Evidence of Our Cuteness

After his stroke, my grandfather had an extended stay at a rehab facility whose temperature was consistently set to BOILING. He wasn't its biggest fan, especially considering he couldn't sleep for the heat, hated the hours of rehab (pinning clothespins to a clothesline, setting a table, matching cut-out shapes to their corresponding openings in a box), or his roommate, who had, what my grandfather assumed from the smell, gangrene.

When Adam and I went to visit him shortly before he was sprung from the facility, we found him in the common room, dozing in front of a television that was blaring soaps. "This is no way to live," he told us. "No way at all."

Right after my grandfather entered rehab, I was put in charge of looking after his cat. Each time I opened the door to walk into the house, that cat jingled down the hallway, but as soon as she saw it was me she skidded to a stop and--I swear--looked disappointed. My grandfather might have a cruel streak, and many of my memories of him interacting with my grandmother might include him screaming at her, but he sure is good and nice and sweet to that cat.

He got the cat after my grandmother died almost four years ago. He needed something to fill the space, the quiet. And he became obsessed with the cat. He let it have the run of the house. Simultaneously, he let the house go to shit. It is entirely possible my grandfather hasn't cleaned since my grandmother's death, and I figured that out the first day I went over to take care of the cat.

I hadn't been to the house in a long time. I'd avoided like the plague, actually. Being in there made me sad and quiet and a little sick to my stomach. After my grandmother's funeral, my grandfather took to talking to the urn of my grandmother's ashes. I sure you miss you, old girl, he would say, nodding in the direction of the curio cabinet where grandma was now stored.

I hated when he did that. I hated it so much. I wanted to tell him it must be nice to get all sappy and sentimental now, now that grandma was dead and no longer around to clean the bathroom and make him sandwiches. I wanted to tell him he should have been nicer to her when she was alive, that he should have spent less time telling her she was being ridiculous and stupid. And then, when he built an enclosed mudroom at the front of the house--something my grandmother had wanted for years, something my grandfather grumbled about and put off--and told everyone he did it for grandma, that was the last straw. I wanted to hit the old man. I wanted to ask him what good it did now. I wanted to ask him why he couldn't given her one little thing she'd wanted for years when she was actually around to use it.

It made me sick to think about it. It made me sick to be there. So I generally avoided visiting the house until I had to, which happened when I needed to take care of the cat. When I walked in that first day, I waded through years' worth of filth: a scattering of old pill bottles thrown casually on the floor, paperwork that had been read and abandoned in the middle of the carpet, piles of age-old cat puke, stacks of magazines my grandfather had clearly gotten scammed into buying: Latino!, Cat Fancy, US Weekly, Star, OK!, Wired, Blender.

It was clear that there was going to have to be some intensive intervention before he was able to come home and live on his own again. There was going to be a day where we all went over and cleaned out the house and garage. Thankfully, my uncle's wife did most of the house cleaning--she turned a miracle, actually--and my uncle and mother plodded through the garage, which was still full of a lot of my grandmother's things. After her death, my mother had gone over and sorted through closets and the attic, but she has yet to make a serious dent in grandma's things. It's overwhelming what a pack-rat that woman was, really. During the cleaning session, we found giant boxes stuffed with old pantyhose, damaged Tupperware, and headless figurines. Not to mention moldy books, recipes, and pictures.

Those pictures, though, were really something else. My grandmother kept large envelopes for each of her children and grandchildren, and she sorted each season's pictures into the envelopes accordingly. My grandfather had shoved those pictures onto a low shelf, one that was attacked and flooded for years. But we were able to pull out some really precious photos--hundreds and hundreds that are worth saving, that make me excited because I'm about to make the world's cutest collage of pictures that will hang in my room. Here are some that are likely to be featured:



Here is my mother. Tell me she is not the fattest, cutest baby girl you have ever seen in your life. Grandma should've entered her in contests because she would've won, no problem. Not convinced?



How about now? I'm not sure whose back that is--it doesn't look like my grandfather; it could be one of my grandmother's brothers--but it's possibly the best photo in the history of photos.



My grandmother loved to cut my mother's bangs really, really short, so in any picture you see of her before she was a teenager, my mother is showing an awful lot of forehead.



Here's where I admit something strange. My brother was a much cuter baby than I was. For one thing, he was chubbier, and chubby babies equal cute babies. Second, he looked sort of angelic. Which didn't last long.



Doesn't he look serious and earnest? Doesn't he look like a future pilot, and not someone who will fail out of college so badly in his first semester that he won't even be afforded a second chance on academic probation?



I blame this photograph of me on my grandfather. Who else would've made me pose with a bottle of Jack? It should also be noted that this was during what I refer to as my Vaguely Chinese Period. Between birth and the age of four, I went through a phase where there's something a bit different about my face and eyes, where I look very much like I don't belong to my mother and father.



I was groomed from an early age to be a domestic goddess. Thank you, Fisher Price.



Here I am being photographed with my favorite toy, a pink and white Fisher Price bunny (are we sensing a trend? Can you tell my father worked for FP for twenty years?). I called him Merlin, and he never left my side.



My mother was sort of a badass maker of Halloween costumes. I won an award at the town Halloween party this year because I was the best Indian princess they had ever seen. And how cute is my brother? My goodness, this collage is going to be brilliant.