Persephone Returns

Junco sirens pierce

thick sodden air.

Tapered shoots spring from damp soil,

forest green and scarlet streaked.

Dewy libation for wandering ants puddles

on blowsy coral blossoms, peony sweet.

Heavy, wet heads bow to the schnauzers

lazily loping along the path.

The flesh of the lonely parsley skeleton,

tucked in its terra cotta coffin,

fills the ebony jade-striped

caterpillars, fat and moist.

Blood red petal and ice orb carpet spreads

underfoot. Jagged limb akimbo, crushed

thatch and lumber below. Demeter’s pleasure,

all told, as fearsome as her grief.

Choking on Freedom

I woke to find you bent over my bed.

Snapped shut my eyes and made you disappear.

I’m choking on my freedom like you said.

The sunset dressed the sky in pink and red,

Dissolved to let me feed upon my fear.

I woke to find fresh wounds that gaped and bled

I contemplate the things we left unsaid,

It's hard to be alone with you so near.

I'm choking on the freedom and the dread.

Mistook the path we traveled on and tread

For a journey from which I could never veer,

I woke to watch you climb out of my head.

I walked among the thistle there instead,

Left the path behind because it wasn’t clear.

No choking on the freedom when I led.

You failed to understand just what you had.

My devotion spread thin as a veneer,

I peeled it clean and dropped it as I fled,

Exuberant in freedom now instead.

Buckeye

She caresses the shiny brown

harbinger hidden inside

the folds of her carnival dress.

Fingers spinning madly,

laboring to coax

Respectable fortune into her pocket.

She wills it to soak deep

through the gauzy cotton

onto her waiting summer-dark skin.

Elegy for Ikarus

The logs recede into the gleaming coals,

A mound of ash appears before my eyes

As I stare into the dying firelight,

Melancholy memories fade to gray.

It’s here my heart lives, in the blaze of day,

Beating beneath my ribs, soldiering on,

Despite the intense white inferno you

Kindle when you wound the ones I love best.

I step into twilight, feel Boreas

Blow lightly against my sweltering brow,

So sharp and crisp, cool relief, a balm for

The scorching gash beneath my grieving chest.

I waited for him among the chaste trees

Alongside the lush riverbed, silver

And grey with purple blossoms arching wide.

I waited though he never came to me.

Daedalus, borne on wings of your own scheme,

Merely to conceal your labyrinthine heart,

Your hubris obscuring my Ikarus

From me til I watched him plunge to the sea.




* artwork by Frank Frazetta

Sweet Memory

I tried to tell you again last night, Lila. You were sitting in the blue chair by the fireplace. It wasn’t cold, but it was damp, and you insisted on the fire. I am used to it now, your tendency to be cold unless you’re soaked in the garden sun. With your head bent over your book and a loose strand of hair curled against your shoulder, I could see you as you used to be and it made me ache. I said your name, you smiled at me, and I remembered the first time I noticed you. You were across the room and I was riveted, like a scene in some ridiculous movie. You wore a gauzy pink dress and smiled at me with a fresh, dark-eyed loveliness. We didn’t exchange a word, but I dreamed about you every night that week.

I lay in bed awake for a long time this morning. I hardly sleep anymore. But you, you’ve always slept like a rock. I used to wake up hungry in the middle of the night when you first started staying with me. We sometimes forgot to eat dinner. When I returned to bed you were always awake, murmuring questions in your soft, quiet way. Today I slipped out of bed, trying hard not to wake you. Just as I stood, the sun peeked through the curtains. You opened your eyes and looked at me, your face still and calm. I thought I should tell you then, but instead I kissed you and went out to the kitchen to make you some tea.

We’re having a beautiful spring. Your daffodils bloom in our front yard, filling the slope with riotous color. The woodpeckers and cardinals flock to the feeder you hung in the blackjack oak and the little juncos gather on the ground below. Every year, I watch you delight in nature’s rebirth as a child does. I think I’d miss it all if not for you. I hope the hummingbirds return soon. I want you to tell me how the female builds her nest, no bigger than the bowl of a spoon, with moss and lichen and bits of spider web.

The spring always reminds me of that first year we spent together in this old house. It was high summer when we moved and it took us some time to get settled. The people who lived here before ripped out all the bushes and flowerbeds and never got around to replacing them. It was a hot summer, too hot to work in the yard, I said. You told me that was nonsense and proceeded to dig a curvy trench along the front of the house. You told me I didn’t need to help. I never met a more stubborn person in all of my life. The next morning and many mornings after, I followed you outside in the cool of the early dawn. We stripped turf, laid sand, and built a wall of stacked rock inside your curvy trench. It took three car trunks full of bagged dirt to fill up the bed. By the time we finished, the weather turned and we were afraid to plant much. You found mixed bulbs in big brown paper bags on sale at the garden center. Once you lined the bed, you started digging holes out on the slope. I was never so glad to see that first frost before. I love those daffodils.

I lived alone a long time before I met you. Even after your first husband died, you always lived with someone else. Your parents, a roommate, your children, then me. I used to wonder how you did it. After a while, I realized you could be alone in a room full of people. You seem to prefer a kind of companionable solitude. I noticed it today. While we lingered over our breakfast, you gazed out the window. I wondered what you were thinking. Maybe planning a trip or deciding what to plant where the old shed used to stand. It seemed like an offense to intrude on your thoughts.

My daughter visited this afternoon. I watched the two of you prepare dinner while I pretended to read. You talked so much it took twice as long as usual for you to make a salad. She told you about her new job, her old boyfriend, and the bed she bought for her guest room. You left mid-sentence to get her a quilt and some lace-trimmed pillowcases you made. For her, you said, but I know you made them for our bed. When I met your eyes and lifted my eyebrow, you blushed, and I let you get away with it. I wonder how long it will take you to make another set. While we eat dinner, I think about telling both of you but I don’t want to spoil her visit. It was such a good conversation.

After dinner, you pulled up your hair, poured a glass of wine, then went outside to fuss over your roses. I walked into our office to work. I spent most of my time watching you clip and prune the Blue Boy outside the window. Such a funny name for a rose that’s really more lavender colored. I can’t reliably remember my daughter’s birthday, but I always remember the name of that rosebush. It’s your favorite. You moved away from the window to another bush and I couldn’t watch you anymore. I decided to work. The desk we use is really a dining room table, old and large with lots of leaves and a sheet of glass over the top. My chair sits on one side and yours on the other. I think it’s my favorite room in the house. From where I am, I can see your books in the shelves by the window, arranged by author in alphabetical order. Mine are piled in the cabinet behind me in no order whatsoever. We tried to share our bookshelves once. It didn’t last long. After the most ridiculous fight of our lives, you very sensibly moved all my books into cabinets so you could close the doors. I swore I’d buy more bookshelves but I never got around to doing it. Secretly, it makes me smile every time I have to open a door to find one of my books.

I work and so do you but our lives are here in this house. I wander through the rooms and slowly realize you are everywhere. There are traces of me, sure, especially in the den. The movie collection you rarely touch over there by the television, the shelves of old vinyl records beside the stereo. My ratty bachelor sofa hidden under slipcovers you sewed because you couldn’t stand to part with the only good piece of furniture I owned. In the kitchen, there’s the table you painted and your mother’s china cabinet. Our guest room holds your grandfather’s bed covered with a chenille bedspread your mother bought you as a child. In the bedroom we share, the nightstand is the only way I can tell which side of the bed is mine. Your glasses lay neatly on top of the novel you’re reading and my table overflows with books and papers, my wallet and change, and the various items I collect in my pockets. The little living room that looks over the front yard is filled with the things you had when I met you. There’s a chaise longue—the most ridiculous piece of furniture I’ve ever seen—delicate, armless chairs and dark tables with curved feet and pie crust edges all sitting on an oriental rug. It’s a pretty, feminine room and it always smells like you.

You finally came back in. It’s too dark to work outside now and you’re drawing a bath. I heard you pour another glass of wine and turn on some old Fiona Apple. The day’s nearly gone and a new week starts tomorrow. Still, I haven’t found the words to tell you we need to begin to say our goodbyes.

I got lost on my way home from work again last week. I need to remember to use the GPS. One day last month, I drove across town to see my mother. I didn’t remember she had died until I turned off my car. I sat in some stranger’s driveway and cried. I’ve been losing things for months and I forget words, ordinary words like the names of objects, all the time. There’s a fog in my brain some days and other times I’m fine. But I know it’s coming. I knew before the doctor told me. I don’t want to forget, Lila. I’ll keep writing, keep reading, try hard to keep you in my mind a little longer. I know I should tell you. Every once in a while, I catch you looking at me with a strange expression on your face. I wonder if you're worried. You deserve to know. But it makes me so sad, and if I tell you, it will be real. Maybe I’ll find the words tomorrow.

The beautiful art on this post courtesy of Julian Merrow-Smith. See more of his work at Postcard from Provence.

Visiting Jim Morrison on Throwback Thursday

One of my favorite memories of traveling to Paris with my lovely (now grown) daughter.

Pére Lachaise

The Memory Palace

Early on in The Memory Palace, Mira Bartók describes her own life as a palimpsest, a tablet or parchment used again and again after earlier writing has been erased.  Following a life-altering brain injury, Bartók leaves messages for herself on what she calls her memory table, working hard to appear healthy and articulate, a process she describes as second nature.  “We children of schizophrenics are the great secret-keepers, the ones who don’t want you to think anything is wrong.”  It is clear from the beginning of this touching, evocative memoir that the life related by Bartók is anything but right.

Bartók recounts a stark, excruciating childhood, filled with countless incidents of uncertainty, embarrassment, and downright abuse.  Her beautiful, brilliant, musical mother is gravely mentally ill; her father, a writer, deserted his wife and two daughters, leaving behind only a collection of lovely books.  The two little girls regularly run to their grandparents’ house nearby for meals, but the situation there is scarcely better.  Their grandmother feeds them, but also burdens them with talk of their mother, Norma’s, illness at quite tender ages.  Their grandfather’s abusive tendencies are arguably worse than their mother’s neglect.  Bartók recalls having the story of Medusa read to her at the age of five or six.  She casts her mother in the role of Medusa, seeing herself as Pegasus.  “For years I dreamed I was a winged horse, watching, from the sky, my mother’s serpentine head float away from her body.”  Medusa’s children sprang from the blood of her severed head.  Norma lost her mind in pieces after her children arrived.

After graduating high school, Bartók leaves Cleveland, Ohio, for two years of college in Michigan followed by art school in Chicago.  Her art and her jobs, working in education and in a museum, give Bartók a sense of purpose and stability.  Her mother’s behavior continues to deteriorate, punctuated by increasingly strange and distressing phone calls day and night.  There’s what seems to be an accidental overdose and an incident involving her mother brandishing a knife at an airport.  Worst of all, Bartók receives a surprising interruption at work.  Her mother shows up unannounced at the museum, harried, haggard, and demanding her daughter go home to Cleveland.  At this point, the sisters decide they must take desperate measures to survive.

The young women change their names and go into hiding.  Her sister, Natalia, cuts off all contact with their mother, but Bartók keeps post office boxes through friends and writes to her mother, giving her vague details about her travels to Italy, Norway and Israel, never providing enough detail to reveal her location.  She sends her mother presents:  postcards from museums, calendars, art supplies, warm clothes, paintings, a red sweater.  By this time, their mother is sleeping in hotels, shelters, airports, bus stations, and eventually, park benches.  Schizophrenic.  Homeless.  Alone.  Of essentially abandoning her mother, Bartók says, “If I am to be really truthful, there is something in my nature as well, something that, like Natalia, and even our mother, made me choose my freedom and creative life above all else.”

Seventeen years pass this way.  Soon after Bartók’s car accident and resulting brain injury, her mother becomes seriously ill.  Social workers contact Bartók at one of the post office boxes she’s kept through a friend.  Upon hearing the news, the sisters decide to go to their mother, eighty years old now and dying of stomach cancer.  While caring for her in the hospital and arranging her transfer to a nursing home, the sisters discover their mother’s life:  two big garbage bags full of belongings, family keepsakes kept in a U-Haul storage unit, a women’s shelter full of caring friends, a bank account, a safety deposit box.  As her mother slips away, Bartók finds her mother’s journals.  In reading them, she rediscovers her mother and realizes that her damaged brain works in similar ways to her mother’s schizophrenic one.

Melancholy, regret and loss permeate this beautifully crafted memoir.  Throughout the story, whether she is in Europe, Israel or America, Bartók clearly shows her continuing love and concern for her mother.  At the same time, she maintains the emotional as well as the physical distance necessary for her own well being, harboring guilt every step of the way.  Bartók gracefully and deftly illuminates the complexity of familial love and its unusual capacity for healing and forgiveness.

Leonids

Ride a trail of vermilion flake

Blaze your path across sooty skies

Leave smoldering ash in your wake

Streak torrid blue and flame bright

Trace the path you will take

Before providence calls

Soothes your hot ache

And reclaims your translucent dust

On Richard Sherman, Tommy Tomlinson, and Sportsmanship

I love football. I grew up watching the sport with my father, going to local games, and once I entered high school, I traveled with the sports teams as a cheerleader or a member of the marching band. Much of the social scene in my hometown revolved around the Ironmen. After all, I grew up in small-town Oklahoma and we are serious about our sports, especially football. 

I watched both of yesterday's games. I am delighted with the outcome of the early game, primarily because someone defeated the Patriots. I am equally disappointed with the outcome of the late game. I am a Kaepernick* fan, not necessarily a Niners fan. But my disappointment stems from more than just the loss to Seattle. What a brutal, nasty game. The refs officiated the game poorly which contributed to the heightened emotion and violence on the field. Both teams are physical, fierce competitors. It's a rough game. Oh, my, the injuries.

Anyone who watched most likely caught the Richard Sherman interview immediately after the game. I'm not sure anyone seemed more shocked than reporter Erin Andrews. She handled Sherman like the professional she is, and the camera cut away quickly. Instantaneously, chatter appeared all over the internet about Sherman's so-called rant. Many condemned his behavior, including myself. Name-calling ensued. Peopled bemoaned the state of the game. One online writer compared Sherman to Muhammad Ali.

 I awoke this morning to a friend's link to Tommy Tomlinson's 22 Brief Thoughts About That Richard Sherman Interview. Huh. A defense of Sherman's antics. His final point? "It seems to me the only proper response to something like that [game] is to holler like a crazy person."

What I gleaned from the article is that Sherman was excited, he's a smart guy, and football players are not fit to communicate publicly until they simmer down. 

I find much of what Mr. Tomlinson wrote disingenuous. Some of his points seem trite and cliched to me:  fans want a violent, exciting game filled with some big personalities but are quick to criticize when the behavior gets out of hand; put a microphone in a guy's face directly after he's made a game-winning play and he's liable to be a bit punchy. Yadda, yadda, yadda. The bit that actually bothered me the most, though, lies in what I consider to be Tomlinson's hypocrisy. He defends Sherman by pointing out his intellect, his high school class standing, and his prestigious college. The next point, I must quote.

"His degree from Stanford was in communications...which might explain why, while he seemed to be hollering like a crazy person, he didn't curse and looked into the camera the whole time."

Tomlinson goes on to compare the interview to an audition for the WWE.

Here's the rub--Tomlinson contradicts his own conclusion when he insinuates that Sherman acted with full understanding of his actions during that on-camera rant. Either Sherman behaved like a "crazy person" or he controlled his language and his gaze while saying exactly what he meant to say. Sorry, Mr. Tomlinson, you can't have it both ways.

Do I think Richard Sherman's behavior offensive? Yeah, I do. On field after the big play and on camera afterward. Sherman behaves like a bully. That handshake proffered to Michael Crabtree was nothing more than an Eddie Haskell-style taunt. Calling Crabtree "mediocre" on national television reveals an utter lack of respect for other players, not to mention a total lack of class. I really don't care what history they might have. Sherman's self assessment of his abilities is probably not far off. He's an excellent player and fierce competitor, but I simply cannot stomach that kind of arrogance. I am fairly sure Sherman doesn't give a whit what I think.

 I'm not a Broncos fan, but I hope they crush the Seahawks on February 2.

* I mean, really. Look at him. And he can play the game, too. Of course I'm a fan.

Redeemed

His betrayal divulged

Naked, exposed,

Enraged by his misbehaving

Words of clemency die on my tongue.

Deceived, I no longer seek

Shelter in saccharine whispers.

Your soft breath and sighs

Advancing, receding,

Endowed with the gift of believing

Embed faith into my icy heart.

Cherished, I no longer wander

Forsaken in treacherous visions.

My slumbering soul

Awakened, released,

Washed by a flood of revealing

Devotion dwells in your eyes.

Changed, I no longer chase a

Life only lived in my dreams.

An Ordinary Life

I cannot know

the purpose of life

but I think it must be

a lingering search

for elusive faith

I cannot know

whether God exists

my only evidence lies

in the peace I find

under the gaze of your eyes

I cannot know

if there is any beyond

but until we die

we have an endless supply

of ordinary nights

Private Property

When I was nine years old, my mother cleaned her closet, culling her wardrobe in the process. Mama is a tiny woman and weighed barely a hundred pounds at the time. Me, well, I’m not so tiny. My father is 6 feet, 2 inches tall, a big-boned farmer with a thick, strong body. I’m somewhere in between. I’m sure they were probably still too big, especially through the chest, but I selected several of my mother’s old shirts to add to my own closet. My favorite was a navy blue cotton number with three-quarter sleeves, a Peter Pan collar, and a row of shiny blue buttons up the front.

I wore it to school soon after. I remember almost nothing at all about that day. It was neither warm nor cool, although I do remember it was sunny. It must have been after lunch because my nearly fatal embarrassment took place as we filed out the front door, across the large expanse of cement in front of the school building and down the sidewalk to the playground in back. I heard a laugh, then another, and what I can only describe as a guffaw. I realized almost immediately the laughing was directed at me. I felt air across my chest, and to my infinite horror, when I looked down I saw skin. Bare skin. My blouse was losing buttons.

We’ve all felt exposed, whether literally or figuratively, and such exposure in childhood is devastating in the moment. It’s humiliating and often lasting. Paule Constant’s novel, Private Property, describes moments such as these over and over in the life of little Tiffany Murano. From the second of her arrival at the Catholic girls’ school in southwestern France, nine-year-old Tiffany feels miserable and out of place. She misses her parents, French expatriates still living in Africa. The nuns are distant and dismissive; the other girls seem foreign and are cruel, teasing Tiffany, ignoring her, shutting her out of their conversations, their play, and their world. Having spent her life until now in Africa renders Tiffany an outsider.

Although Tiffany internalizes the rhythms and routines of the school, she never really sheds her alien status. She moves through her days detached and observant, longing for companionship but misunderstanding the social order so completely that every effort she makes disintegrates into a mortifying blunder. In one painful episode, she goes through the motions of befriending Cathy even though she is told outright she’ll be dropped like a stone the second a popular girl looks Cathy’s way. When the inevitable happens, Tiffany is more upset about her undone, unkempt hair than the departure of her false friend. Tiffany simply watches as the years pass her by. Soon she is thirteen.

Tiffany’s only solace lies with her grandparents, the reserved grandfather and her charming, devoted, but ailing grandmother. She spends her weekends with them, first at a city boarding house, then later on traveling to the Private Property of the title. The big house sits among orchards of apple, plum and hazelnut trees, looking over the picturesque village below, flanked by its own farm complete with livestock, and backed by an imposing range of mountains. Every joyful experience, every peaceful moment, and the only sense of belonging left to her are embodied in the beloved grandmother, the grandfather, and the Property.

Constant’s prose, even in translation, flows gracefully. She is at her lyrical best during the last third of the novel, moving between the school and the Property, between Tiffany’s resignation and her happiness, using only the quality and essence of her language to communicate the acute, turbulent changes. When Tiffany’s grandmother dies after a long, unspecified illness, the girl’s world is shattered. Constant renders her mourning and utter confusion in language so raw, so palpable, it makes the heart ache. Tiffany disintegrates back at school, lying awake at night, her head spinning her lesson’s facts into a kind of emotional armor. We are witness to the imminent fracture, helplessly watch her hurtling toward disgrace.

After finishing Private Property, my mind wandered over my own school years, marking embarrassments, remembering slights, rifling bittersweet memories. I relived a bit of that evening after the buttons fell from my shirt. I picked the buttons up, put them in my pocket, took them home. But with the dark shirt and buttons in hand, I went to the trash can instead of asking my mother to sew them back onto the shirt. I didn’t want to be reminded. Constant draws Tiffany in clear, stark relief, creating a character who throws shadows so large they cover you up and remind you for days.

A Hell of Their Own Design

The people populating the small towns and backwoods of southern Indiana meet with grisly ends throughout Frank Bill’s short stories. Simple shootings just won’t do for these twisted, nasty characters. A blade slices through both of a man’s eyes, a man lassos and hangs his father-in-law at his wife’s behest, silent dogs bite their way from a bulging calf to a vulnerable throat, and then, there are the flames: a barn of dead dogs set afire, homemade bombs exploding and burning the attacker instead of the target, a lit cigarette flicked into a circle of gasoline. Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories overflows with senseless violence alongside righteous, brutal vengeance.

Men, women and children wind in and out of these stories linked and rooted by place. Families take shape from one story to the next, an often gruesome shape, melding into the fabric of the action or serving as a backdrop, a connection, or an explanation of the deep mysteries of human motivation. The tone is pessimistic and sardonic. “The only time life is easy is childhood, but by the time a person realizes this, it’s too damn late.”

Bill paints his law enforcement with the same dark pigment used for his criminals. Even the good guys exhibit flaws, bad behavior, and judgment tainted by personal interest or annihilated by tragedy. Ordinary people fall victim to their vices. Innocence is shattered for no conceivable reason. Children commit violence, are raped and killed. Lives ruined in an instant. Everyone is fair game. It is the rare man who emerges on the other side and no one gets away clean.

The transgressions accumulate like crappie on a fish stringer, so fast that you lose count. In Trespassing Between Heaven and Hell, the breach lays not so heavily in the act as in the cover-up, but once events are set into motion, sin piles upon convenient sin, complicated by the relationship of brothers and the wrecked psyche of a man incapable of leaving war wounds behind him. Already broken people shatter beyond repair.

The aftermath of war figures into The Old Mechanic as well. Perhaps the most compelling story in the collection, the narrative is told from the point of view of an adolescent boy meeting his grandfather for the first time. The boy grew up hearing savage accounts of the man’s behavior. Despite his mother’s misgivings and his own searing fear, the boy goes off alone with the man. The simple words than run through the boy’s head while he accompanies his grandfather to a gun show, to dinner and finally to the old man’s home, elucidate a mixture of repulsion and curiosity, clearly illuminating the irresistible pull of blood and history. In the end, pervasive guilt wracks the grandfather’s existence with hope of only the merest hint of redemption.

The Penance of Scoot McCutcheon is a love story. It's the accounting of an ordinary home and a happy marriage, told by a doting husband. A young wife described in tender, intimate detail. But it is a love story of the dead and the dying, told in retrospect and tinged with regret. It is the least violent tale here, the crime secondary to an emotionally devastating centerpiece. Haunted by his own actions, a man in perpetual disguise runs from himself for years before surrendering to reckon for his sin, making peace with his own conscience but unable to shake his staggering guilt.

This story collection is an astonishing debut. Bill peppers his writing with generous description, some perfectly rendered, some slightly distracting. Hair and eyes “stained like a walnut”, “flesh giftwrapping bone”, or “Frail would describe her as muscular,” evoke just the right image. Even the few less successful passages bring a definite vision into the mind. Inducing and conveying raw emotion seems almost effortless for Bill, particularly in the case of men in love with their women. The stories race along, visceral, strong, and stunning, transporting the reader into a dirty, dangerous world of drugs, alcohol, incessant violence, and the terminal pastimes of decaying rural life. These people of southern Indiana inhabit an unrelenting hell made up partially of circumstance but primarily crafted from their own design.

Ted and Ginger and Dianne

My grandfather served on the USS Salute in 1945. That year, on June 8^th, she sank, broken in two pieces after striking a mine in pre-invasion activities off Brunei Bay. Each year since 1985, the sailors of the Salute meet during the week of that anniversary. They bring their families, exchange tall tales, and tell the stories of their childhood and their service to a historical volunteer. The last couple of years the interviews were filmed. We sit in the meeting room and watch the stories unfold, each the same and each quite different. As the years pass, the men age and are slowly lost to sickness or to time.

For the last couple of years, they held the reunions here in Oklahoma. I’ve been close and lucky enough to attend. This year we all traveled to Bartlesville, an oil-boom town in the northeastern part of the state. My grandfather and my mother grew up there, my father and I just across the county line to the east. It’s familiar country, a place sprung from Delaware and Cherokee Indians, hard-scrabble pioneers, back-breaking work and the bounty of a part of the state deemed “Green Country”.

I’ve never been close to my grandfather. Ted is a small, handsome man who’s led a hard life, mostly by his own choice. When he tells stories of the war, he speaks of women he chased through California where he was stationed, the buddies who accompanied him, and his repeated instances of being absent without leave, which he casually refers to as “jumping ship”. His first wife, my grandmother, was Californian by way of Illinois. Ginger, as she was called, caught rheumatic fever as an adolescent. Her heart badly damaged, her parents moved the entire family out west for the sunshine and the clean air. That’s where they met. He tried to marry her when she was just seventeen, but her father blocked the union. Ted went to war. Ginger waited.

When the Salute sank, my grandfather sustained a head injury, spent about two weeks unconscious, and woke up state side. With his medical discharge in process and a keen sense of his own mortality, he picked Ginger up, took her to Arizona and married her there. Ginger stood four feet, eleven inches with blonde hair, pale skin, and light eyes, a lovely, tiny young woman. My mother was born in California in April of 1946. By May of 1949, Ginger’s rheumatic heart failed. She died at the age of twenty-two leaving behind her husband and a three-year-old daughter.

My grandfather quickly remarried a woman who preferred to pretend his first wife did not exist. I know very little about Ginger, only hearing how my grandparents met for the first time last year, after the second wife died. Ginger is a cipher, a beautiful face in a black-and-white photograph, an almost entirely unknown quantity.

My daughter, at twenty, stands about five feet, two inches tall, with blonde hair, luminous pale skin, and hazel-green eyes. She is a lovely, tiny young woman. In the hotel this past June, as the reunion group lingered over breakfast, my daughter came to visit. I was upstairs in my room, still preparing for the day, so she went down to the lobby with the old sailors and their families. My mother asked my daughter questions about college and my daughter, an animated student of theater and French, began telling stories. My grandfather watched her with obvious delight. When I came into the room a bit later, she rose to hug me and the conversation lulled. My mother overheard my grandfather say to the sailor next to him, with a smile on his face, “She reminds me of my first wife.”

My daughter, unbeknownst to her, gave my mother a precious gift that day: an idea of what her mother may have been like. It’s a sweet and precious debt, one that will never be repaid.