Eulogy

Now a Vidlit!

By Barry Herzog

Watch the VidLit: Eulogy

I am in the room where my father died.

The room is in the basement of a hospital. It could be the boiler room of an ocean liner. Naked water pipes swirl across walls of unadorned gray concrete. Fluorescent lights glare down from the ceiling. The door is thick, brown, and clicks shut when it closes.

My father lies face up in bed. He sports a mustache. The bed has rails but they are down. He grimaces and sighs. His eyelids flutter. He mumbles nonsense, frowns and smiles. He wears blue pajamas my mother brought from home when it became clear that he would not wake up and deserved to wear pajamas consistent with mortality.

My mother keeps his glasses in her purse. She has his wedding band in there, his watch, his college graduation ring, and a partial bridge taken out before the surgery.

I sit on a metal chair along a wall. I watch my father’s death from there, see his facial tics, hear his garbled words, his random sentences.

VidLit Press / Jun 04, 2015 / No Comment / Read

The Perfect Mug

the_perfect_mug_now_a_vidlit

By Wendy Murray

Watch the VidLit: The Perfect Mug

Sunday

I drive an old car. It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t that I went out looking for an old car as opposed to a new one that purrs with the power of a lawnmower.

I drive an old car because I had an old dog and a Volvo station wagon was the perfect shape for her to stretch out and look at the passing traffic.

The part of me that is British drinks tea every morning. Made in a tea pot, with loose leaf tea, with boiling water from my blue kettle. Whatever time I get up, the first thing I do is trot downstairs and fill the blue kettle with water and put it on the gas flame. The second trot downstairs is to warm the pot and drop in a spoonful of smokey tea, pop on the hand knitted tea cosy and go upstairs to finish with the shoes and the hairbrush and the toothpaste, before coming down to pour the properly steeped tea into a mug and head out into the world.

And this is where I come back to my old Volvo. In 1995, when my Volvo came rolling off the production line in Sweden, people had breakfast in their houses. No one bought water in bottles or double skim lattes in cardboard cups. In my Volvo there is the flimsiest of cup holders, which slides out from the armrest and would be hard pressed to hold an ice cream cone vertically.

VidLit Press / May 28, 2015 / No Comment / Read

MY GRAMA WAS KEITH RICHARDS

Lynn and Grama II

By Lynn Snowden Picket

 

My paternal grandmother was Keith Richards, if you take away the looks, the talent, and the British accent. Like Keith, my grama was unkillable. Until she finally died at the age of 95, I was wondering, with a growing sense of horror, whether she would ever die. I was starting to contemplate whether I could, without attracting undue attention, walk through the corridors of her nursing home with a wooden stake and a mallet. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My grandmother married my grandfather when she was sixteen, and had my father when she was nearly seventeen. Oh, how nice, you might be thinking, but you would be wrong. All children are guilt-tripped into visiting more often, but when my grama badgered my dad into promising to see her once a week, it meant a seventy-eight-year-old man was obliged to be on the road for three hours each way, crossing over the Pocono mountains in the dead of winter, to dutifully visit his ninety-four-year-old mother, who would only berate him for not visiting more often. But I’m still getting ahead of myself.

Here’s what you really need to know about my grama: Despite the continuing, and long-suffering presence of my grandfather, my father, the elder of two sons, was the love of her life.

VidLit Press / May 21, 2015 / No Comment / Read

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