"What Would My Grandfather Think?

of me sitting at this table writing about him, Marlboro going in the left hand and a Corona in my right? High noon of a forgotten Friday afternoon. Sunlight beaming in through the mountains forming a perfect rectangle on the table, eyes adjusting, blue-grey smoke cutting up through the glare. I swear you can see faces in it..."

- Random Journal Drivel, July 25, 2001

Well, I've upgraded to Camel Lights and Armagnac. And I take photograhs like this:



Maybe he'd dig that. My Grandparents were all tobacco farmers and both of my Grandfathers had drinking problems. I only met my Father's Father once, when I was five, as he was dying. It's a David Lynch quality memory for me, him standing in the squalor of his house (my grandmother had kicked him out decades before) with crutches on one leg, that had been amputated due to progressive gangrene. Drunk. Really drunk, like for thirty years drunk.

My Mother's Father, however, I knew until he died when I was twenty-two. And his drinking was long over. But he did smoke Camel's and the smell lingering in my parents' house after he left was one of those magical childhood memories.

They don't smell that way to me when I smoke them. Or for that matter, anyone else.

The random journal drivel was written upstate in the Finger Lakes at my friends' Cathrine and Jeffery's cabin. I've lost touch with them and I should do something about that.

But me first, for now.