don’t know what you’re talking about specifically.”
“there are people who believe your grandfather to be a god, & those who believe him to be a complete asshole. communities that worship him, professors that teach him, family members that despise him. you are in sole possession of the only remaining piece of his legacy, & so, it seems, you are in sole possession of this decision.”
“decision?” i asked her. “what am i deciding?”
she smiled, like she’d just seen a face once loved & lost & now found once more.
“how he’s remembered,” she said, & the wind took over.
kent, ohio, air is crisp when the seasons start to turn, just enough chill to remind you of where you’ve been, & just enough sun to show you all that you have to look forward to. punxsutawney phil saw his shadow in 2015, the tricky bastard, promising six extra weeks of winter. the six weeks had turned into sixteen & kent, ohio, was just starting to look like spring.
“well, i’ve made my decision,” i told her.
“you have?”
“his legacy is & forever shall be”—i held it up to read—“‘the people he met & the things they carried.’”
she didn’t understand. “i appreciate the poetry, but i’m afraid the substance is . . .”
“he wasn’t writing for a big audience, & he wasn’t writing in the abstract. he wasn’t telling stories that he wasn’t a part of. & you were right all along, he wasn’t writing for me. he was writing to them.
“henry needed a companion; my grandpa wrote him one. the letters, every year, his whole life, something to look forward to, someone to believe in.
“the bar in green river needed a train full of gold, & so he wrote about it in fiction, but in reality, i’d imagine the sale of an arthur louis pullman short story could probably buy you the entire town of green river.
“& sue kopek, she . . . she needed something to help her remember who she is, & he reminded her. he wrote for those people.”
“so you’re giving them back, then?”
i nodded.
“every last one?”
i nodded again.
“except for the journal with dozens of additional works that doesn’t really have a home other than with you.”
it was my turn to smile.
i’d made that decision as well. my family needed closure; my dad needed something to help him remember the best parts of his dad. more than that, the world needed a reminder of what an incredible writer my grandfather had been, & the fortieth anniversary of a world away seemed like the perfect opportunity.
“you’re sure?” my father had asked.
“yes, i’m sure.”
“because we don’t have to. i don’t want to bruise the legacy he left behind.”
“no, you’re right,” i told him. “& you were right before we found the journal, too. he deserves to be remembered.”
mara & i sat for hours watching the students of kent state as we read & reread the journal entries.
“this one,” i told her, holding up the poem from denver, his confession & process & understanding of love. his ode to his breath & warmth & color. “this one doesn’t really have a home, because jeffery’s not here to take it anymore, so . . . well, you better.”
“you—you’re serious about this?” i couldn’t tell for sure, but as i nodded i thought i saw a glimmer of liquid in the corner of her left eye, an overwhelmed, involuntary thank-you.
on may sixth, i began rewriting the pieces of my past that i didn’t want to carry with me anymore. i’m sure a day will come when i’m reminded of how reality tells the story, but for now, & for the foreseeable future, i like how i remember it better.
mara told me she was going back to denver, back to great purpose, to help them rebuild without jack. i thought she might stick around, or come back to california, & i got mad when she first told me we’d “still see each other sometimes.” but i realized that mara’s life is about mara, not about me, & mara needed something to chase. mara needed a place to belong, & i could be happy with sometimes.
i wrote a letter to mason from the hospital, because i was mad at myself, & he got caught in the cross fire, & no one deserves to carry the guilt of another’s person’s self-hatred. i’d write to kaitlin, too, but i’m not ready for that just yet. also, it’s illegal.
“you know what is interesting to me?” mara had mused as she flipped page to page through my grandfather’s diary of time he’d forgotten. “he made almost no grammatical errors, other than of course the blatant disregard for the rules of proper capitalization, & other than excessive use of the letter ‘a,’ almost no spelling errors—”
“yeah, i think he was neurotic.”
“—except, in this little bit here, that he wrote on his last day.” she opened to may 4, the 2010. “look, here, he misspelled the word ‘things.’”
i followed her finger to the word. she was right, he’d accidentally slipped an extra e into the word, now spelled theings.
“well, he was literally dying,” i said. “i think we can let him off the hook. maybe his hand slipped & he didn’t want to spend his final breath spell-checking his work.”
“i know, i know, i know. i’m just saying, it’s weird, right?”
i couldn’t deny her enthusiasm for even the mundane, & so again, as it had so often, her wave washed over me. “yes, it is weird.”
i didn’t have anywhere i wanted to go or anywhere else that i wanted to be, so i began to read again. with my thumbs, i smoothed the creases at the edges of his pages, where his world stopped & everyone else’s began. next to me, mara’s head tumbled to my shoulder, asleep.
i read each word, equally important, intricately linked & inextricable, a machine moving & bending & chugging & swaying together down the page:
whare i lost my breath
underessed before myself—
it stopped me. the first time, i had read it as underdressed, but i realized that i had been reading too quickly, my brain seeing the letters & drawing a conclusion before it had a chance to actually notice their arrangement.
the word he’d written, underessed, was closer to undressed, a word that made more sense in structure of the sentence. but he’d accidentally added an e. two spelling mistakes in the same journal entry was certainly strange.
without pointing it out to mara, i continued reading:
in a midwest march
a civilization baried 100 of years ago
& i hear voices in the graund,
music scream siren explode gasp
like applause
whare
perfect black & nothing nite
& i feel these theings—
through the spelling error she’d noticed.
i feel everything & see nothing
cold evening near the
i’m crying but do not know my tears
i’m running but do not know my legs
i want so badly
to know
to bellieve—
i stopped. again, my brain had let me slide past another error. he’d accidentally slipped another l into bellieved.
coincidence will be the source of your greatest irrationality, mara had said, quoting someone. she was right, & dwelling on disconnected, totally irrelevant—
focus on the moments of difference; those are the ones that matter. that voice was louder. it was my grandfather’s.
underessed.
theings.
bellieved.
undressed.
things.
believe.
believe undressed things? things undressed believe?
it was tricky, reading the words as they were & not as my brain wanted them to be. in my head, i wanted to fix the mistakes.
slowly, carefully, i wrote them again, just the errors:
under
the
bell
my heart stopped & the world of kent, ohio, & mara & my parents & kaitlin & trains & doctors stopped spinning.
under the bell.
holy shit.
the kent state victory bell had begun the protest, the bell that the students had rallied around following the shooting, the bell that had become memorialized as a testament to their will, a bell rung in remembrance of the lives lost & hope for future generations. i craned my head around & inside of it were markings . . . letters in the bell.
here’s mara, transcribing:
l
i
a
n
t
&
l
o
y
a
l
c
o
n
d
u
c
t
o
r
t
h
a
t
s
a
l
l
f
r
o
m
y
o
u
r
b
r
i
l
maybe there was more, all along, & i just had to stop looking to find it. or maybe it was exactly what it was, & the mystery was more important than the truth.
i rearranged the letters to the proper starting point, & sitting beneath the bell, his bell, i smiled at his final message to me, his final message to everyone.
that’s all, from your brilliant & loyal conductor.