Inhabitants of Towns

no-itsme, habibi Quick stats
Added on Mon, Apr 9, 2001 10:43 AM

I here want to commemorate my grandfather, who died one and a half year ago. He was a quiet man - almost absent in the corner of the room while my grandmother talked and poured coffee - he collected stamps, coins, later phonecards. I think the aquarium was his, too. He liked the garden - my grandparents finally got a house with a small garden, after retirement. He liked the women, and was often unsubtle in admiring my mother's young, "exotic" colleagues, for example - causing embarassment to her, but not much annoyance to them - it was sweet, in a way, it was him. He was a construction worker, I think - his working days are before my memory starts, and my family was never much into recounting the past. He was kind, in a clumsy way sometimes, perhaps, but I've never seen him angry or even grouchy. We weren't close, but he was my grandfather, and, now that he's gone, a - symbol of what my mother's family was about.

My uncle died last year. He was a man of personality - characteristic, his own man, unaffected by the way growing prosperity seems to spread blandness of character throughout society. When we were kids, my mother's family was one of opposites, political and personal differences being hotly debated over endless cigarettes and crude jokes as coffee made way for beer midway though the afternoons, on family birthdays that were celebrated inside, as we sat on large couches and fold-up chairs. In those times, the seventies I guess, he was "the other side" - my mother resented his views and the way they raised their kids, and we resented how he'd pinch our cheeks to make unfunny jokes. Ten years on, and we all grew to see him for what he was, too - a wise man, true to himself but very much able to learn - a man of grim wit and sarcastic retorts that were always, underneath, touching expressions of affinity - a charming man, too, chain- smoking but lean and fit, always fair and honest, and, in a wholly unsentimental way more loving and in love than any other married man I've known.

He was a supermarket branch manager, as he had been in the seventies - a status that had once meant jumping out of his background, into that shopkeeper class of the working-class district's elite - but as those who started below him made their way up through the chatter of communication courses and management classes of the nineties he staid simply what he was: proudly keeping the shop running, hard-working, loved, in an awed way, by the many people who worked for him, and always in for a practical joke. He was my favorite uncle by the time he fell ill - so very suddenly such a drastic change - he had only given in to noticing he was ill by the time cancer had spread far too much to be stopped in any way - a month later, and he was paralyzed from the waist down. He took the time to accept the end, to say goodbye to his wife, and to, one more time, recall his life and the good times - and then asked to take his leave. No passive awaiting death for him.

no-itsme, habibi Quick stats
Added on Mon, Apr 9, 2001 10:46 AM

Finally, here, I want to remember my mother, who'd died four years before. She was only fiftyone when she died, and in many ways at the pinnacle of her life - I want to remember, here, not what she was to me, but who she was, in life. She'd succeeded in, as she joked, "privatizing" the - idealistic - work she used to do at the ministry, getting a new organisation up and running and bringing together a lively group of cheerful, dedicated women. In her spare time, she studied, to get the degree she was not allowed to get way back when (no money) - and she finished university, part-time, in six years.. She travelled a lot, to all continents, and always went out of her way to make contact, and to find out what was going on. She was travelling, in Yemen, when she died. It was way too early - things looked more promising than ever - and yet one could say that moment embodied the moment of fulfillment as well. She was the individual explorer, observer, more than the jovial chap, but she was truly loved. I love her, and miss her, both as my mother, my home, my childhood, and as who she was outside, lonely sometimes but always elated about the new things she continually discovered in life.

Among the three of them, they took a whole era with them, the world of my mother's childhood, the era of my youth, too - society changed now, and my remaining family with it, adapting and conforming, to cityscapes in which it can no longer be found back. It leaves me feeling rootless, as if "home" is something only remembered - things may have changed for the better but sometimes I can not find my way here anymore, it seems. Thinking of them, looking back, I acknowledge, without giving up myself - their efforts were great, and needed to be - and in terms of energy, determination, and readiness to love and work to love, I can not compete.