My mother, who really isn't all that morbid, but who lives with a cracked sense of what she believes is expected from her*, will often talk about dying as if it's something she has any intention of doing. But old people, you see, must chatter endlessly about it, she thinks, so she will halfheartedly do so. One of the things she will talk about is who will get her jewelry when she dies. My sister Pat often angered my mother by pointing out that she, my sister, didn't wear jewelry, so she wouldn't want to inherit it after she, my mother, died.** This baffled my mother - after all, a woman is supposed to wear jewelry! & owning it may even be better!
Now I have no idea if my mother has any diamonds nor do I care. But when I think about diamonds I hear my sister's voice laughing at the idea that she would get from my mother useless trinkets that would just get rusty &/or dusty in a drawer somewhere. Please note neither of us imagined that my mother's jewelry had any value. My mother thinks they do, but we never did.
Maybe in the end I've worn more jewelry than my sister ever bothered to sling on out of obligation. I have worn necklaces, usually ones given to me by girlfriends, & I've worn them until they wore out. I also used to have both ears pierced, & wore different earrings every day, through most of the 1990s, which reminds me of a story.
Back in the day, there used to be a convoluted code about having one ear or the other pierced***. The right one meant you were gay, the left one meant you were straight, the middle one meant you were bi - whatever.**** I had this friend named Gary Anderson I knew in high school. We didn't go to the same high school, we met at a comic shop. He liked elves.
Gary was pretty effeminate & was most probably gay. I had no real understanding of such a thing but I liked hanging out with him because he had an active imagination, he liked to draw, & also comic books. Well, Elfquest. He liked Elfquest.
Three weird incidents made me think Gary might not be interested in girls. The first one was, when I slept over one night, he kinda reached down, off his bed (I was on an air mattress), & started stroking my shoulder. Unaccustomed to this, I simply pulled away, weirded out. He didn't touch me again, & we never talked about it. The second one was, when I was showing him my high school yearbook (probably for the tenth grade), he leapt back as if someone had struck him. "Gary!" he said. "You let boys sign your yearbook!" I said, "Of course I do. All the people I know in school are boys." His eyes wide, Gary asked me plaintively, "Won't people think you're gay?" The third one was, he showed me, in his sketchbook, some pictures of naked girls he had drawn. I said, "Ew, why are you showing these to me?" He said, "I draw them for my friends at school. It makes them get boners."
We didn't see each other much but saw each other every once in a while*****, & then I went away to college. At some point in my first year of college, to piss someone off, I got my ears pierced. My sister Karin took me to the mall, & I handled the first ear well, but when the woman started to pierce the second one, my rebellious brain started thinking, "Someone is punching metal into your flesh," & I got quite queasy. I almost fainted.
Fast forward to the summer of 1987, & I'm home, wishing I were in Austin, but I'm walking from my sister Pat's house to the comic shop, which Google Maps says is two & a half miles away, but I was cutting through a park, when who should I run into but Gary******. I hadn't seen him in over a year, & it was maybe the last time I saw him. Probably not. Probably the next to the last.
He said hello then looked as gobsmacked as he did when he saw male names in my yearbook. "Gary!" he said. "You pierced your left ear!"
(Or whatever ear it was supposed to be. He didn't notice I had both ears pierced.)
"Yeah," I said, deadpan. "I finally decided to come out."
"Oh!" Gary said happily. "So did I!"
That line was a throwaway jibe I used to shut people up who were bothered by such things. But Gary wouldn't have known that. & most certainly it was an inelegant way to encourage someone to out themselves as gay to another.
The point is, I had a lot of earrings, but none of them were diamond. Honestly, I find diamonds a little tacky.
* She gave me this sense, & it takes all my will power to drown those noises out.
** My sister Pat & I talked often about my mother's death & how it might affect us, so it's quite ironic Pat died before my mother. Tragic, too.
*** Or this may still be true.
**** "Middle ear."
***** If I haven't told you already, remind me to tell you my Gary Anderson astral projection story.
****** He was going in the opposite direction from me. I don't know if I asked him where he was bound, but if I did, I don't remember what he said. He lived near the comic book shop, so he was pretty far from home.
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