"When It's Round Up Time In Heaven"

[This post is for Kendrah. Just because she keeps checking. That's not her real name, by the way.]

My singing is suffering for lack of the daily song, even these songs. This one--with its catchy cowboy-esque title--is a lot more fun in theory than in practice. It has a brief homage to 'Home On the Range' in the middle, but otherwise it's entirely predictable, though it does make me want to pull out my guitar. Whatever happened to that cowboy hat I got from my grandfather?

Speaking of my grandfather--well, technically, I'm not speaking of the grandfather who got me the hat. He died a long time ago, and I miss him more all the time. But my other grandfather, the one who called me a whore, he passed away this last November. [See 'I'm Falling in Love With Someone' 8 December 2005 & 'Stop and Smell the Roses' 24 October 2006] Even though he had been ill for years, somehow it still felt sudden. I got up at 5AM to drive across the state to his funeral. The service was soulless. No one cried. No one gave a eulogy. I didn't sing the 'Ave Maria'. [See 'The Fox' 20 March 2006 & 'God Bless the Child' 27 March 2006] My nephew passed out Tic Tacs to me and my siblings at communion time. (We were discreet, if not respectful.) It was sad, but only because there didn't seem to be much genuine grief. And it's still not over: my father is still dealing with the lies my grandfather told about him, attempting to clean up the mess, trying to ensure that one man's probably diagnosable paranoia doesn't live forever in the form of continued family estrangement.

The good news is that I have seen my grandmother, my only living grandparent. I have hugged her, I have brought my daughter to meet her, I have heard some of her stories of growing up, of her siblings, of her parents, of my grandfather, who she loved, with all his flaws, and she knew them. She's one of those people who is always trying to give things away, and I did come back with a ridiculous amount of grandmother knick-knacks (mostly the result of leaving my seven year old daughter alone with my grandmother for ten minutes): I will treasure these things always because they passed through her hands. I feel that she cannot know how fully and completely I crave the gift of her, of her stories, of her presense.