So, I originally wanted this blog to be about observations around the city (and wherever else I may travel) and the poetry, short stories, ideas on process, etc, anything of like that may emerge from it. But there are a bunch of things from the past that have always stuck with me and I never really got down on the page--this following memory may be one of the ultimate ones. Some people who know me will find the subject, particularly the first line, amusing as I have talked repeatedly about the salami sandwiches of my childhood. (Whatta ya want, I'm Italian, any worthy memory involves food...) But as I was thinking, or rather re-thinking the whole situation and actually writing about it, I noticed how much more was going on than I could have gathered at age..eight? nine? I forget exactly the ages I spanned during these times. But--and I have to get slightly theoretical here, as I would like to convince myself that I am not going into massive debt for my damn MA in lit for nothing--I also started thinking about time and memory in general and the odd effect that the latter has on the former, it's ability to bend it, freeze it, push it back, drudge it up from the dirt and make the past existent and quite alive, though a bit altered, in the present. Tradition may be a word for this. So, I don't think I captured all of that exactly in this little memory piece, but there are always revisions, and re-revisions, and more time to muse.
Grandfathers
Nothing tasted better than my grandmother’s Genoa salami sandwiches. Grandma Anne, whose real name was
Anna, which I never knew until her funeral. But she was never really Anna to any of us, not even to my father because after all, my middle name is Anne, and he told me it was after her. To him she was Ma, with a drawn out
aaah, so you know that he grew up in Newark at a time when wise guys hung out on street corners in front of salumerias with cigarettes stuck to their bottom lips, slicked black hair and ribbed white ginny-ts. At least, that’s how I imagine Newark when it was still Italian, a guido, a five-cent hipster, as frozen in time as a Norman Rockwell painting, marking his semi-circle of urban territory. My father, young enough to look my grandfather in the face and spit right at his car. Years later he would become his son-in-law.
Her apartment was cozy, Grandma Anne’s, cozy as the subtle smell of cigarettes that sticks on your shirt and smells like smoke long after you’ve gone home, making the scent of your bedroom resemble her apartment as it sets its soothing stench into the closet, the pillows, the curtains. Her loose cough wasn’t loud enough to scare me or make her any less appealing; it was just often and soft enough to be part of her speech. Looking back on it, I’m sure it annoyed the hell out of my father who by that time had quit at least two decades before; it never seemed to worry him though, not like it should have. But the water always tasted so much better there, pure and crisp and freezing cold, from a rectangular ridged container topped with a sea-green lid, and when I drank it I imagined the clear spring that it most likely did not come from. It was also in my grandma Anne’s apartment, during one Sunday dinner that I got my first buzz off of red wine amidst the dull clank of wooden salad bowels, congenial shouting, smoke and smoker’s coughs. The glass a heavy goblet in my hand, I poured from the carafe as everyone occupied themselves yelling from all ends of the table and drank a fair share from the cup, later falling asleep on the couch.
Often on a quiet Saturday, my father and I would take a ride to see my grandmother, but not before first stopping at Glendale, a cemetery about five minutes away in the neighboring town. Both of my grandfathers were buried here, in plots not too far from each other. As a child, there was nothing morose in this; cemeteries, at night, were where the plots of ghost stories unfolded, and by day they were where my grandfathers lived. I made no association between myself and the residents, they were dead, I was alive, and I was too young to dwell on any fateful correlation between the two--except for that brief moment of first coming upon the gravestone of my father’s father, which bore my own name, but at the time, it was more fascination than fear. Soon enough I would be distracted by my father, who would then tell me to say a prayer for my grandfather. But instead of praying I would basically just talk to them in my head because honestly, saying a Hail Mary or an Our Father seemed completely impersonal and I didn’t think that’s what either one of them wanted to hear when they so seldom had visitors. As I have never known my father to have any serious opinions one way or the other about religion--we seemed to be Catholic by default of tradition--I suspect that he would have been okay with this. I’d tell them what I was doing in school, if I was getting along with my brother; really, anything going on in my life at the time. I had never met either one of them, so there was plenty to talk about.
Words bouncing off of a headstone and into an air that was vaguely fragrant with possibility, the slightest chance of an eavesdropping spirit--this was a conversation with my grandfather. And I would always seek that indication—maybe a bird would land on the stone, maybe acorn would fall at the exact time that I would think, Grandpa, can you give me a sign that you’re listening? Nothing like that ever happened, but it didn’t stop my interior monologues, relaying my life so matter-of-factly, just in case.
When I was done I would stray a bit while waiting for my father to finish, collecting honeycombs, or if time allotted I would walk through the stone sea looking for what was most mysterious and muddled. Some of the older 19th century stones would have oval-shaped portraits of their residents, dangling like a locket above the carved out names. On one of these I would imagine finding my own faded name sleeping below the portrait of girl who uncannily resembled me, with a stiff, ruffled collar around her neck and the stone-cold adult-like seriousness characteristic of 19th century childhood. Or maybe secluded in the shade of an oak tree I would see a pale young girl gazing above the rows of gravestones, out into the distance and into another time. With the blink of the eye she would no longer exist, and I would question whether she ever did. I would walk over to the tree and flat into the ground would be the forgotten grave of a girl who had died young, of what I would try to determine.
We never stayed long enough for me to witness any of this, despite my father always lingering in what I assume to have been a deeper conversation. I wonder now what he was saying to my grandfather; I always imagined he told him that he missed him, and maybe let him know that my grandmother,
Anna to him, was being taken care of. I wonder though, did he, like me, talk as if my grandfather were merely on the other end of the line? Did he talk about my mother, who my grandfather used to call
Sunny? Was he remembering how he died, with a hole plucked in his side, the last time he saw him, the last thing he said. Did he think of how he lived, and did the same memories rush back to his head as they did that one day, when he found his makeshift pick, crudely cut from thick plastic in the deteriorating case of his old mandolin. Time bent when he held it, as he looked into the jagged, clouded plastic and way into the distance of after dinner strumming, of prohibition and speakeasies, of hiding in the basement, swigging wine straight from the bottle.
My father, he had said, his voice trailing off into this other time.
I see my father now, a skinnier, healthier version of himself, his strong silhouette standing over the grave with his head bowed slightly in silent conversation. The version of him when he only showed his bright face, when I really believed him when he said the only time I need to be scared is when I saw him scared—and I never did. When he smiled more and he could walk for miles, and even his eyes smiled and sparked; they weren’t so soft and heavy, so easily extinguished by the shadows of his face.
When all conversations were over my exploring would end and we would get back into the car and head to my grandmothers. Without fail, I would always see a huge pile of flowers and a fresh mound of dirt on the way out. Without fail I would try to imagine who it was, and how old they were. But as we crossed through the gates of Glendale and were back among the living, all thoughts of this ghost world vanished immediately, and it was back to oldies on the radio harmonized by my timid mention of the sandwiches. Did she have any rolls, I would ask, nearly in a panic with anticipation. Those fresh and simultaneously soft and crispy rolls with the crusty ridge on the top, the fresh semolina rolls. Of course he knew she did, as she went to the same bakery every weekend, but for me that wasn’t enough reassurance. By the time we got there, as soon as we walked up the stairway and into the kitchen I would already be whispering in his ear to ask her for the salami sandwich, and she would say something like
cat got your tongue?, an expression I heard all too often growing up. I remember her singing always singing to me,
you’re daddy’s little girl, with a rather rough smile, as if she were relaying information to me that I should have known already. But she always made me a sandwich and afterwards they would talk; I never paid too much attention to what, and I would wander around or watch television in the other room until it was time to leave. And thus ended our Saturday afternoons.
My father said that we should never forget the dead and I remember more as the years pass, as the images become blurred but the taste enhanced. And now I always try to have wine with dinner, and sip it when I cook. The smell of tomato sauce in my first cramped apartment, it's ability to materialize the muffled clank of salad bowels and the echo of smoker's coughs, was the only real comfort that could be felt on a Sunday afternoon. But oddly enough, I’ve never physically been back to Glendale Cemetery, not since the day she moved in. I’ve never gone to tell her how I’m doing now that I finally started dressing like a girl, why I would actually want to live in the city, how no, I’m not married yet. How my father’s eyes have been sinking like a slowly setting sun on a hazy horizon ever since she left. I’ve never been back there, but I would imagine it would be very much the same as it had been back when I used to visit my grandfathers, a headstone, a monologue and now the smallest tinge of hope as the years have decreased my faith in such things. But maybe the next time my father goes, I’ll whisper in his ear and remind him to ask her for a salami sandwich, just in case.
I had some trouble pulling myself out of the muck of the lake’s bottom, and once I was able to float freely I had the odd sensation that I was about to sink into the water. Unlike the sturdier canoe, this simple lightweight kayak left me completely vulnerable with what felt like no barrier between myself and the depths of the lake.
