I wish we could have rewound time and been other people. We could have been strangers having a drink in an airport bar, formed a friendship that lasted through relationships and kids. We could have been neighborhood kids who grew up together, suffered through parental rules and high school. Or maybe, just neighbors who watched out for each other, swapping stories and checking in while bringing in trash bins.
At the very least, perhaps we could have pretended to be other people for a time, for a week or two— erasing past foot prints, created new ones in some distant soil. All the while, we could have worn different faces. You could have chosen the mother’s face you’d have liked to have worn. And I could have chosen a daughter’s face that perhaps wasn’t some reminder of what you wanted to forget or ignore.
If we could have worn different faces, made new footprints in different places-- Perhaps our burdens of rage and loss and fear would have drifted away like runaway balloons at a child’s birthday party long before that day in July that haunts me still when I had to reach down to close your frightened eyes.
I want to preserve your stories. The stories you told of how you grew up in the poverty of West Virginia during the Great Depression. I want your granddaughter to know them, to absorb the wisdom they contain.
Since it is near a pivotal mid-term election, I am reminded of your story about importance of voting. I heard you tell this story so many times I memorized your words, and so I will let your words tell the story—
“It was early November. Don’t remember the date or day. I was about nine years old when it happened. Back up in the mountains, in the hollers*, people would to cook food for a family where someone was ill or if the woman had just had a baby, and the kids, like around my age then, we’d deliver it.
It was my mother’s turn to make a food bundle for a neighbor family in the holler. The woman had just given birth a little while ago but was suffering with sickness after. So that afternoon, my mother sent me up there with a pot and a bundle of food for the family. I had no trouble going down the road to deliver the food. But it seemed such a long way. It was already twilight by the time I got there to deliver the food.
So, on the way back, I decided going through the woods would be quicker. But I’d never been through the woods. I ended up getting all turned around and couldn’t find my way back to the road. By that time, it was pitch dark. I was so scared. I heard something that sounded like a big animal, a bear or something, so I climbed up a tree where I thought it would be safe. It was damn cold that night too.
I was scared. I was cold. I knew my mother was going to be pissed off. Early in the morning, it must have been just as it was getting light, I heard all these people calling for me. I could hear my father above all of the others. I shimmied down that tree so happy to be found. I yelled out. My father was the first to reach me. He scooped me up. My mother, she was lightening mad. She was rambling on about teaching me a lesson about not running off like that. She took out her little knife she always had in her apron pocket and cut a switch off a tree. She grabbed me from my father and said I needed a good whippin’. Now, my father, he usually let my mother do the disciplinin’ of us kids because he was always working in the mines or traveling to find work in other mines or farms. But not that day. He swept me up and grabbed my mother’s wrist as she started to drawback, and he said, ‘Renie, ain’t nobody gonna whip any of my kids today! Nobody! Even you, their Mama. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected our president yesterday, so today we’re gonna celebrate that because we got somethin’ to hope for.’ My mother dropped her switch and kept her head down as my father carried me home. The rest of the people took off to their homes.
And we did. We had hope. Took time but things started to get better little by little.”
Then we would watch the Watergate hearings and you would throw your house slipper at the 13-inch black and white television sitting on the kitchen buffet, ranting about how you couldn’t understand why people would vote for a crook like Nixon especially when Marylanders knew Agnew was a damn crook from the start and birds of a feather and all.
Your rant always ended with “that’s why you vote. Keep the crooks out. Get good people in who care about us. Not these guys who wanna line their pockets.” By then you may have knocked back a six pack, but there is no denying that you were right, Mom. You were absolutely right.
*holler- hollow, I know. But my mother and aunt always said holler so I use her words as this is her story.
The deer came to greet me today. A small hello before going on their way– Two does and a fuzzy coated fawn. The leading doe stared at me, Assessing me a threat or not. Her head turned, her elegant neck stretched toward me, her eyes softened as she decided— no need to run away.
Her stare continued. For a moment, I sinned. I coveted her innocence, their understanding of the world, these mountains here—
Yes, I know, they know the twins, cruelty and brutality, in ways I can never understand.
But I envy their ignorance of the cruelty and brutality contained within humanity.
I hold a handful of pomegranate seeds— I think of you all I know and do not know--
A bushel of grapefruits arrive at the front door. The next day, a bushel of oranges followed by a bushel of pomegranates, like tribute foretelling the arrival of some dignitary or prince. Every summer, the bushels foreshadowed your visits-- The grapefruits and oranges for my mother, who loved all citrus, a luxury she didn’t have growing up in West Virginia. The pomegranates for me-- You knew I loved them. Why did the bushels and the visits stop after the summer I turned six?
These seeds I hold, ready to throw into today’s salad, are too few—
I remember you— showing me how to open a pomegranate; teaching me to count in Greek; moving a stepstool to the counter so I could climb and see how to make Greek yogurt from scratch, when you saw my nose wrinkle at the smell, telling me, “You will like it because you Greek,” your accent as thick and heavy as the clabbered milk in the yogurt glasses.
The last summer you came to visit— A train ride to Florida to stay the whole summer with you and Aunt Mae. I wanted the top bunk in the train car. You tucked me into the lower one saying, “You fall here. No hurt. You fall from up there, you hurt,” before hefting yourself into the top bunk. You said you’d teach me to swim. “Everybody in Greece swim. I teach you. You learn easy because—” you paused, waiting-- for my six-year-old excitement to finish, “I’m Greek!” You tousled my hair then loaded our things in the car.
Everything to be tried, to be learned, to be shown required our liturgical call and response: you would start, “You will like because—" and I would finish, “I’m Greek.”
Teaching me to swim didn’t work out too well— You told me to move my arms and legs fast, then threw me into the ocean. Each time I flailed and sank. Each time you pulled me up, “You okay. You learn.” The third or fourth throw, You pulled me up And said, “Enough today. But you learn because—” And despite my fearful sobbing, I finished, “I’m Greek,” as I wrapped my arms around your neck. We did not have time. I never learned.
Sirens, red lights, dark outside, Aunt Mae crying. The hospital cold, noisy. Mae on the phone. Mommy coming on the train.
You lived. Came home. Peeled me a pomegranate.
Mom and I left on the train. The last time I saw you, Uncle Pete, though you did not die until three months after my high school graduation, an obituary found on the internet tells me so. But the bushels, the visits, the phone calls stopped the summer I turned six. I never knew why. I will never know now.
Fifty-nine years after that summer with you, I stand holding a handful of pomegranate seeds, shining their ruby glow. Decades since last I split open a pomegranate. Too easy to buy in plastic tubs now. I need to finish this salad.
But I am stilled in the moment— The truth I now know— sleuthing through scraps of internet information after a DNA test-- What neither of us may have known that one summer, We were/ are father and daughter.
As I sit at my desk, I watch the does scale the stucco wall. Their leaps never fail to dazzle. Next, they stretch their necks to grab and eat the seed pods from the trees. Here, in the foothills of the Sandias, this sight wrings a sigh. Then I see him, outside the wall and to the left, watching the does. He is large but nearly hidden behind the tall Chamisa waving in the breeze. His head would be a prize to any hunter. His antlers tall and wide, many pointed. He steps away from the cover of the Chamisa. What I thought a waving branch— an arrow lodged in his left shoulder. He is the stag the neighbors have posted about— The one they say will eventually succumb to the wound. Reflexively, I rub my own left shoulder once frozen still from scar tissue until broken loose years ago by a medical procedure but now occasionally aches. How I wish I could help this buck. Remove the arrow, apply some healing balm, Let him recover here, feasting on seed pods, before sending him on his way only a scar to ache every once in a while.
(I originally wrote this several years ago, and it was published in my book, “The Gift of Mercy.” I’m drafting a second part to this piece and decided to reblog this as a starter.)
I entered life, an accidental tourist.
My mother’s body served an eviction notice,
but I ignored it and burrowed deeper
into placental warmth.
My twin, however, weaker,
entered the world a clotted, bloody,
gelatinous mess on the white tile
of a bathroom floor.
The doctor told the man,
who wasn’t really my father
but thought himself to be,
there was still a heartbeat,
still a baby left.
I felt the absence of my twin,
the lack of another’s heart
beating a rhythm to match my own,
racing toward emergence, light, life, breath.
A ghost like memory I carried with me
always— even when I, who survived
by claiming squatter’s right
to my mother’s uterus
as it tried to evict me
and who had never been told
of my twin’s existence, would
turn in childhood play and talk
to my twin sister.
My mother asking to whom I talked
and I answering in innocence—my twin sister.
Now, I recognize my mother’s twisting face
of guilt as she turned from my childhood answer:
the long walk from the restaurant’s apartment
to the stores on Broadway to buy school
supplies; the washing down of the restaurant
walls over and over again; the bed rest the doctor
said she needed when she was spotting, her body
threatening to throw out the babies she carried, ignored—
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