his digging of the holes, his addition of the fertilizer, his setting of the bulbs was what I had taken all for myself. The labor theory of value. I also knew what a capitalist was. I thought everybody did.
How did Grandfather think of my father, who employed fifteen men and owned a building and seven trucks? I don’t really know. It is all very long ago. Trivia. My grandfatherwould have said that the life of the individual is trivial indeed. He used to rail against Freud, against novels, against hospitals and doctors, against paying too much attention to what you ate, and against talking about yourself. Glorifying the one over the many, he called it. Although he railed against religion, they had a minyan at his apartment when my father died, and he said kaddish. It was one of my father’s seven trucks that popped out of gear when he was standing behind it and pinned him against a wall, crushing him, and not quickly, to death. “Think! Do
not
work in restricted areas by yourself! Accidents
can
be avoided!” The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
My mother, who two years from yesterday will be the age of my grandfather when he died an old man, was never Jewish. She was a singer with a jazz band during the Second World War. She had blond hair and sang with a guy who became Perry Como. She was from Asheville, North Carolina, and her mother and father had both died by the time she and the band got to New Jersey and New York. The story is very sketchy. It sounds to me now, as I think about it, that the trivia she didn’t like to talk about was her life. My grandmother thought she was too tall, didn’t know how to cook or dress, was eccentric. Our apartment was a mess. “So what does she do all day?” my grandmother would say. The eternal question. But they, and their cousins, were her only family. After my father died and then my grandfather, she lost touch with them, and had no one but Avie and Miriam and me. “Isn’t there anyone at all down south, Mom?” I would say. “No cousins? Don’t we have cousins down south?”
“There must be, somewhere,” she would answer vaguely. “Everyone from around there is related.”
• • •
Now I’ve been talking a lot about those days, as if they were more important than these days, or than the days since, but they weren’t. For sheer happiness, things were best in Kansas. I lived with a guy for three years in a farmhouse on a hilltop. There was a windbreak of evergreens on the north side of the house, and the fields of wheat and sunflowers spread away for miles in every direction. I was studying Chem E., Scott was tending bar and playing in a band, we had three dogs and seven cats, and parties all the time. He had been to Vietnam and married, briefly. We agreed to forget the past, to make everything start all over. The oldest dog, a stray we got out of the pound, who was missing an ear and always snarled and snapped if you surprised him, was named Born Yesterday. We gardened and cooked and bought lots of records. We meditated twice a day and tried to overlook each other’s unusual behaviors. After a while, to conceal the silence between us, we started talking about “wordless communion.” That was the goal. It was soothing to think of. I liked my work. It got in everywhere—I would refer to the popcorn popper as a “popcorn containment building” or to the month of August as “zucchini detonation month” or our lovemaking as “the insertion of tab A into slot B.” Desperate bad jokes that Scott perceived as put-downs. He was killed on his motorcycle.
I built more bombs than the FBI thinks I did. It’s funny what reminds me of them—clocks, of course. Penny wrappers in banks, because they are about the same color as dynamite paper was. Once I was putting up a new closet rod, and as my fingers wrapped around it, I felt a frisson of breath-catching uncertainty—closet rod is about the diameter anddensity of a stick of dynamite. Sometimes I am overcome
How did Grandfather think of my father, who employed fifteen men and owned a building and seven trucks? I don’t really know. It is all very long ago. Trivia. My grandfatherwould have said that the life of the individual is trivial indeed. He used to rail against Freud, against novels, against hospitals and doctors, against paying too much attention to what you ate, and against talking about yourself. Glorifying the one over the many, he called it. Although he railed against religion, they had a minyan at his apartment when my father died, and he said kaddish. It was one of my father’s seven trucks that popped out of gear when he was standing behind it and pinned him against a wall, crushing him, and not quickly, to death. “Think! Do
not
work in restricted areas by yourself! Accidents
can
be avoided!” The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
My mother, who two years from yesterday will be the age of my grandfather when he died an old man, was never Jewish. She was a singer with a jazz band during the Second World War. She had blond hair and sang with a guy who became Perry Como. She was from Asheville, North Carolina, and her mother and father had both died by the time she and the band got to New Jersey and New York. The story is very sketchy. It sounds to me now, as I think about it, that the trivia she didn’t like to talk about was her life. My grandmother thought she was too tall, didn’t know how to cook or dress, was eccentric. Our apartment was a mess. “So what does she do all day?” my grandmother would say. The eternal question. But they, and their cousins, were her only family. After my father died and then my grandfather, she lost touch with them, and had no one but Avie and Miriam and me. “Isn’t there anyone at all down south, Mom?” I would say. “No cousins? Don’t we have cousins down south?”
“There must be, somewhere,” she would answer vaguely. “Everyone from around there is related.”
• • •
Now I’ve been talking a lot about those days, as if they were more important than these days, or than the days since, but they weren’t. For sheer happiness, things were best in Kansas. I lived with a guy for three years in a farmhouse on a hilltop. There was a windbreak of evergreens on the north side of the house, and the fields of wheat and sunflowers spread away for miles in every direction. I was studying Chem E., Scott was tending bar and playing in a band, we had three dogs and seven cats, and parties all the time. He had been to Vietnam and married, briefly. We agreed to forget the past, to make everything start all over. The oldest dog, a stray we got out of the pound, who was missing an ear and always snarled and snapped if you surprised him, was named Born Yesterday. We gardened and cooked and bought lots of records. We meditated twice a day and tried to overlook each other’s unusual behaviors. After a while, to conceal the silence between us, we started talking about “wordless communion.” That was the goal. It was soothing to think of. I liked my work. It got in everywhere—I would refer to the popcorn popper as a “popcorn containment building” or to the month of August as “zucchini detonation month” or our lovemaking as “the insertion of tab A into slot B.” Desperate bad jokes that Scott perceived as put-downs. He was killed on his motorcycle.
I built more bombs than the FBI thinks I did. It’s funny what reminds me of them—clocks, of course. Penny wrappers in banks, because they are about the same color as dynamite paper was. Once I was putting up a new closet rod, and as my fingers wrapped around it, I felt a frisson of breath-catching uncertainty—closet rod is about the diameter anddensity of a stick of dynamite. Sometimes I am overcome
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