Status Updates From Büyük Büyükanne Webster

Halloween is upon us

'' Even missing
him was futile, for it was like missing a foreign country which one had
never visited and never would. No anecdotes or reminiscences from his
contemporaries could ever give him a face. ''

I missed my
father. Missing him, I realised that for me he would always be lost in a
much more serious and final way than Aunt Lavinia and Great Granny
Webster could ever be. Like someone born before the invention of the
camera, he had disappeared too early for my memory to have been able to
form any device that could retain him as a distinct outline.

Despite the
humiliations of extreme old age, her sense of the worth of her own identity
was solid because it had become inseparable from the hallowed stability of
her own unvarying routines. Even if one happened to dislike both her ways and her values, because she saw herself as too highly placed and well-armoured to need to care about vulgar criticism she remained in a sense the winner.

But their laughing nostalgia when they remembered how someone in their set had been sick on the floor, or passed out, or insulted a stranger, or crashed his girl-friend’s car, never could counteract my feeling that what they now remembered as precious moments must also have been in many ways unpleasant. This mood was too fragile to be resurrected many years after it had suffered a smoke-like dispersal.