Young Mame
She’s eccentric; the kind of girl who one day might wear satin jumpsuits to cocktail parties. She carries herself with a bubbling coolness, a contradiction of temperament. One moment she is detached as a Japanese dowager, the next vying for the gasp of an audience. Some might label her dramatic. She’d probably agree. She relishes exhibition. She moves animated, flittering in a flattened world, pushing her will upon it with an infectious charm, a large part of why I love her.
It has been nearly five months since Jordan was diagnosed with cancer, and the disease is distant from her – a log line in her life story, seldom more. Her illness wafts around like a familiar scent, rarely intruding upon her life. She is matter-of-fact about it, leaving the high drama to more mundane crises: denial of sweets, manipulation of her brother, trivial playground bruises.
But the scent of the disease lingers. It irritates reality when we pause, thinking it benign. Thankfully, it does not threaten health. Our daughter blushes forceful will over life’s testing challenges. Her illness surfaces in ghostly forms, like a random software bug. She stammers over familiar words, forgets conversations, teeters with misplaced observations. Sure, she is smart. It is her intelligence that renders error immediate. She over-compensates to conceal mistakes. Her eyes feign sovereignty. She puts her back into false assertions. It is once noble, inspiring and sad. And I can’t help but love her more. She reminds me of a modern day Mame Dennis. I imagine her twenty years from now, a character none can comprehend, full of life and contradiction; never sweating the big things, sounding crescendos on nuances the rest of us overlook. (more…)
