wanderingsoul
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The Coat Rack and My Grandmother's Coat - Monday, September 05, 2005
Did some more cleaning today. Could do it everyday and never be finished. It is an old house with 8 rooms and a basement and an attic. I should live so long to finish cleaning all the YEARS of accumulated junk—and memories—from this house.
But I got rid of something today that part of me didn’t really want to get rid of. It was an old coat rack. I don’t know exactly how old it is, but I DO know it is probably around the same age as my dad would be, which would be 81 this year. And I know that because he said it belonged to his mother. But it wasn’t one of those “valuable antiques” or anything like that. It was almost as tall as I am and a dark, almost black wood—probably so dark because I doubt it has been cleaned much in at least 26 years (I don’t remember anyone ever cleaning it). And some of those metal hooks you hang the coats on were gone. And it had an alarming tendency to tip over. Every time it was moved or even touched—usually when it was full of coats because it was ALWAYS full of coats. Coats hung there long after their owners had left the house—and in some cases, left the world.
And it was the home of my “grandmother’s coat,” which I wrote about some time back on my old Xanga. I dug it out for this occasion:
Sunday, March 28, 2004
I am my grandmother’s coat. She had a big black coat, was probably wool but I don’t know. I only know it was big, black, heavy, smelled like her closet and had big round shiny black and silver buttons on it. I used to play under it when it hung on the coat rack in the hallway. I used to hide under it and become invisible. I think it was the ORIGINAL Invisibility Cloak. I remember it fell off the coat rack a few times and would land on me—well, since I was playing under it that was to be expected. I remember thinking it felt like it weighed as much as my grandmother and I knew it was only a matter of time before it would smother all the air from me. I would struggle valiantly to push it off me, but would end up collapsing from its overwhelming bulk and just lying there, the breath leaving my lungs, the life leaving my body—until days later, when my grandmother decided to go home, they would find my lifeless body lying beneath my grandmother’s coat.
I feel like that tonight. I feel like something so immense and oppressive it can absorb all the light, cover everything in a heavy blackness and smother the life out of anything.
I am my grandmother’s coat.
So today I threw out the coat rack, where my grandmother’s coat and I had such dramatic experiences. And as I asked Sam to move it for me, it fell over on him and one of the hooks left a scratch on his stomach. And as I moved it, taking all the old coats off of it, it fell over on me, too. Got me in the head—which is a good thing, I suppose, since that IS the hardest part of me. So I was cursing it as I took it to the curb. I wonder if it knew…that it was the last time it would have the chance to make its presence felt?
I just know that it didn’t really dawn on me until I sat down here that part of me, a very sentimental, runny-eyed part of me, is going to miss that hideous old thing. And that part of me wants to run down to the curb and grab that nasty piece of wood and bring it upstairs and hide it in the attic. Except that it isn’t quite the same, without my grandmother’s coat.
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And by and by my Soul returned to me, And answered "I Myself amd Heav'n and Hell"
Omar Khayyam
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11/4/2005, 2:43 am
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