Gayle Ann Weinstein current

CURRENT

"Meet Me On The Corner" excerpted from a longer memoir-in-progress titled Shayndel.

After the deaths, very close together, of my grandmother’s husband and her youngest son, my father sent me to Florida to check on my grandmother’s sanity. I found ants crawling out of cereal boxes, eggs that were black inside, and a room filled from floor to ceiling with jars of okra caterpillars floating in a broth of Martha Washington seasoning. I couldn’t diagnose her condition, but I considered myself lucky that she agreed to let me record her stories.

The two of us sat at her kitchen table, my ten-year-old son asleep in a back bedroom, and by the light of a bulb plugged into an electric socket down near the floorboards, she told me the often-repeated stories of her life. Over time the importance of the veracity of her stories diminished, and when my father told me that he listened to the tapes with his eyes closed and he could see his mother sitting before him, the truth didn’t matter at all.

This is one of my favorites.

(Thank you to Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL.)

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