mmmdcclxxxix

A Few Things About Marie

she loved liberace and had a
lazy but genuine-sounding
laugh that she’d use a lot,
especially when she’d
mention his name, for
which her descriptives
would fluctuate between
several tried and true blips
like tinkling the ivories to
twinkle-toes, but in the end
it always appeared to me
that she had had a life-long
devotion to the pianist and
i could picture them as the
best of friends. also, although
i don’t think she ever met him,
she took many excursions to
las vegas in her later years,
particularly with her sister,
my great aunt wilma. marie’s
husband had worked most
all of his life in detroit at
uniroyal, a tire company
which had a teevee advert
that ran regularly through
the 1970s that featured a
woman and two men who’d
proclaim at the top of the ad:
hi, i’m uni; i’m roy; and i’m al.
when he retired from uniroyal
in the mid-70’s, she and he,
trekked back to arkansas and built
a house just outside of the city 

in which i lived, which was very 

near the vicinity of where the
two had grown up, met and
married, before moving to
detroit during the depression
era migration for its thriving 

automobile industry. my father, 

with whom she was pretty close in 

his later years, claimed that by the 

time they arrived back in arkansas, 

or at least before my grandpa
passed away, that they were
millionaires, which seemed so
wild to me given that she’d
always been a stay at home
mother of four and her husband
but a long-term employee of a
retail tire company. but it made
me happy that she and her sister
would go on these excursions to
las vegas and be downright giddy
in preparation for these trips. she
could also be fairly cold, which made
sense considering the life she had been
given. she seemed less than impressed
with children, for example (sure, she put
forth an effort once i arrived, but i could
tell that her mind would inevitably turn to
worrying about what me and/or my little
brothers and sister were going to destroy
or how we’d manage to mess up her routine
or the meticulous order of her home this
time), so the days we’d spend there
could be a bit of a drag after a while
(i had a tendency toward boredom
when not spending time in my own
bedroom; not that there was any
privacy in the small home that 
the six of us and i shared in 

town; i shared, in fact, but a
small bedroom with my younger
brothers). there was no real
sense of “you are welcome
here” warmth. she treated us
mostly as adults, or, well,
i heard her make occasional
“baby talk” for her dogs or
for humans who were yet
infants. nevertheless, in general
i always felt a certain eye-level
straight-up adult one on one
talk whenever we’d exchange
words. and there was always
that laughter. lots of sitting on
the lazy porch swing after long
days picking ripe goodies from
their very large garden, feeding
the chickens (i don’t recall ever
being let into the coop, however,
a uniquely designed home for the
dumb birds that had a rather elitist
look compared with the scads of old
and stinky chicken houses that were
strewn all across the arkansas countryside
in whichever direction one might move;
home of tyson, old chicken coops were
fairly ubiquitous when i was a kid, in
that same way that cattle and barns
were, and the crescendo of locusts
that swelled loudest around dusk every
evening from mid-summer to mid-autumn,
at about the same time the fireflies
began to emerge from any of the
surrounding thickets to visibly alight,
or when the mosquitos would likeliest
bite. there was even a small family
of guineas, hens that arrived a year

or two after my grandparents moved

back to arkansas.  well, initially there 

were just two, but the chicks would follow 

soon after, much to her pleasure and
ours. aristocrats compared with the
chickens, they did not require a coop,
but utilized the more glamorous
one, anyway, and did not have
to be fed like the chickens did.
in fact, they were foragers who
generally kept the property clean
of the multitude of more problem
atic invasive critters such as slugs,
ticks, grasshoppers, horseflies,
crickets and mosquitoes, etc.
the guineas were even known
to chase away snakes, part
icularly when it came to
protecting the more lower
class chickens. and since i am
on the subject of class, marie
did love her long luxury car,
which would be traded for a
new one with regularity at
the ford dealership in fort
smith where her brother-in-
law was the top automobile
salesperson at the ford dealer
ship up the road in the city for 

several decades. also, marie 

truly loved tabloids, especially 

the national enquirer and the 

globe and sun, many issues
of which would more often than
not be found in knee-high stacks
next to her private bedroom. i
think she typically would end
the night asleep next to her
husband in their regular bed
room, but of the three bedrooms
in what seemed their palatial home
to us kids, and our place was about a
quarter the size of theirs, she had
a bedroom she called hers, and no
one else would dare enter that one.
mostly, i think, it was just where she
sewed and quilted, two things she
would often do and that were much
more than just hobbies.  andyway,

these rags would often have liberace or 

cher or burt reynolds or dolly parton 

(and sometimes all four at once) 

plastered in the most non-

glamorous angles on their cover
pages. otherwise, her home was
always meticulously in order, well
vacuumed, the fireplace roaring
during the colder seasons. her
husband died of a heartattack
after chopping wood one fall
morning, and he had never
spent one night in a
hospital; he sat for
a bit, uncharacteristically,
on the arm of their long 1970s
green living room couch one late
morning after he arrived back home
from this very regular ritual, told her
with a face that was a bit more strained
than usual, she thought, that he was
hurting, she went to grab some
aspirin and by the time she
got back to the living room
he was gone, just like that.
i have always thought that was
a pretty awesome way to go.
switching gears again, it is
definitely worth noting that
she was the best magician
of the kitchen that i have
ever known.
and how i could
continue for chapters
and chapters on that
subject alone. and
i have yet to but intimate
about her earlier years. it’s
clear i could write about her
in this way for at least a month,
and so easily. so how could i
begin to tie this growing list all
up in a bow, and allow you all
to carry on with your days (or
your nights) without turning this
into a long and annotated biography?
i supposed i have been a bit of a trickster
once again. i’ve started a piece
i thought might be easy, relevant,
historical, an aid to memory, and
a montage, only to come to realize
by now that there’s enough to detail
that i could go on and on about this
mysterious matriarch named marie
ad infinitum. in fact, a month of
this would not even begin to
scratch the surface of getting at
her person. even though i feel as if
i know so little about her, my paternal
grandmother. that clearly cannot stop
me from relaying what i believe that i do,
and from furthermore expressing my
curiosity and my hypotheses regarding
those things i do not know, have no business
knowing, really. but these mundane facts
as i recall them turn out to be just as
interesting, at least to me, to that stuff
that i might further imagine her long history
to be made up of. one thing is certain: i
did not begin to exercise my curiosity nearly
enough while she was still here with us. and
my assumption that i was not really on her
radar might be fictional fancy. so what i have
now is a bit of a meandering few lines about
a real person, whose name was not really marie,
by the way (just another tidbit before i close this
particular chapter - it was not her first name,
in any case, but her middle name, which she
despised, like two of the rest of my four most
immediate grandparents who also were known
familiarly by their middle names; hardly a soul
actually knew her first name), and whose fairly
mild streak of hedonism and her desire for a world
that was built, at least later in her life, for her ease and
satisfaction, but only because she built that world
herself, these happen to be only a couple of the things
of hers that i have taken with me into my more
grandparently years. so, for now, for today,
i’ll end here. but now that i know that the
varied and relevant tidbits about her are plenty
and vast, which i find to be one of the many
perks of being a so-called writer, if and as time
might kindly allow, i will come back to tell you
some more about this six foot tall woman named
marie, whose life now seems to me to
deserve much more than simply a cursory
glance. so. yesterday i mentioned a word
we like to use, “process,” and today, i’ll end
with another word we also like to use, which
i once upon a time hated (ironic, as you’ll
see in a very brief moment). and that word
is “project.” this project, as it is, turns out
to be filled with an assortment of sub-
projects, another word which is just a
word to use, as i might and do,
since i am here and now calling them
such. so if you are of a mind to join
me at some point down the road in
doing so, let’s look at marie again,
shall we? i know i will. because
with the distance of time, and
her loss that seems with such
distance, more and more of
something rather more gained
or accrued than lost, it certainly
seems to me to be a more than
worthy and pleasurable venture.
and as entertaining as it might be
enlightening, and interesting, 

though what one might occasionally

call a bit tragic. at times. and if that does not
hook you, well, you are simply
not hooked. i do hope to see
you again around these parts

soon, nonetheless.