I doubt she ever thought about it. I doubt she ever wondered what would become of this boomerang shaped coffee table.
I doubt she ever dreamed it would sit in her granddaughter's living room, sharing a weekly cup of coffee and a reading of the New York Times. Yet it does, along with the ghost of her secrets. Secrets clothed in pride.
That's the funny thing about pride and furniture. They live on after we've become worm food. Or a box full of ash. They keep our secrets just below the tangible surface of understanding. In plain sight and just out of reach.
I've changed the table's legs from their stumpy originals in an attempt to refine and polish the thing. The new thinly tapered set isn't quite right, though. It wobbles on its weak foundation. My attempt to update the table seems futile as, in reality, I am only trying to drown out the thought of our similarities ending at our shared middle name and this triangular, unsteady object.
Did I end up with her self-sabotaging prideful ways? Do I have her fear of being truly known? This woman whom I've never met but seem to encounter every time I step foot into my living room haunts me with the possibility of sameness.
Grace and mercy covers the generation that came before me, a valley of peace sandwiched between the pragmatism of the one before her and the one after her. Born to one and the giver of birth to the other, shouldn't my mother's life have been the catalyst of change? Wasn't her humility the bridge to better? Here I sit, questioning the genetics of the soul. Do we get the strands of DNA that have been spliced and pinched from those who've come before us to craft the foundations of our souls? Is this the growth place for the marrow in our bones?
Perhaps it would be easier to come to a conclusion if the liquor hadn't soured her liver, turned her eyes yellow and brought death in her fifties. Maybe if I could sit across from that woman shrouded in her secrets, instead of her 1960's knock-off antique, I just might be able to define our similarities from presumptions.
What if my questions are exactly that which makes us different? While she spent her life in the trap of what she couldn't bring herself to say out loud, maybe I am the one who is supposed to do the dirty work of ending the silence. What if she lived through the dark so that I could glean from the light? A busted and holy combination of my ancestry 一 grandmother, mother, daughter.
Is it possible a namesake does bring with it a cloak of responsibility?
