satisfy
his curiosity. With each bump and dip in the road, the children in the back yelled joyously.
“Say,” the man asked after a while, “what’s your name?”
“Sally.”
“Just Sally?”
“Sally Angel,” she replied in a cold voice. She turned to watch a tractor plowing a field in the distance and didn’t speak
again until the end of the drive, when, as she was stepping out of the car, she thanked the man for giving her a lift.
March 15, 2007
S crappy changeling, there and not there, transforming herself with a snap of her fingers. Good-bye, hello. Dear Sally, I’m
your namesake. Wait for me. You should listen to what I have to say. I have the advantage, after all, of living in your future.
I know what’s in store for you. Of course, that makes it more difficult to be accurate in my description of the past and keep
the facts compatible.
Ever since discovering that my grandmother’s grasp of this story was incomplete, I’ve made an effort to fill in the gaps.
I’ve retraced her journey upriver and beyond, all the way back to Tauntonville. I’ve talked to members of our extended family,
along with some of my grandmother’s old acquaintances, and I can say with confidence that my version, even if it’s not infallibly
correct, is closer to the truth than hers. I admit, though, that I can’t always keep straight who told me what.
Girl, my grandmother would say to me when I was caught causing trouble: you sure are a Werner through and through. I used
to think I heard in her voice a note of conspiracy, as if she were concluding, in light of my bad behavior, that I was obliged
to repeat the mistakes she’d made. Over time I came to believe that she was only pretending to disapprove of me, and in reality
she was secretly pleased with my antics.
In one picture from the late seventies, we’re standing facing each other on the terrace behind her house on Anchor Heights.
I’m about five in the photo, and my grandmother Sally is still young enough to look spry. I’m holding up a bouquet, though
not a bouquet of cultivated flowers from a garden. They’re weeds, unglamorous, aggravating stalks of dandelion and yellow
rocket from the looks of them. Just weeds I must have plucked from the side of the road.
I only ever collected weeds — out of ignorance when I was little, and then as part of a game. Over the years, my grandmother
and I engaged in a fierce competition involving weeds, each of us trying to outdo the other, gathering as many weeds as we
could find in an hour. We’d rate our hauls at the end by counting the different stalks in each bundle. I usually won the contest.
My grandmother managed to find the colorful weeds, but I’d collect more of them.
She kept a
Golden Guide
to weeds in her kitchen, and we took to drying and pressing examples of individual species, though we didn’t make much effort
to keep track of our collection. Even to this day, I’ll pull an old book off my shelf and find in its pages an ancient sprig
of pigweed or goosefoot.
In this photo of the two of us, I’m proud to be showing off my winning weeds, and my grandmother is proud to acknowledge her
defeat. There’s something wily in her expression. It took me years to realize that I won our games because she wanted me to
win.
Weeds might be infesting, unattractive plants, out of place everywhere they spread, but the way they adapt to the most adverse
conditions —
well, it’s something,
my grandmother liked to say whenever I told her about a patch of weeds I’d found growing in an unlikely place around the
city, in a sidewalk crack, between bricks on an outside wall at the mall, in the middle of the Wegmans parking lot.
More than something,
she’d add.
My mother was standing at the kitchen counter flipping through a magazine when her water broke. My grandmother, slouched in
her chair, had surrendered to the lulling glow of the TV and was singing in a whispery
his curiosity. With each bump and dip in the road, the children in the back yelled joyously.
“Say,” the man asked after a while, “what’s your name?”
“Sally.”
“Just Sally?”
“Sally Angel,” she replied in a cold voice. She turned to watch a tractor plowing a field in the distance and didn’t speak
again until the end of the drive, when, as she was stepping out of the car, she thanked the man for giving her a lift.
March 15, 2007
S crappy changeling, there and not there, transforming herself with a snap of her fingers. Good-bye, hello. Dear Sally, I’m
your namesake. Wait for me. You should listen to what I have to say. I have the advantage, after all, of living in your future.
I know what’s in store for you. Of course, that makes it more difficult to be accurate in my description of the past and keep
the facts compatible.
Ever since discovering that my grandmother’s grasp of this story was incomplete, I’ve made an effort to fill in the gaps.
I’ve retraced her journey upriver and beyond, all the way back to Tauntonville. I’ve talked to members of our extended family,
along with some of my grandmother’s old acquaintances, and I can say with confidence that my version, even if it’s not infallibly
correct, is closer to the truth than hers. I admit, though, that I can’t always keep straight who told me what.
Girl, my grandmother would say to me when I was caught causing trouble: you sure are a Werner through and through. I used
to think I heard in her voice a note of conspiracy, as if she were concluding, in light of my bad behavior, that I was obliged
to repeat the mistakes she’d made. Over time I came to believe that she was only pretending to disapprove of me, and in reality
she was secretly pleased with my antics.
In one picture from the late seventies, we’re standing facing each other on the terrace behind her house on Anchor Heights.
I’m about five in the photo, and my grandmother Sally is still young enough to look spry. I’m holding up a bouquet, though
not a bouquet of cultivated flowers from a garden. They’re weeds, unglamorous, aggravating stalks of dandelion and yellow
rocket from the looks of them. Just weeds I must have plucked from the side of the road.
I only ever collected weeds — out of ignorance when I was little, and then as part of a game. Over the years, my grandmother
and I engaged in a fierce competition involving weeds, each of us trying to outdo the other, gathering as many weeds as we
could find in an hour. We’d rate our hauls at the end by counting the different stalks in each bundle. I usually won the contest.
My grandmother managed to find the colorful weeds, but I’d collect more of them.
She kept a
Golden Guide
to weeds in her kitchen, and we took to drying and pressing examples of individual species, though we didn’t make much effort
to keep track of our collection. Even to this day, I’ll pull an old book off my shelf and find in its pages an ancient sprig
of pigweed or goosefoot.
In this photo of the two of us, I’m proud to be showing off my winning weeds, and my grandmother is proud to acknowledge her
defeat. There’s something wily in her expression. It took me years to realize that I won our games because she wanted me to
win.
Weeds might be infesting, unattractive plants, out of place everywhere they spread, but the way they adapt to the most adverse
conditions —
well, it’s something,
my grandmother liked to say whenever I told her about a patch of weeds I’d found growing in an unlikely place around the
city, in a sidewalk crack, between bricks on an outside wall at the mall, in the middle of the Wegmans parking lot.
More than something,
she’d add.
My mother was standing at the kitchen counter flipping through a magazine when her water broke. My grandmother, slouched in
her chair, had surrendered to the lulling glow of the TV and was singing in a whispery
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