Rainey Blogs on Some Days

I visited my Grandpa Rainey—my dad’s father—in the hospital the other day and he asked me if I like coffee. “Yes, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to go start the coffee,” I told him. “That’s how I knew she wasn’t going to make it,” he had told me in March when I was home for my Grandma Rainey’s funeral. “She stopped drinking coffee.” If there is any metaphor for life that both sides of my family shared, it is coffee. As long as we are drinking coffee, we are alive. We have a reason to get up in the morning, to brew a pot, to hear the coffee moan and travail until the dripping stops and the coffee pots rests, her work done for another day. We pour a cup, put in our cream and sugar, grab a Bible or newspaper, and come alive for a new day. We start the day this way during the deep chill of a winter morning or on dewy spring days just after dawn. When we drink coffee, we are alive. When I was growing up, I was not as close to my dad’s family because my parents divor...

On a Thursday some time ago, I grabbed a pair of pants off of a hanger in my closet to put on and realized they weren’t mine or Marcia’s. (We share a closet.)  For some reason, it disturbed me more than I thought it would. To have someone else's pants in your closet and not know why? Marcia was already at work and I was not really sure how it happened. They were huge; the waist was size 36. I am a 33. They were nice pants--actually three pairs. But to have someone else's pants in your closet? I felt violated. And then I realized the dry cleaners must have made a mistake. And then I figured that someone else must have some of my pants, even though I wasn't sure that I was missing any pants. That thought bothered me too. I did know that not all of my pants were in our closet. I also knew Marcia recently dropped some clothes off at the dry cleaners and they wouldn't have been finished yet. Or maybe Marcia threw out some of my clothes because they were no longer nice enough...