Do you know how in some movies, characters have "flashbacks" -- scenes that are stylized to indicate a character is mentally recalling a person or event that occurred in their past? It may be something like their fifth birthday party where everyone is smiling and wearing pointed hats, hovering around a cake on a picnic table as they got ready to blow out the candles. The colors are desaturated, the voices are muted in an eerie way and everything fades out slowly before the viewers are brought back to the present tense of the movie...
Well I've had a few of those over the past couple of days. The first one started when I went over to my mom's to have dinner during the week, as I usually tend to do. When I got there, I immediately noticed a scratch-off lottery ticket sitting on the washer in the laundry room. My heart sank; I knew it had come from my grandma's house.
Gloria Leone was an avid Ohio Lottery player. She'd spend thousands a year buying scratch-off tickets and watching the numbers live every night before Wheel of Fortune to see if her numbers had won her millions. If she spent say, $2,000 a year and only won $1,000, she'd only be excited for winning the thousand and would have completely forgotten she had spent the two-thousand in the first place to win it. Her and my grandpa would buy those scratch-off tickets like there was no tomorrow. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I'd even get to scratch off a few. She'd always tell me that if my ticket won, she'd go "halfers" with me. (If it would win though, she'd let me cash it in and keep all of it, though.)
So I asked my mom where that ticket had come from, and she said she had found it that day hidden somewhere in my grandma's laundry room. Glo would always write the amount the ticket was worth on the back of the winners, and she would hoard them in her cupboards (often unknown to my grandpa) and take them all in and cash them at once. So I flipped that ticket over and on the back was "1,000" written in her handwriting.
At that moment, I closed my eyes and pictured her, scratching that ticket off on the kitchen table... The scratching of the tickets was always a big ordeal. First, she'd get out a paper towel and lay it out so the scratchings wouldn't get all over her plastic tablecloth protector. Then she'd grab her special "scratching knife" and sit down, wasting no time getting started with the process. I could see her so clearly, scratching one winning number off, then another and another, getting more excited as she revealed each one. When she'd finish, she'd stare at it a while and count and re-count to make sure she had the right amount. Then, with one of her black calligraphy pens, she'd write the amount on the back so she wouldn't forget.
Well this particular ticket she did forget about, hiding in the laundry room perhaps so her husband wouldn't see it and want her to share it with him. The ticket was too old and couldn't be cashed now, but I held onto it because I knew that at one point, it had been in her hands.
That mental image was the first of a number I've had recently, each one being clearer than the last. I don't know why I thought it was a good idea, but yesterday I drove back into the neighborhood where they had lived for about 10 years. As I made the turn onto the road, the memories came flooding in.
I had remembered rollerblading down that street, all decked out in a helmet, elbow and knee pads. My grandma would help me strap everything on and send me on my way, usually waiting outside until I'd come back. I drove past the mail room, where she'd always stop on her way home and have me jump out to get her mail; past the pool where she used to take me swimming in the summer; past the dock and pond where my grandpa took me fishing for the first time. I sat in front of their old condominium for a while, the exterior so familiar after having pulled in that driveway so many times... The front upstairs window of the bedroom I'd sleep in when I spend the night... The kitchen window she'd pull a chair up to so our dog could look out of it... The lamppost out front where she had me stand so many times to take my picture.
I thought of all the Thanksgivings we had in that kitchen; or coming over for dinner to the smell of her spaghetti sauce cooking on the stove in her big silver pot. So many Christmases we'd bring our gifts over and open them all together under her huge tree, each of us spotting the white envelopes on top of our piles of gifts, already deciding what the twenty-dollar bills inside would get spent on. I could barely stand to see her house, hoping she'd come walking out the front door to greet me like she used to. But now, it's different, colder.
I try to be strong, but some days are just more difficult than others. Some days I miss her so badly, so desperately that it's a foreign feeling to me that I can't just drive over to visit her. I see her smile so vividly in my mind, her blonde hair, the way she smelled when I'd put my arms around her. Yet sometimes she feels so close that I trust she's near me to help me along.
When you lose someone you love, they can only exist in your heart, and in your memories of them. I miss my grandma about as much as I thought I would, and it's a staggering amount. When my heart feels empty on days like today, I try to fill it with thoughts of all the years I had with her, knowing that in the years I'll have without her, I'll never let her disappear from my mind.
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