livingoutloud

Dayle came home while I was in the shower and caught me singing. She told me I have my grandfathers voice.
To make her point, she played me a recording of him singing happy birthdayit was an answering machine message she had saved and held on to for the past two years. She confessed to having a collection of saved answering machine messages, and then she played me one from my grandmother. Hearing the voices of the dead is an unsettling thing. Pictures arent that way. I suppose because images have an inherently detached quality. But voice recordings are different. It made me think of this story:

A friend of mine used to live on a street that ended at the entrance to a cemetery. One night while putting in several hours of drinking and conversing, we decided to take a late night stroll through the cemetery. So there we were, beers in hand, mumbling and stumbling along. We came to the top of a hill and something about the layout of the grounds looked vaguely familiar to me. As we walked along the path that creeping sense of dj vu became more and more intense. Eventually I led us both to a single grave site and was surprised as hell to realize it was my grandmothers.
She died when I was younger, we werent exactly close, and I remember nothing about the funeral except a fist fight among my uncles and getting sick from the cookies. If you had asked me earlier where she was buried I couldnt even have told you the name of the town.
It was all very surreal, to quite literally stumble upon a hazy memory like that - quite possibly one of the more disconcerting evenings Ive experienced.
***************************************************

This is pretty friggin cool.

Also, I braved the blizzard this evening to see "Innocents' at the Ohio Theatre. It's a poetic adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. It's a beautiful performance. Tix are cheap and I highly recommend you go.