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Very soft and very clean dish towels to be exact. I might've been just turned three, but noticed my great grandmother had them. I remember telling her I liked them. She taught me a couple embroidery stitches, how to darn holes and made me the most stupendous quilt out of scraps of various patterns, backed with one big expanse of creamy cotton, filled with some kind of boofy burlap-ish stuff that got held in place by little tassle stitches of various color yarn.
I had that on every bed I slept in for decades, even after it was beat to a tattered wreck by my Olympic Trials we called "sleep" all that time. I still have it! Can't bring myself to part with the shreds. Folded up and cushioning my big, overstuffed, reading chair, out of which I no longer read, but stack mounds of clothes and miscellany for which there is STILL no containment in my life.
I have a socks basket instead of drawer. My sewing basket is also my medicine chest. I own a number of hemp bags that are excellent as luggage. Also little makeup bags with toiletries and first aid items. I can fill up the trunk of my car with my system of bags on very little notice, quite easily. And most of that has evidence of the stitching I learned from my great grandmother at least 67 years ago.
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But maybe you are noticing I'm up in the middle of the night, and that's because I had a very long and perplexing dream I figure I should try to work out here before it turns more tattered than my comforter from Nammie.
It's the relative breaking into the absolute. This is easy because it started out full of relatives and in a McMansion and ended up shed of both relatives and building, a staircase losing corporeality was my egress, my escape from a creep.
It started out with my aunt and uncle and various strangers, almost like a jury, in a sitting room, and they'd been talking about some suspected miscreant with a story they did not know how to believe. I was going over the elements of his argument, pointing at the recondite connection of one bit of it to another, and saying that these show he's telling the truth.
To my immediate surprise, all recognized what I was pointing out, and they all agreed, and were bustling around me to admire my insight and thank me for my input on their way out of the room. I was there to divorce my sister. It was going to involve some haggling and some medical tests and more application of insight for which I now had general approval.
I'm not going to say it was exhilarating, but I noticed the general approval and reliance on my competence, noticed that I'd finally gotten to the point where I could impart this stuff to others such that they saw the meaning and were not so impeded by their personal confusion as to completely run off down the garden path in their imaginings to just goddam pay attention and take the points. When has that ever happened before?
My sister was there of her own volition, standing with her precisely plotted hair part, usually in a corner or off to the side of a doorway, icy, remote, mute, actually speechless, unable or cosmically unwilling to speak to ANYONE there except in little murmuring sidebars with her dweeby fiance. I don't know what happened to her husband, but she was going to marry this creep and he was dancing attendance on her while I was going through documents and pointing out which medical tests needed done, and the doctor's nurse, a young, Polynesian-looking lady, was agreeing that she should undergo them with me.
I don't know. Maybe she was going to act as our baseline. How this connected with negotiations and executing documents to be permanently quit of my sister will take some contemplation and all I can offer right now is that I've been listening to geneticists online lately. It could be that we were about to formally splice those genes, but the poor young nurse was agreeable and not really very avid about it at the same time.
Lots of coming and going from different rooms. Aunts, uncles, cousins and various close community members and a very busy doctor who kept redirecting the young nurse to my project. We were having to collect the various legal and medical objects and they'd get left in one room while we were off trying to get other stuff rounded up, and then have to be remembered further down the very complicated simple actions necessary to complete our task.
At length, all the coming in and going out and "negotiating" with my mute with hatred that had settled into a state almost not discernibly different from catatonia sister. I was sitting at my great grandmother's vanity, sprucing up for the final signing and medical tests that were about to take place, looking into that mirror, that is now my bathroom mirror, attached back to the vanity table it started out with a century ago. I could see the creepy fiance approaching me from behind.
He was standing a couple feet behind me to express his gratitude to me for doing all this, but suddenly broke into a very greasy declaration of my vastly superior attributes, ranging back into the decades... just grotesque and insufferable and drippingly worshipful and, even though I felt not an ion of pity for my sister witnessing her fiance slobbering behind me right in front of her, I did stll feel appalled on her behalf... as well as my own.
It was too stupid. I stood up and made a beeline for that staircase, the one that led up into the Milky Way, bannister starting to break away and roof completely off, even the floor holding up creep and sister and everyone falling away.
pipe up any time....
