Relevant RevEnant

Jeez, I'm such a terrible speller... Tried to actually google the word "revOnant" (my test for the social and objective viability of my "spelling out") and discovered that no such word exists. Google suggested, "Did you mean 'revEnant?'" It didn't say this, but it might as well have added, "Because if that's what you mean, then you must be some Old School D+D dweebazoid who happened to glance through the Monster Manual once or twice, and saw some creepy picture of a zombie with a vice-like grip choking some poor fighter-looking dude to death. Jeez, get a life!" (Because: that's exactly where I got the idea, and became acquainted with the word...)

ANYWAY: interestingly enough, revEnant means someone who "returns from the dead, or after a long absence," and comes from the French word "revenir" meaning "to return." Etymologically, it shares a root with the word "revenue," which is traditionally defined as the "gross returns" (haha, zombie indeed) before taking account any losses... Also, as we are all too familiar by next month, part of that three lettered acronym, IRS. Taxes. Taxes (revenue) and Death (revenant). Indeed. The only things that keep returning...

So, if you ever paid attention to this monoblogue, you might have read that I intended to write something called "Relevant Revenant." It was going to have something to do with my grandfather. It wasn't intended to be disrespectful, but probably will be. It was going to have something to do, not with death, but with memory... "Revenant" meaning return somehow seems to dovetail nicely with this idea... Something which stubbornly comes back, returns, repeatedly...

I am thinking of detailing one of my grandfather's significant meanderings, like how one day he left the house and went wandering down to Hau Bush (in Ewa Beach). He'd already passed the point where he failed to recognize his own wife (he kept complimenting on how nice she was, but that he had to "go home..."). I often wondered, where was he trying to get to? I know that the part of the brain affected by Alzheimer's (hippocampus) is also near the "mapping" portions, those areas of the brain that allow us to navigate through space. (JEEZ, I sound so clinical and cold about this... Don't mean to be... Sometimes this sort of "objectivity" is in response to the utter futility and despair I feel with respect to this terrible terrible disease). Anyway, I wanted to write about his wandering as though there were some secret purpose to it, as though he were on a kind of quest. And I wanted to have, as his companion, a "talking dog," an Alaskan huskie with two different colored eyes (I actually know such a dog went missing in Ewa Beach). The dog would articulate things that my grandfather couldn't possibly know (for example, the meaning of "revenant"). Eventually, it would be revealed that my grandfather was searching for the "Bone of Memory," that aspect of his own experienced time and life that was "solid" and enduring, that could not be touched by the degenerative effects of his disease... And it would be something similar to the "HEART" that was lost by "Mad Hettie" in the Sandman series, in "Death: the High Cost of Living."