flour flats

this weekend i drove to and from vegas with jason to retrieve things like photo albums, (bruised my legs), old family movies in reels, (dropped on my foot), box of records, (smashed my finger and then jason made me take them out of the car anyway because they impeded his rear window view.)

jason’s house made me sad. the empty pool. the big bed in his dad’s room with no sheets on it. and most of all the mountains and mountains of stuff. everywhere. what do you do when faced with that? it was completely overwhelming. i remember getting to my grandfather’s house the summer after i graduated when he died and we had to clean the whole place and that was a good 20 years more accumulated garbage then westwind drive had. and we spent a whole month there doing nothing but cleaning and having a garage sale.

last week i was at safeway and the cute boy who’s hair was more dishelved than normal told me as i approached the counter that it was prostate cancer awareness week and he had to tell everybody this spiel and he didn’t really expect me to contribute anything but threw out the $1 or $5 amounts politely. i looked him in the eye, wrote down $20 and my dad’s name and handed it back to him.

i finished jason’s book on the drive back up and in the last couple of pages there’s a note from jason to himself as a reminder to ask his dad about a zip code in the LA area. i have no idea if jason ever got to ask this. but just the inclusion of it there staring up at me from this page of words that jason wrote, this beautiful novel that his dad will never get to read, seen by me while surrounded by the memories of their life as a family–was unutterably depressing.