Gracy with a Y

When Grey set up the blog, I asked him to spell my name GRACY, not graci from my email account or Gracie, whom I've never been. The Y ending harks back to how I spelled my nickname as a child (it's the familiar for Gracelyn, my middle name) and it's how I'm mostly known at home. I will admit though, that I did go through a voluntary respelling phase somewhere in my early twenties and then I got stuck with the teeny I ending, but like Annie says about so many things, you can always press undo. So, Gracy then.

So what does it feel like to be home? On the one hand we've removed our Brooklyn selves intact to a new location, but it's much more than the physical shifting, of course. I left Trinidad at sixteen and I'm living here for the first time as an adult, a married woman with a child and a job (oh, so I've resigned my lectureship at LaGuardia and doing some work at University of the West Indies with a group of visiting students, and trying to sneak some progress on the dissertation). I'm not in the countryside where I grew up, so even now after having lived overseas for eighteen years, there's a bit of the country girl come to town in this experience - what, Trinidad have fancy malls, and look at how tall this building is, and we have a crime-fighting blimp, and crime!

Then there's negotiating this experience with my family. My mother, who has come to stay with us many times in Brooklyn is, not surprisingly, the most adjusted to my adult status. The surprise has come from my second oldest sister (by 6 years) who has resolutely tried to remind me of who I used to be or maybe who she last knew me as. So for example when I tried to share the joke with her of our mother trying to get me to teach Helen to pray (and that is a good joke), she said, 'huh, I remember that just before you went away you were about to become a born again Christian.' This by the way is true(and I also had a jerri curl), but I think besides the point. From her have come constant reminders of what I was and look who I'm pretending to be now. She chooses to insist that the past is the valid image and right now we're in the middle of an 'I'm not ringing you first' standoff. Ridiculous, but I'm not ringing her first.

But then again maybe I am being a bit unfair, because I want so much of what I remember of my childhood to have stood still. We used to call a quarter a bob, our aunts 'tanty,' godmothers 'nenny,' stop whatever we were doing if the national anthem came on and stand at attention, not be afraid to go outside after dark, a dollar used to be plenty money. All of that has changed now and top on the lists of things my nieces wanted me to bring them were Mp3 players, a PSP portable, and denim. This modernity unsettles me. I want them to wear school uniforms and ribbons in their hair and have impeccable manners. I want to call unfamiliar old ladies tanty and get a smile and a bob for it. I want to go for a moonlit walk when current goes without thinking I need pepper spray. I want the dead from these eighteen years past to walk again, and I want all of this to neatly coexist with all that I am right now.

Maybe I should ring my sister, eh?

Love from all of we.