Today was a day for catching up on everything. I washed the Mercedes-Benz, I did about a quarter-ton of laundry, and I bought food.
This is exciting, isn't it?
I've been reading other diaries on the web, and what I have to call a New Year's malaise seems to have settled over a lot of them. A lot of people can't get motivated to do things, they're still mired in things left over from last year, and people don't seem to be looking forward, they're looking backward. One diary is kept by a woman who apparently had an extramarital affair with a co-worker, and although it doesn't seem to have been a very long thing, she is still obsessed with it. I read a lot of it, and call me unsympathetic, but I really don't understand why she just doesn't forget about it and move on. If the guy was that much of a jerk, she owes it to herself (and certainly the people who read her diary) to move on to more positive things. Instead, months later, she still goes on about it all.
I have to count myself among the backward-lookers, I suppose. I try to show you all a little of where I came from and where I think I'm going, but I think too often it ends up being me talking about stuff that happened a long time ago. Sorry.
I watched a program the other day about people who had won lots of money, either in the lottery, the horse races, or maybe in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, and how the money changed them. How their expectations of how they'd live after "hitting it big" changed and in some cases soured. All of them seemed a little dazed, even the ones who insisted their lives hadn't changed. But all of them had lost friends, all of them had had relatives' attitudes toward them change in some way, and there was a lot of mixed feelings about it.
I thought about that for a long while after I turned the television off. I have some money, but the two most important people in my lives worked and took care all their lives so that I could have it, but they aren't here now to benefit from it.
So, I sympathized with the people who had lost friends, but I remember that I lost friends, too. Two of them. My parents.
I should tell you that story.
My parents used to go on vacation in the last two weeks of August every year, to a place they found after I went off to college, in western Tennessee, not far from Memphis. Some sort of resort place. They always took two days to drive down, and I never went with them.
August, two years ago, they stopped by here on their way down, as they always did since I moved to Chicago for grad school. They dropped off a couple of pieces of mail that had come to me at their house, and a bag of apples. Then they left, telling me they'd call when they got to Memphis.
About 11:00, the phone rang, and I assumed it would be them. It was not. Instead, a lieutenant of the Illinois highway patrol was calling to tell me that my parents were involved in a high-speed accident in the mist near the Marion Reservoir, on Interstate 57 near Marion, Illinois. Someone had slowed down suddenly for no reason in the mist just after sundown, and they had slammed into the back of his car at 65 miles per hour. They weren't wearing seatbelts, he wasn't, and all three of them died. Several other cars ran into the wreckage and other people were injured. The lieutenant gave me some information on who to call in the morning for more information, and the call ended.
He said he was sorry, and I am sure he was.
Over the next few days I had a lot of things to do. I drove down to Williamson County and met several people at the county hall to accept my parents' belongings. I also talked to the officers who were at the accident, and they said that my parents weren't at fault, that witnesses said the other driver had slammed on his brakes and my parents couldn't avoid him. I wasn't sure that this was supposed to comfort me or what, but I thanked them when I was done talking to them. I brought back a carload of the things they had with them, though initially I didn't want to even be there once the finality of it all started to sink in. I didn't want to be there, I didn't want to have to be there, I didn't want any of it to happen.
My parents had told me that they had made plans for their funeral arrangements, which were, like a lot of the aspects of their lives, minimalist. Essentially, no funeral. They left directions about who to contact about where they would be buried, and information about who to contact about their finances and legal arrangements. My parents were thorough. That would help me a lit in the days after they died, and it went a long way toward making it seem like I was more in control of things (and myself) than I was.
When people die, other people seem to come out of the woodworking claiming to know what the "deceased" would have wanted, you know? Relatives I hadn't talked to in years somehow found out my parents were dead, probably through one of my uncles, and I got a bunch of calls from people I'd last seen when I was eight or nine. Worse, they all seemed to treat me like I was eight or nine instead of 27. Telling me that somehow they knew better how to handle my parents' arrangements than my parents had known, or that I now knew. Tried to convince me to have a funeral I knew they didn't want. There's so much to do, and yet there's so much to think about, so much to absorb. I know why a lot of people can't handle that. If my parents' plans had not been so clear, I couldn't have handled it, either.
My parents are buried in a cemetery in Minneapolis. They'd bought the spaces a few years after they moved there. I haven't been over there these last few times I've been in Minneapolis. I suppose I should have gone, but I didn't.
The rest of that year was a waste. I spent most of my days writing or thinking about writing. I had to think about where I fit in the world, what I was supposed to do and how. The picky details never seemed to abate through the rest of 1995. I ended up hiring an accountant to help me with the taxes and other things about my parents' estate, of which I had been named executrix. The last versions of their wills were dated January, 1993. Clear, direct, simple but thorough. A lot like my parents.
When it became clear that there was nothing of interest in my parents' estate for them, the calls from relatives trickled away to nothing. Neither of my parents were particularly close to their own siblings, and no one was ugly about it, but it seemed pretty clear to me that they only came sniffing around hoping for some mention. I think my parents were more careful than some other people in the family when it came to money, and none of them ever forgot it. I was as friendly as I felt I should be, but when the talk started to turn toward money, I steered everyone toward my parents' attorney and my accountant. The calls gradually stopped.
I never looked at their car, though the officers said that I could. I could not imagine what I could gain from looking at it. I signed off on the title and the car was eventually scrapped.
Looking forward. Look forward to what? I can't confess that I felt a strong direction in my life for the first 27 years, except to play music and write. I'm not sure that I have a strong direction now, except that having lost the two people I knew best in the world, I think I want to find other people to know and to be close to. I am not the first person in the world to face this at my age. I certainly won't be the last. I'm the only one of those people who is me, though, and I'm still not sure what to do next.
I'm not sure why I'm not more upset retelling this story. I don't feel upset. Something in me thinks that I should, but I don't. I don't owe anyone tears, I guess. I'm certain I don't owe you tears.
Sometimes I want to buy an island.