content warnings:  child sex abuse mention tho i don’t go into any detail at all, child neglect and abuse, class strife.

Found out recently my maternal grandparents both died around ten years ago, which means they had easily found online obituaries.  My paternal grandparents both died before that, and are not so easily found.  This means nearly nothing to me, in stark contrast to PZ’s experience.  I once had an article about the magic twenty thousand dollars that everybody but me seems to get, but that isn’t wholly true.  From my paternal grandfather the broadly esteemed superannuated horrifyin’ secret criminal, my dad got around twenty-five grand, of which he gave some amount to me.  I don’t recall how much, but I used it all on rent while being underemployed as a freelance artist.

Per this article, I’m expanding on the things I can remember from early childhood before they evaporate.  I was born and raised through earliest childhood in suburban California, and previously discussed things that happened in or around my family’s apartment in the housing project.  The other things I can remember from back then took place in other locations, to which those memories belong.

There’s a geographical aspect of memory, where things that take place in a given location will be continuous with each other and run in parallel to experiences from another – home life versus work life, for example – and after the fact it can be harder to remember when a memory happened relative to a memory from a parallel timeline.  In this article I’ll look at Grandparents’ House timeline – events at my non-cybermemorialized paternal grandparent’s residence, in a much nicer neighborhood than my own.

My father had a horrible childhood, victim of violence neglect and abuse from many directions.  He’d have very good reason to want nothing to do with his parents, and yet poverty will bring one around, hat in hand.  Especially because those parents were beneficiaries of the best economy in the 20th century, fucked up nightmare dad being a union carpenter rolling in greenbacks.

Worse still, he left his own children in the care of those parents often enough that I have a lot of memories of that time.  Did I get abused by them?  Not that I recall, so it was a gamble that paid off.  Unless of course my older sister was abused by dad’s nightmare dad, which is distinctly possible.  Fucken sigh.  How did I not make that connection until now?  Ain’t no justice possible in any of that.  The monster was instantly killed in a car accident in his 90s without having known a moment of remorse nor of punishment.

That grandfather used to drink buttermilk straight out of a tall glass.  His skin was sun-damaged, his hair white when I was a small child, and the whites of his dead grey eyes yellow or blood-red most of the time.  Looked a bit of the monster that he was, not that all of those traits couldn’t be found on a wonderful human being, up to and including the dead-eyed expression.  I saw him go for the buttermilk and gave it a try, as a child.  Was not to my tastes.

That grandmother was dark-haired and wore big-ass eyeglasses.  They were those transition types that turn into sunglasses outdoors, but the technology wasn’t worked out back then, and they looked fairly sunglass’d indoors as well.  I don’t remember her eyes, probably because of this.  I do remember one humiliating time when I had to revert to diapers due to a stomach illness and she changed them in the living room.  I can understand not wanting to get out of your lazy boy, but unpleasant, and in view of the gross granddad who mocked me.  I don’t recall the words, which is probably a good thing.

My brother did that 23andme bullshit, which said we had 25% Iberian ancestry.  That was so specific it made me think I had a secret portuguese or spanish grandma.  The grandpas were too northern looking.  And yet, those grandmas both had well-establish USian roots with UK-derived surnames galore.  So this grandmother, not spicy, unless adopted.  Portugal had a historically close relationship with England and probably it’s random ingress from that kind of thing.  In the US it’s all whitey.  These distinctions are nothing here unless you go out of your way to play them up, which would be disingenuous for me, to say the least.

Overall, their household seemed like a goddamned land of bounty.  A place I wanted to be; a cornucopia of weal.  With a cigarette-choked living room, but still.  They had a garden with fresh vegetables and grape vines and more.  I remember eating cheerios with sugar, sometimes sliced bananas or strawberries on it, and raisin bran.  There are two major raisin brans in the US – Post and Kellogg brands.  Kellogg has sugar crusted into the wrinkles of the raisins, Post does not.  I got the good shit.

Why are so many of these memories about grapes?  As small kids we were given snack foods a lot, and one was these tiny boxes of raisins.  The brand was Sun-Maid, and it was the first word I can remember sounding out backwards.  Diam-nus.  Take that, normalcy!

And in the smokatorium, where I hardened up my lungs a bit, I got to watch a largesque color TV in one of those stands with the wicker screens on either side.  A lot of wood paneling back then, chonky wood furniture in olive or forest green, tchotchkies and decor that were utterly lacking in our slum.  The curtains were always bright with sun.  49ers games which bored me, TV and movies which entertained.  As I recall Kung Fu and Man from Atlantis were easy enough to track, but the plot of Flash Gordon didn’t make any sense to me.  Didn’t matter; everybody in the movie seemed like they were having a good time, and the theme song ruled.  One time on the porch I was hanging out with the kids and we were all singing that theme with the “bump bump bump bump” beats, and interjected some hiccups and burps to much hilarity.  “Flash hiccup burp Ah-Aaaah!  Savior of the Universe!”  That porch had some kind of deciduous tree, not hugely tall but with leaves that looked gigantic to me.

In most of my memories there, no other siblings are around.  Why was that?  Was I usually sent there when I was ill, to be tended without spreading the disease to the others?  Were some memories formed before my brother left the crib?  Was my sister being kept away while I was not, to avoid attention that I would be presumed to avoid on the basis of my assigned gender’s anatomy?  Was I being watched while my sister was attending preschool but I wasn’t quite old enough yet?  Let’s say it’s the last one.  It’s the most probable, thankfully.

On Flash Hiccup Burp occasion, my sister and brother were there, along with some unspecified neighbor or cousin – a girl taller than me.  This was one of a few girls that fascinated me in ways I didn’t get yet, and whose memory somehow escaped me so hard.  I don’t remember her name or even her hair color, just that I was intrigued.  Maybe wasn’t getting to be around kids other than my siblings much at that point.

I remember being alone looking at the clock on the wall.  It took so long for me to figure out how to tell time on a non-digital clock.  I was watching the second hand and imagining I was watching minutes speed by at some wild rate, felt like I was expanding my consciousness lol.

I remember all the ash trays and the main brand being Marlboro, in brown or in white and orange, both with gold foil near the filter, and a tiny little coat of arms.  At night when I couldn’t sleep, looking into grainy darkness, I found when I try to focus, a tiny spot of the grains at the center of my focus seem to sharpen and intensify.  I would in these situations remember that coat of arms, and imagine the grains to be wildly oscillating heraldry.

The class disparity between my parents and grandparents had us kids complaining a lot, like, why can’t we have better things?  Maybe you could just leave us with them.  That would be cool, right?  No?  Weh.  Anyway, class war now.

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