How do you respond to this? How many students do you know bring the cremains of dead relatives to school? As time passed I felt proud of having her there. When I was done I took her to my car and we went home. She is now sitting in my living room. My grandfather would like her back. My mother will take her up there at the end of this week.
Screaming Bean, untitled. (Apr. 27, 2004).
Sometimes I think about the things I would have liked my grandfather to see. He died in 1993, before I graduated high school. It was the drink, and time, that took him. Would I have carried him along, though, to see me graduate high school? To see me running wild in his home town of Boston? Would he have been there, hunched yet strong, when I put on the puffy velvet hat and blue robes and received my JD? Afterwards would we have ended up in the poker pits of Atlantic City? Would he have chuckled at my shaky hand as I was sworn in by Justice Griffiths?
Last night I hunched over the oak rail at the Dublin House watching the Playoffs as I sipped my gin, listening to my friend Peterson talk about his favorite film monologues. I thought about one of the final scenes in Blade Runner, when Rutger Hauer - Roy Batty, a short-lived replicant - tells Harrison Ford, the bounty hunter sent to kill him, of the things he had seen in his life. He pauses, and then says simply, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain... Time to die."
Peterson thought about it for a second. "Eh. I prefer the one line movie quotes, you know, the ones where it's all right there. One line."
I nodded and took a swig of gin. "You're a movie person, though, deep down. I'm a book person. We need these differences."
And, after all, it was raining that night.
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