I haven't had a good day yet this week. Michael and I marched yesterday.

Salam hasn't posted to his weblog since the bombing started. I hope he is ok.

I just feel... sad. There is nothing I can do.

From dvb:

"the Saturn Cafe in Santa Cruz is temporarily changing the name of their fries to 'Fuck George Bush fries' and 5% of the profits go to the impeachment fund."

Also, one of my instructors this morning called me a pinko feminist.

My grandmother died this weekend - my dad's mom, my Ammie, Evadne Johansen.

I haven't seen her since Christmas three years ago, when her Alzheimer's had gotten to the point that she no longer remembered who I was, but before she had forgotten the faces of her children and her husband. My dad seems relieved. I always know when he's been to see his parents at the nursing home. He'll come back on a sunny Sunday afternoon, feeling morose and halfway joking about wanting to die young. He always tells me he doesn't want me to have to see him like that. This is when I plug my ears and chant lalalalalala until he changes the subject. I don't like this particular part of growing up. I don't like knowing that people that I love are going to be gone soon. It makes me feel incredibly, horribly lonely. I wonder if this is why everybody I know who's my age is baby crazy.

Vadie was always a little bit strange, and despite the fact I spent a lot of time with her when I was younger, I know next to nothing about her. I knew that my grandmother grew up incredibly wealthy, she was a Lloyd Jones and her father had owned a string of polo ponies and a big house in Beverly Hills before the Depression took it all and left her with only a nanny. Her nanny was a family friend until the day she died, and I remember her coming to my birthday parties when I was small.

My grandmother went to Canada during the war, where she met my grandfather, a Danish merchant marine who, along with the rest of the men on his ship, had escaped the Nazis and joined the Royal Norwegian Air Force. He had no money, but he had bright blue eyes and a wicked smile and he smoked a pipe. They got married and went back to Denmark after the war was over and had two children, my aunt and my father, then came to the United States and had a third child, my uncle. She worked at Camarillo State Mental Hospital in the years before it closed, in the children's ward. My grandmother had a brother, and I think a sister who lived in Vancouver.

I remember when I was little how she would sit all of us down, me and my five girl cousins, and show us her collection of ghosts. She had snapshots of dust clouds and blurs and light leaks from everywhere she'd ever been. She knew about haunted houses and how to make Danish meatballs and all about our zillions of distant relatives. If you listened to her elaborate genealogical tales you would know that I am related, through her, to everyone who was ever famous in any way. She told us of our relation to Abraham Lincoln, and Confederate generals, and the old family connections to the Rockefellers and the Gettys. I've never been able to find anything about that particular side of my family tree except for my father's signet ring, which she handed down to him after my grandfather Kaj crushed part of it in a machine at work. By the time I was old enough to know to ask about it, that part of her mind was gone.

This is all I know about her. She wasn't the kind of grandma who calls once a week to ask you if you've flossed and whether your doors are locked and sends cookies and birthday cards. I saw my father's parents exactly once a year for most of my life, even though they lived in the next county over. When I saw my grandmother on Christmas, she would just look at me with her cloudy blue eyes and smile at me and pat my cheek. She was kind. Once I remember she cried at Christmas breakfast, remembering something from the past, unable to articulate exactly what it was. All she could say was that it was beautiful. That was the last time I saw her.

Now she's dead and we will put her history and her secrets and her stories in the ground with her, gone forever. I'm sorry I never knew you Ammie. I hope you are at peace.