FLUFFER71

“Most English-speaking people will admit that cellar doors is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955

THE SICILIAN

“Stay away from the cellar doors!” When I was a wee one and spent weekends with my grandmother, without fail, whenever I played in her yard, she’d always caution me to steer away from the ground level steal doors mounted into her tiny sliver of earth in Reading, Pennsylvania.

I never asked why. I just did what I was told.

My grandmother was very special to me, but she wasn’t for everyone. She suffered from paranoia, which only grew worse with age and led to her withdrawing from society. By the end of her life, she had all but barricaded herself in her cramped corner two story row house, where she had lived for nearly 50 years, spending her final days marking her initials – JK – on her possessions with a black sharpie.

My grandmother was one of six children, born to Sicilian immigrants. She did her best to live a normal life; she got married and had two children, but she was incapable of maintaining healthy relationships. One of my mom’s earliest memories is of being buried under a Christmas tree, which my grandmother had tore down in a fit of rage after coming home to find my mom and grandfather decorating the tree without her.

After the kids were raised, my grandmother settled into life alone and supported herself by working at a nearby factory in an area of the city that would deteriorate significantly in her lifetime, where after her funeral I’d find myself stepping over needles and a syringe on the broken sidewalk in front of her house.

My grandmother and I shared the same birthday – April 28 ♉️🤘- which I felt gave us a special connection. While I didn’t understand paranoia as a wee one, I understood that Mom-Mom was moody and the slightest misstep could trigger her. That said, I wasn’t scared of her, because I knew she loved me. Even when enraged and screaming, all I needed to do was look in her eyes to know Mom-Mom was a prisoner, held captive to ghosts that didn’t exist.

To ensure peace during my weekend stays, I had to learn how to read Mom-Mom’s emotions at a very young age. But it’s because of her emotional instability, I credit my grandmother for gifting me the power of empathy. Aside from avoiding potential triggers, I genuinely wanted to see her happy. While not the easiest task at times, nothing brought me more joy than making her laugh. It was the only time, I felt, that she was present and unburdened by her ghosts.

CELLAR DOORS

After grandmother passed away on October 4, 2010, I received a small inheritance, which was welcomed given that I was hunkered down in the Great Recession and unemployed at the time. I didn’t use the money for saving, however. Instead, I bought a new computer and purchased software to create music and animation, so I could bring some short stories I’d written with her in my heart to life, including Patient 28, a story about a catatonic woman and her empathetic doctor. I also hosted the creative project on the website cellardoors.me as a nod to the steal doors mounted into the earth in my grandmother’s yard, which she so adamantly wanted me to fear.

There is another reason why the name Cellar Doors appealed to me. At the time of my grandmother’s death, I’d been reading about past life regression therapy in the book, “Many Lives, Many Masters”, written by Dr. Brian Weiss. So in addition to channeling my grandmother through my writing, I was exploring concepts of past lives and found myself riddled by the notion that we all keep coming back until our lessons are learned, which gave me pause where my grandmother was concerned.

We all have ghosts that haunt us, but none that I’d met as burdensome as my grandmother’s. There was a pain in her from a young age that couldn’t be explained. Phycological diagnosis’s and medications aside, perhaps my grandmother’s ghosts followed her from another life?

I put several short stories I’d written to music following my grandmother’s death, but only animated one, “The Ambassador”, which saw the debut of Patient 28. Included with this post is an excerpt from another story I’d recorded but never animated, about a different patient, a man who believes he’s the reincarnation of Anne Boleyn, who tends to her wounds to heal his own.

After securing work again in 2012, I locked up the cellar doors and focused on practical, adult things again – i.e. making money. In 2020 I revisited the project, when I found myself quarantined and bedridden with COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic, which brought back memories of my grandmother, who was a champion when it came to isolation.

When I lost my dad to COVID-19 at the end of 2020, I was forced to ask myself if had it been me dying in front of my parents over FaceTime, would I feel I lived an accomplished life. Did I learn the lesson I was meant to learn, or would I leave this life burdened, flustered, and angry like my grandmother?

While I wasn’t certain of the answer, I realized that I felt most accomplished in the months following my grandmother’s death, when recording music, making videos, tapping into the ethereal, and being weird. I realized I’d spent 50 years bound to the expectations of others and had censored myself out of fear of judgement, which is why I’ve been revisiting old works and creating new material, which I now house on TikTok (Fluffer71 🦄)… so popular with the crazy kids nowadays.

I may not get the same number of likes on social media as I do when I post a picture of my ass, but I know now, when all is said and done, I’ll feel more accomplished for expressing what’s in my soul creatively without a fear of judgement than I would living a censored life shackled by rigid ideologies, trapped in fear of other people’s opinions, expectations, and intentions, like my grandmother.

I pray, like my grandmother, that not caring is my lesson to learn.