Every year at John’s mom’s house all her children would gather, bringing their children, from Nebraska, or Alabama, or someplace far away, driving all night or day in their big white vans, with their towels and suits and fireworks –all the paraphernalia that a road trip to grandma’s house on the 4th of July required. Uncle Eddie would always come with the biggest bag of fireworks you had ever seen: first the snakes which the kids threw on the ground, laughing at the snap; the twirling sparklers; then the show, the children sitting on the hill looking up oohing and awing, the inky black night, the bursts of light –always somehow new–late late lighting up the summer sky. For them, then, life, the day, the summer was always: Me! Me! Me!
Emma’s legs, mosquito-bitten; me, chastising John for forgetting, her legs swelling up. Someone else, stepping on something, the tears of something gone awry.
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Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”:
“Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”
Me! Me! Me! How does it feel to be me?
Didion says “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be. . . otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends” (“On Keeping a Notebook”).
Me! –like her or not.
Begin Again 