Rhinestones I think she was spooning custard into my bowl, Grandma Phyllis, when I asked her about the owl pinned to her dress. “Are those rubies?” I wondered. The eyes of the tiny bejeweled bird caught the light, glowed as bright as the coffee percolator’s red spot. She fiddled with Saran wrap. I didn’t think she’d heard. “Oh, this?” She tapped the tip of her red-enameled nail on the owl’s breast. Metal plumage rattled like hail had, the night before, on asphalt shingles over my bed. “No. Just paste.” I thought of the white goo at school, how all the girls made it into fake fingernails, would wave their hands like movie stars, fling invisible feather boas over their shoulders, call each other “Dar-link!” Grandma, whose hair glinted high over her pink scalp, showed me the worn gold bands on her left hand, sprinkled with clouded stones pressed like raisins into dough, hazy with lemon oil and cold cream. “These, though,” she smiled, “are real,” and lit a cigarette. “Understand?” Leslie Schultz
Who defines what is real? Who determines value? Does the surface reveal or conceal?
Questions with no fixed answers….
Yes, right!
After I published the poem, I thought about such pinging connections as the Rheingold in Wagner, and how the last reunion for Grandma Phyllis’s clan, scheduled for this summer, is now cancelled. Would have been held, as always, in Rhinelander, WI, home of the Hodag hoax.
“These? These are real!” Made me chuckle. Reminded me of some grandmothers in my life. I could picture the pins and the rings. Love that they were “hazy with lemon oil and cold cream.” That moment just speaks about a generation gone while making me look at my own ring that’s been washed and covered with lotion countless times these day!
Wonderful, Leslie.