Excerpt: Kuhreihen

My Last Memory Of Celeste

is not entirely unfavorable. I did and do love my mother. she just makes me feel, made me feel I should say, like I was quietly and secretly dosed with some mind-altering chemical. she lives in her own little world. but not instead of the rest of the world. she lives in that quote unquote real world too. firmly. functionally. but there’s something not quite right about the whole thing. the more I settled into the idea of this game of hers, the more it makes sense. the real (quote unquote) world always seemed to be treated like a game. Celeste thought of it like a contest yes, but a meaningless one.
“The only meaning anything has is the one we assign to it ourselves.”
everything was a test or quest to her. and one without meaning. but that made it meaningful. you can see why I tore ass out of there and got into school. I believe my intelligence, any above average capacity I might have at all, is due to my young mind trying to make sense of my mother all the time. mine was a latch-key childhood.
my last day with her was spent discussing the Tetragrammaton. I was sixteen. it was miraculous that I should even know the Hebrew term for the name of God. or G_d. however that flies. and it wasn’t a spiritual discussion. or maybe it wasn’t religious. it was her trying to explain to me the power of certain words.
“Or uncertain words.”
“What?”
“Some have weight even when they don’t have substance.”
“Mom, seriously. Can we for once have a normal discussion?”
I’d told her about my early acceptance to UCLA.
“We are having a normal discussion.”
“No, we aren’t.”
very much like Norton, I slinked away. several days passed before I realized my mother had been calling attention to the abbreviations of universities, and how they becomes symbols on their own due to their lack of linguistic “substance.” I think it was her way of saying good-bye.
In the end I went to school in New York anyway. one of the CUNYs. it was A-OK. I got a BS and a leg up on a DSSc when I moved to CA to pursue my career studying the Sociobiology of household insects.
spiders mostly.