ASSIGNMENTS:
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Bronwen
New York, New York USA
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REPORTS:
PREVIOUS NEXT
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Advice to Bronwen at Nineteen
So you're standing in your dad's tiny little monk bedroom that isn't his anymore because he died a week ago. And you're looking at one of the pair of kid's school desks with the tops that open upwards that he bought for you and your sister when you first came to live with him and that he finally adopted when you got too cool for that sort of thing. And you open it, expecting to find dead batteries, some old headphones, maybe a stinky sweat-cured wristband and a few copies of Interview magazine from last year. Instead, you find a safe-deposit box of his daughters' childhoods-we are children now, sure, but these are the long-distant childhoods before the diabetes (Mom), suicide (my friend), and cocaine (sis).
You find: your sister's ballet slippers, those books bound with the plastic combs collecting the short stories of your second and third grade class, many school pictures, report cards, hand-made and store-bought birthday cards addressed to "The King," sis' soccer trophies rewarding participation rather than victory, and the high school poetry mag you edited.
And you think: what the fuck am I supposed to do with this shit?
Touched by the care in curation, the maintenance of the archive, you make your first mistake. You think it is for him. That it is sentimental. And you wonder again: What am I supposed to do with these things that were precious to my father, who is no longer living, that is, to me, the detritus of a long, slow shipwreck?
1. (and this I don't really have to tell you, because you did it, it being easier to hold someone else's story than your own) Save the ballet shoes. Your sister will appreciate those days (perhaps for the first time) as she compares their proportions to those of her own daughter years down the line.
2. Save the elementary school short stories. You don't know it now, because you are very serious about acting, but you are going to end up a writer. You'll always wonder if those stories were encoded with any secrets about that future and what they'd reveal about you then. You think now that they are stupid exercises in over-achievement (you are embarrassed that they are three pages long while the others are only a paragraph) but they are the oldest documents of your self-expression and once your parents die, there is no one to tell you who you were. You rise from nothing.
3. Save the school pictures. Now they are a humiliating montage of bad glasses frames and bad bangs, a superficial slideshow of dorkdom. Later, they will tell a story. About moving from Idaho to the O.C. About shopping for dresses with your dad. About self-awareness.
4. Save the letters and the cards. They will remind you how you spoke to your father and what he taught you and later, that will go fuzzy.
5. Pitch the trophy. She hated soccer anyway.
6. Keep everything from now on. Write it down. This is when it all starts to go, early on-set Alzheimer's caused by the loss of a parent. Concentrate on the details; avoid the emotional rant. Don't listen to that bullshit about having to experience things in an unfiltered, "real" way. Your filter, your perspective, has no relationship to the real/fantastic. It is your experience. It is all you have. And though you'll feel solipsistic at times, remind yourself: Lest I forget...
7. Turn around and write down the title of every book on your father's shelf. There are only five or six-it's part of that monk thing. You will be so happy, years later, to have imaginary adult conversations with him about them and understand, just a little, who he was besides your father.
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