In other words, is this blog a dialogue, or am I just talking to myself, and if I am, does it really matter? So what if this ends up being yet another navel-gazing piece of crap, something that should have remained safely ensconced in a Moleskine journal or a Mead three-holer, rather than committed to cyberspace for generations to ridicule, neglect, or misrepresent?

(Of course, I bring up three conditions most would construe to be negative. I strive for optimism, but I am the daughter of a man who says, when asked whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, “What fucking glass?”)

I guess I won’t know until I write a bit more. And I can’t expect my anticipated audience to visit or become involved unless I provide something with which to interact.

My brother has a successful blog that was recently picked up by the Los Angeles Times called Dodger Thoughts. He gets hundreds of comments daily, and I am incredibly proud of him.

Here is his third post, from July 23, 2002 (yes, he started his blog years before people were discussing SEO and keywords and even added value, at least in a blog context):

Having now written that unsolicited ramble, I now confront the question of: Why? Why am I doing this, and who am I doing this for?

My best answers are, for no good reason, and for no one in particular.

Whatever I write here will be with the assumption that the audience might only be one person – me. Admittedly, writing for one’s self on the Web is not unlike talking to yourself in a public place – but though I try to avoid doing that, it’s not like I haven’t done that. There are probably worse things.

And I figure, occasionally, someone else might read this. My brother or sister. An indulgent friend. I don’t know – someone. I’m not sure it matters.

And I guess I enjoy the idea of writing about baseball enough that I’m going to try not to worry about the audience thing too much.

But if there’s one thing I do want to make sure you all know, it’s that I’m not so delusional that I’m thinking big about this site. I’m thinking small. Very small. Just something to have fun with for the time being.

I’m trying to keep his thoughts in mind. The royal “We” will see whether I can ever get comfortable with this, whether it matters even to me, and whether this is not a case of deja vu, which for me has mostly translated to, “Why bother?”

The last time we visited her in Hemet was almost 20 years ago, and at the time she lived in a little sandstone cottage that was part of a senior development. She kept all the curtains down, possibly to ward off the heat, and it smelled like sandalwood. There were several walls of photos of our family and my grandfather. Most of the photos were in the original frames — some wood, others silver, some faded with splinters — and the photos were ranged from wallet size to 11X14s.

For some reason I picture Lucille’s last living place as being a sandstone version of the army barracks where my great uncle was assigned during World War 2 (being a Jewish guy in his 30s, he was, not surprisingly or stereotypically, an attorney) like this:

and this:

Apparently the convalescent facility has an east and west side, so I see three barrack-type buildings shaped like a horseshoe. Even though she probably lived in an apartment-like the way my Grandma Sue lives, I keep imagining hospital-like rooms with adjustable beds like those in Cedar’s-Sinai Medical Center (my memories crowd out my imagination). I’m sure there’s a window, but it’s probably draped. The room or rooms will be cluttered. Some of the photos hang on the walls, while others lean against them. I imagine most of her clothing still hangs in the closet, some of it lying on the floor in rayon puddles. The sliding door of the closet is only partially shut, and it probably is mirrored.

I know it’ll have a distinct scent — a bit of soap or perfume, the sandalwood, a lot of disinfectant, and some sour sickly notes. I wonder if the bed will be made or if the sheets have been stripped, or if the bed is still there. I imagine that her caretakers stripped her bed at the very least, but I’ll see for myself in about 12 hours.

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death, Lucille, memory, memory token, imagine

I finally gave up — you can only wrangle with someone for so long before you say, Oh, fuck it, it’s still under warranty.

Having had such crappy luck with Sears repair these last few years, I wasn’t convinced the repairman doing my yearly maintenance (an option I was unaware of until this final year of my five-year extended warranty) would be a senior technician as I had requested. After all, the guy was supposed to arrive between 8 am and noon, and it was now 1:30. When he called to say he was leaving Beverly Hills and would be at my house in 15 minutes, his voice, a tenor, caused me to revise my picture a little. The guy was in his 30s tops and had a full head of black hair.

The senior technician (he really was a senior technician) did have a full head of black hair, but it was tinged with gray. He was big enough to have played football and had a round face. He’d been a technician for almost 30 years and admitted that he had been one click away from buying an unlocked Nokia 95 smartphone the night before.

He took apart the lower spray arm to find bits of plastic wrapper and black schmutz clogging the filter. He cleaned the filter, fixed the latch, checked the wiring, and even checked the water temperature (ideally the water should be at 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and mine was only 120). He also told me it’s better to ask for a 1-5 pm appointment rather than the morning one because technicians are usually overbooked, and they’re required to take and log their 15-minute breaks and one-hour lunches.

In other words, he was an excellent technician, a kind man, and looked nothing like my mental picture of him.

But normally, people, places, what have you, rarely end up the way I imagine them to look or seem. The few times they have, I’ve really been surprised.

But then are there many people who guess correctly more often than not? To what extent do past memories color future recollections?

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memory token, preconceived notion, Sears repair, dishwasher