2002-03-21 - 10:44 p.m.

Officially, my earliest memory is of my great grandmother Isabel sitting on a rocking chair with a shelf above her head. Nothing happens in this memory, there�s no expression on her face, in fact I don�t even see her face. I just have the impression of seeing her sitting there on her rocking chair with a shelf overhead. And a green background. Maybe she had green wallpaper, or maybe I subconsciously colored a green background into the image to give it something else, some other detail.

The authenticity of this memory cannot be verified. It could really just have been a dream. Maybe I saw her in a photograph and imagined myself there, and built a memory from that. For years it�s been my official earliest memories, if only because it seems so old, unearthed during an archaeology dig around my brain, a copy of a copy of a legend whose source has long since been lost.

The only other memory I have of Isabel is from beside the hospital bed. Nearly every week toward the end of her life we�d drive down to the hospital and sit around her. The moment Kevin had pulled away to make room for me, my father would announce: �And this is David.� For a moment I nudged right up close to her, close enough to see the bits of hair on her upper lip, close enough to see that wide-eyed look of surprise as she discovered me once again for the first time and say �Ohh�,� and then I would step away and Mark would have his turn. I would sit back in a chair, my social obligation fulfilled, feeling how strange it was to be announcing who I was each time I came and already wondering when we could go home. Then we�d sit and watch ice skating on the television that hung over her bed, and I�d wonder what it would be like to watch all these things knowing that you�ll never do them, never witness them in the flesh, never even get to stand up again for that matter; nearly all the joys in life could now be only enjoyed vicariously through television.

Us kids, we were just killing time before we could go home. Sometimes they�d wheel her off on excursions, down to the game room where the kids could play a round of Perfection, or take her out to the little back yard and let her feel the breeze and the sun for herself. We knew somewhere that we were just waiting for her life to finish, sensing that this was a funny way for a life to end, just kind of trailing off into nothingness, not in a single great crescendo but in little decaying bits until you�re a strange creature that can�t do anything, can�t go anywhere, can�t remember the names of your great grandkids, maybe can�t even remember much of anything anymore. I wasn�t sad when she died.

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