Sunday, January 11, 1948

It’s a very gray day. I’m sitting alone in the back seat of a large gray sedan on the left side with my nose sometimes touching the cold glass, looking through streaked lines of rain, but not seeing anything, but gray. Everything is gray: the low gray clouds, the mist that hangs over the never changing marshlands, broken only by the repetitive brown-flash flash flash of telephone poles speeding past my view, and the green-brown soggy marshlands that go on forever and ever, and ever, forever.

I come out of my reverie when cousin Bennet swerves the big car sharply right to avoid something in the road and I slide with it, halfway across the seat then quickly back to the center as he straightens it out. “You Okay back there David?”

“Yeah.” I push myself back to my perch at the window, nothing’s changed out there. But, in here his new wife Judith turns on the radio and the announcer comes to life with, “Plastics! An amazing plastic material called ‘Saran,’ developed by Dow Chemical, and used during the war to protect metal from corrosion, is now available in clear sheets at local food stores to protect foods of all kinds from the ravages of oxygen. The wrap, that Dow calls “Saran Wrap” can extend the life and freshness of meats and vegetables …”

Bennet is excited, “Judith can you imagine how this is going to revolutionize the way we preserve our foods! This is destined to replace cans, and much more, and ..!”

describe how I feel physically and in my mind … I’m angry and I’m hurt. want to shout out and bennet and Judy, Don’t you know who she was? Who she is and will always be, for me? How can you talk about fresh vegetables a

I mentally turned down the volume of their conversation and visualized the clear plastic gum drop tree that my mom had sent me before Christmas. What made the tree special was that she sent it to me. The end of each clear plastic branch was capped with its own colored gum drop. it was perfect and seemed almost magical when the sun flowed through the clear plastic bringing radiance and life to each translucent colored gum drop, except for my favorite black licorices’. There were red cherry gum drops, yellow lemon ones, orange, orange flavored ones, green mint, and even a few of my favorite black licorice gum drops scattered here and there at the ends of some of the branches.

And now she is dead, her radiance and life vanquished, and I’m on my way to her funeral in Queens, and I’m scared.

And now it’s real, —- flash back to her sickbed/deathbed.

And then …

We’re here …. describe scene

won’t look in her casket because I knew how she looked now since I had visited her a month ago when she was dying and wanted to say goodbye to me.