When Does a Person Become a Character?
(this one is a little existential and might not be for you if you're currently mourning someone)
Dear Reader,
I know exactly what my great-grandmother’s hands looked like. Her long, elegant fingers. Her perfectly manicured nails. The click of her nails on the piano keys. The fact that having long nails was more important to her than the practicality of short nails as a pianist. The fact that she had long nails despite being an accomplished baker, too. I think I know how she’d stir her tea, the way she’d avoid clinking her spoon against her china teacup. I can see her writing a recipe for brownies, her perfect cursive letters elongated like her fingers. If I saw her in the street, I would recognize her, despite never having seen a photograph of her.
If I only left you with that paragraph, you might get the impression that she was a stylish, feminine woman, and she was, but I think this might reduce her to a stereotype and flatten out her complexity. She was also tough as nails. Her husband died suddenly and left her with two small daughters to raise on her own, so she went to work. She was a career woman at a time when women were not career women. I cannot imagine the kind of sexism she must have faced in the workforce, nor the grit it took to pick up the pieces of her life. And she was cruel to her daughter. She favored one daughter over the other. Her parting act when she died was to intentionally leave the bulk of her possessions to one daughter, as if to drive a wedge between the two sisters.1
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