18.7.04
My parents got rich while I wasn't looking.
The phone asked if it could speak to my mother.
No, I told the phone, it couldn't because my mother was downstairs speaking to her financial advisor.
That's all right, the phone said, it was just calling to let my mom know it was booking tickets to see Rigoletto, and was the twenty-fifth or the twenty-seventh better for her?
The financial advisor was convincing her to buy a house in Florida.
Florida has never been a secure financial investment for our family. In Florida my grandmother's family lost a million dollars in the Depression. Some of them still live there, many of them have been chased away by tragedy (violence, alcoholism and a murder-suicide). These are the distant cousins my grandmother grew up with after her father died when he came back from crocodile hunting with some weird jungle fever, these are the children of the distant cousins my mother saw for months every summer of her childhood until she lost touch with them, and heard about their slow decimation via hearsay, and finally via email, in a comfortably distant digital reunion.
Do you want to go to Florida this Christmas? she asks me. I can look at houses and we can visit Tommy and Johnny and Freddie.
Yes, I say. I do want to go there. Take me.
The phone asked if it could speak to my mother.
No, I told the phone, it couldn't because my mother was downstairs speaking to her financial advisor.
That's all right, the phone said, it was just calling to let my mom know it was booking tickets to see Rigoletto, and was the twenty-fifth or the twenty-seventh better for her?
The financial advisor was convincing her to buy a house in Florida.
Florida has never been a secure financial investment for our family. In Florida my grandmother's family lost a million dollars in the Depression. Some of them still live there, many of them have been chased away by tragedy (violence, alcoholism and a murder-suicide). These are the distant cousins my grandmother grew up with after her father died when he came back from crocodile hunting with some weird jungle fever, these are the children of the distant cousins my mother saw for months every summer of her childhood until she lost touch with them, and heard about their slow decimation via hearsay, and finally via email, in a comfortably distant digital reunion.
Do you want to go to Florida this Christmas? she asks me. I can look at houses and we can visit Tommy and Johnny and Freddie.
Yes, I say. I do want to go there. Take me.
