My grandmother Juanita Melanson, is 80 years old. She was born and grew up on the American side of the Del Rio river, in Texas. I guess there’s Mexican counterpart on the other side of the border as well. She grew up with eight brothers, one brother died as a teenager, allegedly drowned, and one sister. On the occasions that we would visit her hometown in my youth she would take me to swim in a river that went through town, the same river that her brother was drowned. Now that I think about it, it was like taking someone to swim in the drainage pond, small inconsequential rivers that course through the suburbs. You had to get out from time to time, due to a dirty diaper sailing by. She met and married my grandfather, George A. Melanson at the end of WWII. She folded and packed parachutes, while he was being trained to be a mechanic.
I remember when I was a teenager, she had thicker, more muscular arms than I ever did as a teenage boy. Now she wheezes and coughs, a ghost of her former self. We have seen much death together, my grandfather died on our couch in the middle of the day, after we had just returned from Kmart. My father died some months later, a result of a drug overdose, I never knew him. We for some reason did not attend his funeral, despite the fact that he was buried at the same cemetery as my grandfather. It was only three of us for a number of years until my mother died in 2009, succumbing to her asthma.
My grandmother was never that bright, in one instance of my childhood I remember her telling me to unplug the microwave in case of a thunderstorm because if lightning struck the house the microwave oven would blow up like an atom bomb. Once she told me that something was wrong with an old television set we had, a massive old T.V. which became the stand for another when the first one died. She told me never to turn it on because if I did it would explode. I remember one time I psyched my friend up and we were prepared ourselves to die in a suburban Hiroshima. I said goodbye to my friend who sat on the couch and watched as I pulled the knob. I had expected to meet Jesus, but instead it only confirmed that my grandmother didn’t know what she was talking about when nothing happened, a lesson I was taught over and over and over a hundred thousand times. I learned to entertain her mindless babble, what else could a young boy do?
I went to the YMCA for swimming lessons when I was about eight to ten years old, why I don’t know, but it was just one of those things that an idiot parent puts an unfortunate child through. I was like a fish out of water, I remember looking down at these kids that were a few years younger than I was, who were looking up at me with the same look as the adults with them, what’s wrong with this boy that he has to take a swimming class with us kindergarteners? Once we were in the water and my swimming aptitude was obvious to everyone but grandmother, it was quickly noted by the adult staff, and mentioned to my grandmother, that I was in the wrong place, and that I should be swimming in an intermediate, or an advanced swimming class. My grandmother, she would have never come up with this idea.
Once I almost lost my fingers in the hood of the LTD, after she dropped it without seeing where I was and what I was doing. I yanked my fingers away at the last second, before the hood dropped like a guillotine. Like a great many things in her life, she never noticed. It was only one of many instances that I knew I may live with her under the same roof, but mentally I was there alone.
Another time she daubed some stuff on my eye, for some kind of eye disorder that she diagnosed me with one day. Her concoction only resulted in puffing up my eye, one of my classmates getting the opportunity to advertise to the class, “JOE GOT BEAT UP”. I never again let myself be the guinea pig for her stupidities again. At an early age I realized she was one half stupid, the other half insane.
As the day for my road test got closer, my grandmother thought she would give me her driving crash course in a couple of days. Little did she know that I had been covertly teaching myself to drive for a couple of years. These urges to drive would come and go, mostly around the availability of my friends. Once a friend of mine slept over, and after my grandmother went upstairs to bed, we took off in her car, and roamed the suburbs in the night, polluting various roads, houses, and cars with eggs and our graffiti. Once I drove myself in the early hours of the night to go to Sylvan Beach, a destination of preoccupation designated as a goal when next I had the urge for the road. That time I came home at 5 A.M. to find my grandmother standing at the front door furiously waiting for me to come home as I often waited for her to come home with dinner. I listened to her scold me, then I went up to bed, vowing to be ever more careful, but knowing I would never give up my surreptitious wanderings behind the wheel in the night.
She used to tell me when I was a child, “everything you touch turns to shit” and often I would have to listen to her tell me “if I didn’t have you, I would have a million dollars”, and often I heard her lament “I wish I could just crawl into a hole and die”. After a period of years, I began to feel the same way too.
My grandmother sent me to this family by the name of Christian, to be babysat, when I was around five years old. They didn’t live up to their last name. I would get locked in rooms, and once I had to urinate which I did, through the ventilation shaft in the floor. Another time I was awoken to the two brothers, one my age, another older, stabbing my feet with forks. Another time I was shitting myself from being dosed with laxatives in something I ate or drank. Another time, the eldest brother hid my bike and told me he threw it in the neighborhood pond. I told my grandmother every single time, and she kept sending me back. I think it was the time I beat the youngest son with a stick that she had to finally admit it wasn’t working out for any of us. After the Christians, my grandmother found me another babysitter, a woman who ran a foster home a few houses down from our home. Here I witnessed and heard a great many things about troubled kids and teens, once I witnessed a vicious fist fight between two teenage boys, now that I think about it, I think the eldest, strongest one of them had saved me from being sodomized. But at least I got my first sexual encounter with the granddaughter of the foster lady, so I can’t say it was all that bad of an encounter.
My grandmother abused diet pills when I was a kid. She would come home in a bad mood, complaining about the people she worked with. “Those goddamn people, those goddamn people”, she would say, apparently it got rough at the Napa auto parts warehouse in Eastwood. Then she would go upstairs, take her pills, and then come down singing and humming loudly, another lesson to a young boy in her insanity. I learned how to amuse myself, playing alone in the basement with my G.I. Joes, then hiding in my room watching television, wishing in my teenage years I had someone sane to talk to, wishing it was one of my other family members had lived, wishing I wasn’t alone.
My mother once came to see me, and she didn’t last more than five minutes. My grandmother was always criticizing her for her lack of responsibility, her supposed lack of parental concern. “Where’s your mother”, she would ask a little boy, “she don’t care about you”, a lesson to a little boy that I was nothing more than a chore and an obligation that my mother couldn’t afford to be bothered with. When my mother showed up one time, I remember them getting into an argument. “If you didn’t want a kid then you shouldn’t have opened your legs”, my grandmother told her daughter, in front of her son. My mother departed in tears. I remember my mother saying to me in tears before she went out the door, “this is why I don’t come to see you”. My mother left, leaving me alone with this crazy woman, a woman whose head, for many years, I wanted to bash in if it didn’t mean the rest of my life in New York State prison.
My grandmother was not someone that I could look to confide in when I was a child and a teenager. If one had a bad day at school, her advice was to eat something; this was also the advice for a good day too. Food is the only means that you have in life to manage your emotions seems to be the greatest message she ever sent to me. Her limited capacity to comfort me was spent on McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, an any other manner of fried foods. My emotions I ate for thirty seven years until lately they have become an acrid, and burning ache in my gut.
Because of my grandmother, I am forever alone. I learned at a young age that family means nothing but chores and obligations, relationships are nothing but hoops to jump through, a job that doesn’t pay very well. And so I care not for anyone else but I, and I am now a monster in the suburbs, I am what my family has made me.
Professor's Comments:
"GRADE: 96Joseph, this is a powerful essay, since it captures reader interest from beginning to end as it develops in meaning and intensity. You impress your audience throughout with a very distinct narrative voice, well constructed, flowing sentence patterns that control grammar, usage, and mechanics; well placed descriptive detail/imagery; active verbs and deliberate use of literary devices such as story line, character development, dialogue, scene and setting. Containing no stereotypes or clichés, your language choices are fresh and surprising as you succeed in getting the reader to care about and wait for the outcome. Grounded in a dilemma/conflict that gets the reader involved, the significance/theme or “greater truth” of your subject matter is consistently interwoven throughout the narrative, as you focus on family conflict and personal identify. Well developed connections between factual information and personal meaning demonstrate truth-telling and why your topic is important. By the end, you’ve evoked a strong emotional/intellectual response in the audience and created a very successful piece -- excellent work, Joseph! Grade for Essay 3 is A".
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