I want to try and tell it straight but that is hard and already my memory is fading. Sitting at the service and after, listening to my father’s cousin play Bob Dylan covers on his guitar I felt the same: I want to try and tell this straight, in a way that isn’t trying to be good. Even though I know this will betray what it was to sit there and listen to these people speak and think of this man. Every so often life happens and art becomes superfluous. No, it becomes self-indulgent and diminutive. This is why, maybe, I’m not an artist.
If I was an artist, I could write in a way that would evoke what it was to sit there outside in prairie sky under a cheap plastic tent on cheap plastic chairs amongst relatives who are strangers and strangers who I only know by name but not by face and hear them speak about a man who was my grandfather.
It’s so hard not to pinch things.
But how do you hold on
All of these disparate voices saying the same thing, knowing him in the same way. That in itself seems remarkable and near impossible. How can one’s life mean the same to different ideals when all he did was live it. Because in that choice must be absent.
Already my memory is fading and I can’t record what happened three days ago when that’s all I want to do. Already my memory is mixed up. How strange it is to think you’re carrying something and when you try and hold it out to someone else just find a milky film of the clichéd three Ls Life Loss and Love.
Well.
There was the breeze that sometimes muffled out the speakers. The occasional mosquito that had managed to survive the chemical fog sprayed over the garden the day before. The group of men who stood in cowboy hats with their arms crossed in the sun for the whole 2 hours so that others could sit. The ranchers who I always thought had no time for emotions but maybe in actuality just none for dishonesty because they cried without stopping themselves when they spoke.