private in public

i spent the day cleaning out my grandparents' house in puyallup. since my grandfather died, my oma was moved to a nursing home against her vehement protests; apparently she didn't unpack anything for the first week she was there, so convinced that she was not going to stay. i can only imagine the horrible wilting when she realized that this was now her life, no turning back. i am terrified of growing old- actually, growing old (and hopefully belatedly developing some shard of credibility) is a tantalizing prospect. it is helplessness that scares the fuck out of me. i have tasted it. and it is, in my opinion, death while still being alive.
my parents, my uncle and i scoured the home, everything, and i got the first real glimpse of what my grandparents' lives were like. in doing so i saw firsthand, appalling evidence of how Not Right things had been for awhile. there were boxes of food that expired in 1999, three open packages of the exact same products, science experiments in the refrigerator (including a completely green slab of bacon). there was the birch marinade my mother excitedly sent them for xmas years ago (at least 11, for i still lived at home), never opened. "bitch" my mother said, tossing the bottle in the garbage. piles of packets of honey, rock-hard, leaching into the cabinets. what i had been specifically looking for, thankfully, was still there, and i took them all: the ancient spices that used to live on the plastic lazy susan on their counter in wauna. when i was as young as four, i would sit at the counter while my grandmother washed dishes (always by hand- they never, ever used their dishwasher) and smell each spice, spinning the thing for hours. it was always there, every year, the same dusty selection. the containers i have now are ancient and flavorless, old enough to not have bar codes, metal perforated slide-tops instead of the stupid thick plastic ones of today.
they hoarded toothpaste. i counted ten empty tubes in the hall bathroom, in the drawer with the piles of heavily used q-tips and about ten generic, straight-bristled toothbrushes. i found my grandfather's shaving brush, the folded paper menu of the chinese zodiac with my grandmother's handwriting indicating the years of her family members (i am a horse, passionate and inquisitive). stacks upon stacks of fine china next to opened packages of hideous thanksgiving paper napkins. a sadistic potato ricer. a set of encyclopedias from 1925 (i put my name on those), hiding inside the chinese cabinet of a magnavox record player. they had a paperback copy of 'm*a*s*h' next to 'racism: the world's problem', next to several years of 'architectural digest'. the pumice soap in the shower was covered with curly black hairs. there was a wrist-strap blood pressure monitor; we all took a break to check our vitals. (myself, apparently rather mellow: HR 50, BP 98/63, energy drink in hand.)
my mother was tense and flitting manically. my father was getting impatient to leave. at his request, i brought them a 12-pack of beer ("not crap" said my father.) afterwards my parents and i ended up at a very loud and generic brewpub in the sphincter of puyallup- a slice of the world where, everywhere you look, every store is a chain, pavement usurps flora, people drive minivans with magnetic ribbons, asses are large and baseball caps are not removed indoors. "you and your brother were acting like they were both already dead" my father pointed out. "it kind of feels that way" my mother replied.
i ranted to them about how frustrated i am with my current scattershot lot in life. "every component of my world is in a different place" i said. they gave good advice, essentially the same advice that s gave me last night: calm down, things will happen when they should. and i know this. i'm just fucking miserable in the interim.
(side note: i have derided s quite a lot, but he's a damn good friend.)
my father just returned from working in spokane, where he was inspecting public housing. he came upon the first residence that he flatly refused to go into, and ordered his first eviction. apparently there was cat shit everywhere, smeared on the walls, the litter box -"you couldn't even see litter. it was mounded with shit. it was a big fucking box of shit"- "i've been in homes where you can't see the dishes in the sink for all the mold on them" he said, "but this person was literally living in a cat box." i feel a bit better about my grimy lair now.
and now: classical music, yerba mate, a cafe that i haven't been to in a while but really fucking love, the street slick and shiny, always on some sort of precipice.