Author: Jackie Mantey

My grandpa died this week. It has caught me off guard. He was always so full of life, I just figured he would live forever?

He was such a spry old guy, too! Grandpa had recently moved into an assisted living facility, an act he definitely DID NOT want to do but acquiesced to when COVID-19 hit. Why? So he could visit my grandma in the Alzheimer’s unit there every day (a through-the-window visit would no longer suffice). He took such loving care of her the past few years. From making sure she had outfits she would approve of, to bringing her a thermos of root beer as a treat when he’d visit. His love for her is probably what I’ll remember most. I can still picture him helping Grandma dye her hair in the sink whenever we had sleepovers. They were best friends. 

Grandpa was curious, adventurous, thoughtful, smart, and so damn playful. And he was a wonderful writer, writing and editing the Army’s Preventive Maintenance (PS) magazine throughout his career. I’ve always attributed any natural gift I have as a baton handoff from him to me. 

After college, I asked Grandpa to email me some of his stories. Him and Grandma kept binders of tales from their many travels—like #vanlife bloggers before their time. He said yes but did one better: He said he would write some brand new pieces for me and his daughters of memories from his life. Today I have this remarkable collection of stories he wrote (a few by Grandma, but mostly him). What a fucking gift! I loved getting to know him this way and I was always excited to get a new email with a story attached. It sparked a lot of interesting conversations between us. They’re now all stored in a binder he gave me when I moved to Chicago. 

I recently started adding new photos to the binder… printouts of photos he would text of him and of Grandma at the nursing home, screenshots of funny text messages he sent, a photo of him in a COVID face mask that he’d drawn a smiley face onto. Such a rascal.

I’ve been adding these to the end of the book. The day he died, I added a note about when, where, and how he passed. I feel tender toward making sure I give his story, in this binder at least, the ending… that I record it. He would always end his written stories like the grisled old magazine editor he was: with – end – at the end.

A story isn’t a story without an ending. And Grandpa had a hell of a story. You did good, farm boy.

I’m sad COVID forced me to cancel my March visit to Marion. He and I had a Bob Evans breakfast date planned, like we had been doing for the past year or so. We would eat together, bitch about the coffee, politely disagree about politics (he would always hear me out!), talk about about my hopes to roadtrip across the country with Justin, order some blueberry crepes to-go, and take them (and some root beer) to Grandma for our visit.

But. I’m so grateful to have had him as a grandpa and have had as much time with him as I did. I miss him already.

– end –

Hey, how are you doing? Overwhelmed? Me too. It’s surprising how all-consumingly intense life can be in lockdown, no? Nearly four months of time in which I’ve talked to a total of three people in person. But maybe that’s part of the problem—I’m worried about humanity because I am not experiencing it much beyond the screen. I’m like the baby monkey clinging to a wire-made mother, longing for but misunderstanding real love.

Some complain of feeling bored in quarantine. I feel anything but. I feel stressed and anxious and overwrought. Everything seems so B-I-G, even as the physical boundaries of my daily life are smaller than ever.

To help myself feel just a little bit better, I’ve been trying to focus on things I can control. I can control what I give my attention to, so after work each day, I’ve been plugging along at building an online shop to sell my artwork. There’s something cathartic about tinkering away at a thing I hope to launch in “the future” while listening to the news and the podcasts and the sound and the fury. Working on the shop symbolizes the shred of optimism I have buried underneath all this tension that’s seething and solidifying inside a worried self. It’s like embodying a strange paradox—I miss being around people, but I’m also very tired of “people.”

I’ve been thinking about restarting my blog too. As social media, which replaced a lot of blogosphere time and energy, becomes a place of exacerbated one-dimensionality and optical, oppositional grandstanding, the thought of having my own little Island of Internet is increasing in its appeal. 

How do we all come out of this moment kinder, more equitable, more closely tied to one another and our collaborative condition? Is that possible at this point? Do others feel as tired and disconnected as I do?

I don’t know. And writing all of this seems trite in the wake of a cultural revolution, a global pandemic, a paradigm shift of historical proportions… I feel increasingly tense as there seems to be no route out of this place but to keep on keeping on. 

I am plankton in a wave. 

I do my work, I add items to my site, I plan for “the future,” I read about the present and feel upset about the past, I go to bed. 

I wake up and do it all over again. 

Well, damn. When I started my newsletter I thought I would use it to share anecdotes of joy or hope or humor from my previous seven days. This past week has been anything but joyous, hopeful, or funny. It’s been historic. We better get used to it. We are on a precipice of something. I hope that something is change and a more equitable criminal justice system. I hope it happens soon.

In lieu of anything joyous to report, I’ll share this instead: I’ve found a lot of solace during the pandemic by doing regular runs around my neighborhood. I am not a ~runner~ by any means. By “runs around the neighborhood” I mean I slow-jog about a quarter of a mile, then walk, then kind of run again but get tired and tell myself it was a valiant effort and we can’t all be heroes, and then sort of surreptitiously dance to whatever music’s spilling from my headphones to my ears, then sit in the park for a while and try to will myself to do sit-ups and pushups but mostly just stretch and inspect the grass.

You can see a lot by looking at the grass, while on the grass’ level. 

Like a mystical woman in polyester nylon, I conduct phony tasseography and stretch my hamstrings. Fortunes emerge through the layered leaves and fragile stems, the grasses map to answers (a rapidly disappearing luxury). A cross can mean a blockage—they’re everywhere. The wings of a bird, new freedom—they’re here but not fully formed. This is like cloud watching but for those who have found themselves tangled in the earth.  

The other day, while performing the last act of my running ritual and lying down in the grass pretending to do leg lifts, I spent some time watching the last two seeds of a dead dandelion struggle to detach, to fly away from home and grow near each other elsewhere. They were on opposite sides of the center bud, both pulling as mightily as they could, buoyed by the breeze, like a tug of war in which both of them would crumble away with their host if they couldn’t figure it out soon.

I left before either flew away.

Two days ago, my bangs had reached the point of no return and needed to be trimmed/ burned to the ground. I haven’t cut my own bangs for a year or so, having found a delightful little Logan Square stylist who smells of root beer floats and always asks how my day is and brings me a bit of tea to sip on even if I don’t ask for it.
 
I forgot how to do this task for body management (it’s not so much a beauty ritual as it is maintenance and upkeep of a relatively uncontrollable variable—a body, my body, my hair growing out of my body). Nonetheless, I, chin-up, strode to the bathroom mirror, grabbed a chunk of hair and, with the confidence of an award-winning surgeon, performed a thorough snip straight across the bottom, right above my eyebrows.
 
I realized my mistake as soon as I let the pieces go free and they stacked like unruly sticks on my forehead. I looked like a young German boy off to fetch mushrooms for mutter dearest from the Black Forest at dawn.
 
“That’s not how you do it,” a voice snorted in my head. “Cool, hey, so nice of you to show up!” I replied.
 
Life in lockdown has reminded me a of things like this, things I’ve forgotten. Like that bangs are best cut in small vertical snips, not one long horizontal gash. Other remembrances of late:

• I live in a city because I like to see things for myself.
• Intimacy is a gift; adaption is a given.
• My body is a vulnerable vessel.
• I still own the red mini skirt from Express that I bought at 80% off five years ago. (Hello, week six’s Project Closet Purge.)
• In a lab test in 1978, two scientists fed rabbits high cholesterol diets to see if they got heart disease. One group of rabbits totally fucking did. The other group didn’t. Why? The lab assistant who fed the group that didn’t get sick talked to the rabbits, stroked their fat little cheekies, and cuddled them while she fed them. (AKA: Family dinner can be sacred.)

Twenty-four hours and two YouTube-tutorials-by-teens-named-Ava after my “haircut,” I fixed my bangs. They look pretty good, actually, all fringed and perfectly layered, and I’ve been thinking about how much, before coronavirus, I paid for things that I could do myself just as well. More of that’s coming, I’m sure—a global scaling back in favor of doing it ourselves (by way of virtual spiritual guides named Ava, of course.)

I feel shocked that these shifts that are already happening to us individually. This experience, potential life-threatening illness notwithstanding, hasn’t been a full two months in progress and we’ve already changed, adapted, rethought, reimagined, reframed. 

Why am I so surprised that I can continue to be surprised?

When will I remember that there’s always something to forget?