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Show cigarette smoking had devoured both lungs and brain, leaving him crazy. My dad and his siblings put him in the nursing home the morning after he wandered, half naked, into the bedroom where I was sleeping and tried to get in bed with me. I had fled to the safety of the yellow-lit kitchen where the adults were playing cards. Climbing into my father's lap, my fourteen-year-old body much too long, I pretended to be only interested in the game. Moments later, my grandpa entered the kitchen, white underwear hanging, as if wet, from his body, limbs shrunken, eyes frantic and rolling. What had he called out to me as he had entered the room where I was sleeping, groping the air like a monster? What name came to his lips? In my memory, it is my own. That summer we arrived at the peak of the corn. No longer farming, my grandpa kept a large garden in the back, and each evening we would pull the ears of corn from the stalks and take them up to the kitchen. Our infrequent visits meant that our arrival brought together all my aunts and uncles and cousins. Dinners were enormous affairs, requiring extra table leaves, a kids' table, and my grandma eating in the kitchen while she made sure the gravy boat and meat platters remained full. My grandpa sat at the head, the plate of white bread nearby, sweeping pieces through the gravy on his plate, telling off color jokes while he smoked cigarette after cigarette. I sat with my cousin in the kitchen at the old formica table, close to the deep freezer that held five gallon containers of vanilla ice cream, an amount I could not even fathom. Two of my cousins were close to my age, and I always looked forward to seeing them. They lived in Nebraska and Colorado and visited my grandparents often. They had never left their childhood homes. 91 |