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Silence | Oct 20 2002

When you’re a kid you think that the way things are is the only way they can be. Not that that way is necessarily good, but still you never think, or certainly I never thought, that anything could ever be any way but the way it was. So for example, and this is what prompted this thought, my grandfather loved me and took me to baseball games, each of which we, meaning our team, lost. The team we loved was terrible and on Tuesdays we sometimes went to Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips where there was a two-for-one special and then my grandfather died and I sat in the first row with my mother holding in my lap the Collected Poems of e.e. cummings, the one with the black and white photo on the cover of cummings taken by his wife—his second wife, Marion Morehouse—and cried. Sometimes I say I miss him and that I would give anything to talk to him, but then I wonder what I would say. I don’t think he would understand anything. Nor do I think I could tell him anything. Instead it would be like it is with other people. Maybe you like the person, maybe you want to reach out to the person, but what do you have to reach with? He would be very old now. Ninety-four. His sister-in-law, my great-aunt, is the last one left in his generation. She weighs seventy pounds and sleeps all the time. Would I sit by his bed as I sit by hers and hold his hand as I hold hers and smile when he opens his eyes and say nothing, as I do with my great-aunt, those eyes like my eyes, the same shape as mine but older?