I’ve driven up to the front gate several times in the last two and a half weeks, but the guard on duty isn’t one I recognize: a man—not much older than I am but a lot larger—who looks cramped in the small booth. There’s California summer sweat on the guard’s forehead, and I can’t blame him for being laconic.

“Winger.” I try to look polite.

“I.D.?”

Getting to my driver’s license is a bit of a hassle since I haven’t taken my seatbelt off, but I’m pretty sure this guy has a taser and he looks like he has to take shit from geriatrics all day, so I don’t argue.  The guard holds an arm out of his sliding window and I drop my license into his palm.  The arm retracts slowly, coiling into the booth, and I can feel my face being scrutinized.  The license picture was taken at fifteen and a half, and I don’t look anything like it any more.

A car—a big, gold Oldsmobile like the kind I thought only retired Mafiosi in Florida owned—pulls up beside me.  The bottom corner of the windshield is emblazoned with a yellow “Leisure Village” sticker, and the guard waves the eighty-year-old woman hunched over the steering wheel through the gate. The bar rises, seems to stretch to accommodate the Oldsmobile, and the grandmother in the gold car is gone.

“I have a Marc Winger on file.”

“What?”  I look back over, and the guard is scrolling through something on his computer.

“Marc Winger.  You related?”

“Yeah, that’s my dad.  Am I not in there?”

“Doesn’t look like it.  And I can’t let anyone through that gate”—the guard gestures with my license to the bar blocking my path—“if their name’s not on this list.”  He points my license at the computer.

“I should be on the list.  Everyone should be on the list.  They told us anyone could visit this month.”

“Unrestricted bereavement visiting ends after two weeks.”  I can hear the cover of the employee handbook slamming shut.

“Look, I’m just trying to visit my grandpa.  Can’t you just call him or something?”

With a sigh, the guard slowly hands me back my license and then reaches for the phone in his booth.  He punches the buttons methodically as he reads them off the computer screen.  The phone rings, and the guard comes to life with saccharine alacrity.

“Hi, Mr. Mann?  This is the front gate.  The front gate.  Yes, the gate, sir.  I have a Seth Winger here to see you; is it all right if I let him in?  Yes, Seth.  Great.  You have a nice day now.  Well thank you, I will.”

Any trace of his previous personality vanishes with the faint click of the receiver, and the guard sizes me up one more time before silently raising the gate.  I thank him and accelerate slowly, trying at once to steer, roll the window up, and escape.

The drive through Leisure Village, the senior community my grandfather lives in, is slow and methodical. I’m careful to keep my speed under twenty-five miles an hour, the speed limit on every road weaving like strands in an asphalt web through the gated community. I’d ignore the signs, but my dad told me this morning that he already got a ticket from a twenty-hour patrol car for hitting thirty-five with no one else around. I haven’t ever gotten a speeding ticket, and I’d rather not start with a low-speed pursuit in the middle of a giant senior resort.

The Santa Rosa Valley, where Leisure Village sprawls over 440 acres, is really just like any one of the hundreds of other little valleys in California, but it does have a nice view of the Santa Monica mountains. The sky is dazzlingly azure today, like every other day, and the perfectly manicured and perfectly green lawns that line the perfectly tarred, abundantly wide, jet black stretch of road glisten in the sunlight. Smiling senior couples stroll down the sidewalks. Bluebirds may or may not break into a charming rendition of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” as they flit around my car.

There are two named streets in Leisure Village. I’m on the imaginatively named “Leisure Village Drive,” but somewhere in the labyrinth of homes is supposedly a “Mountain View Drive” as well, though I’ve admittedly never looked and so have never found it. All of the other streets are named with numbers—“Village 12” or “Village 41” or “Village 23”—and every home on the street has as its address a number like 12006 or 41011. It would make sense in a grid, but Leisure Village is about the farthest thing from a grid possible: a weird, vaguely triangular blob sandwiched and squeezed between one of Camarillo’s main roads to the northwest and agricultural fields to the southeast. The village-roads snake away from Leisure Village Drive like ivy tendrils, curling in on themselves and filling every available inch of land that’s not already taken up by the eighteen-hole golf course, the swimming pool, the recreation center, the spa, the tennis courts, the paddle tennis courts, the extra-wide sidewalks, the gym, the giant chessboard, the main office, the park, the shuffleboard courts, the horseshoe pits, the RV parking, or the bocce courts.

I pass Village 44 first. It branches off to the left, and might be a little shadier than some of the other villages, but it’s hard to tell.  The addresses are about the only way to differentiate between houses—every village has the same suburban look, and even if they have different floor plans, all the houses are painted the same identical shade of beige. Some residents go so far as to hang potted plants or wind chimes from their porch eaves, though I assume the homeowners’ association has approved this practice. My grandmother used to hang bird feeders from the roofs of her houses—she loved the hummingbirds they attracted—but the feeders were swallowed up by cardboard boxes during some move and have yet to reemerge. I think the iridescent birds with ruby bellies and emerald wings may be gone forever.

My grandfather lives in Village 35, in the left half of an “El Dorado” model duplex. At twenty-five miles an hour, it takes a couple minutes to get from the gate to his driveway.

“We don’t want a duplex,” I can remember my grandfather saying as he sat in the green armchair he’d sat in for as long as I paid any attention to these things, the one that had followed him from home to home. We were in his living room in an apartment in Simi Hills, late afternoon, and the sun was just beginning to set. There was sunlight flooding into the room’s big windows and reflecting off the cream-colored carpet, so that the entire room looked blindingly white. My grandmother was standing at the miniature kitchen counter, sorting pills into compartmentalized plastic containers for the week ahead.

“But there’re only a few openings now,” she said. “We have to take what we can get.”

“Why not just wait until something bigger opens up?” I asked. Naiveté.

“People don’t just move out of Leisure Village.” My grandfather said the last two words with a sort of reverence. “And we’re not going to wait for someone to die.”

The earth that Leisure Village sits on—the land that all of Camarillo sits on, actually—used to be Rancho Calleguas, an 1837 land grant by the Mexican government.  I’ve thought a lot about how different the land was then, how different California was then. About how Adolfo Camarillo, sixteen when he inherited the ranch upon his father’s death, would sit in the fields on horseback for hours watching his cattle graze in the mountainous bassinet of the Santa Rosa Valley; about how Rancho Calleguas, rechristened Rancho Camarillo, became one of the nation’s leading lima bean ranches; about how Adolfo would have had to watch wildfires descend from the mountains every summer to threaten his crops; about how, eventually, Adolfo’s adobe home was devoured by the ravenous tongues of those same flames, collapsing with the terrifying crash of dreams rent asunder; about how, ultimately, the land was segmented, divided, and sold off to the California government.

California was quick to incorporate the rancho into the small communities already blossoming quietly in the valley. What became the city of Camarillo, isolated by its geography, saw little growth between its inception and the Second World War. But when a newly prosperous America emerged from the dusty rubble of Berlin and the acrid smoke of Hiroshima, when my grandfather returned from the ruins of Europe at the age of twenty—my age—to forget what he had seen and to learn how to be a college student again, when Eisenhower’s highway system began to steamroll its way across the nation in post-war affluence, Camarillo’s population exploded. Orchards were razed, houses were built, and people followed the path blazed so many years ago by wildfire over the mountains and into the city.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to explain why, exactly, I’m going to my grandfather’s house alone. Two and a half months ago I got a call from my mom while I was at work, saying that my grandmother’s cancer, long in remission, had resurfaced. It was multiplying rapidly. The prognosis was grim. She was made comfortable.

I flew home to visit that weekend, spent hours sitting by the hospital bed that had been wheeled into my grandparents’ bedroom, talking to my grandmother over the crooning notes of a Joan Baez CD, the constant drone of C-SPAN, and the hum of some sort of machine busy invading her body with tubes. My grandmother—who had had no symptoms the last time I saw her, who walked and cooked and danced until just days before I got the call from my mom, who I secretly thought would outlive us all—looked small and fairly well drugged, but brave. We hit the same topics we always covered: how’s school, how’s work, are you enjoying yourself, I’m so proud of you, have you met a nice Jewish girl yet, are you eating well? But then my grandmother asked me what I wanted to do with my life. Tell me your plans, she said. Show me the future. Show me your future. I’m so proud of you.

The second phone call—the one I was expecting but not, of course, prepared for—came two months later. I left my summer job four days early, flew home again, and the next day stepped out of my dad’s car and into the gravel parking lot of Eden Memorial Park.

I was greeted by family members I knew from across California, family friends I hadn’t seen in years, a stooped man of almost ninety—one of my grandfather’s friends from the days when he played handball—who stood barely five feet tall, walked in inch-long, shuffling steps, and shook my hand firmly while apologizing for his “handballer’s strut.”

I gave the eulogy for my grandmother. I don’t remember what I said. I do remember calling her the Energizer Bubbe. She would have liked that line.

And then I carried my grandmother’s plain pine casket up the hill, to the gravesite next to the plot where my grandparents buried their youngest daughter decades ago. The six pallbearers paused every ten feet while the rabbi leading the procession said a prayer. We hauled the coffin past dozens of graves, each marked by a tombstone flush with the ground—no fields of upright crosses in a Jewish cemetery—doing our best to dance around the names, to step on the lattice of grass that framed the plaques and not on the memories interred by them. My grandmother was a small woman, but our arms burned under the weight of the heavy coffin, and the two or three minutes we carried my grandmother in the hot southern California sun lasted into eternity.

The rabbi pinned a strip of black cloth to my mother, aunt, and grandfather’s chests at the gravesite. They tore in unison. The coffin was lowered into the grave by six Hispanic men dressed in grimy work clothes, their calloused hands sliding expertly over the leather belts that supported the coffin. My family took turns pouring dirt onto the grave with an upside-down shovel, each pile of dirt stippling the pale pine until the earth had swallowed my grandmother. Unto dust thou shalt return, I believe the saying goes.

I’m at about Village 39 when my phone rings. It’s illegal in California to drive and talk on the phone—and I know the Leisure Village police will nail me if I do—but it’s not technically illegal to check who’s calling.

Gram.

That makes me pause. It always does. My grandfather’s phone died two days after my grandmother, and he’s been using her phone since. I haven’t gotten around to changing the address book entry from Gram to Pops.

I realize I’m about to sideswipe a golf cart driving on the side of the road and swerve around it. The old man behind the wheel of the cart is oblivious. If there’s a cop around, he’s going to get me for that, but since I don’t hear sirens I figure it’s probably safe to pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Heeeeeyyy, kid. It’s Pops. Where are you?”

“I’m on my way—I’m in Leisure Village. Almost to your house,” I say as I turn into Village 35. I don’t mention his conversation with the guard. “I’ll be there in one sec.”

“Oh, that’s great. Just great. See you soon.”

He hangs up, and I park my car alongside the curb outside his house. I guess I could park in the driveway now that my grandmother’s copper-colored Lexus is gone— my grandfather sold it three days after the funeral, saying he didn’t want it around the house anymore—but I don’t. Old habits—well, you know.

Tradition in Judaism—the oldest of habits—dictates that the immediate family of the deceased actively mourns for seven days, a period of time known as shiva. The first night we sat shiva was a Friday, and so my family spent the first night with my grandfather, mom, and aunt, accompanied only by a few close friends, each other, and our memories. On the shiva’s second night, the two local Chabad chapter rabbis, who had apparently visited my grandparents often since their move to Leisure Village, came to my grandfather’s house with six other orthodox Jews in tow. From the window I watched them drive up to the house, careen wildly around Village 35’s cul-de-sac, and climb out of their van: first the thickly bearded Israeli driver, then the two rabbis, and finally two fathers and three sons, tumbling out onto the pavement like well-dressed clowns, faces set in the forced somber expression of people going to mourn for a stranger’s death.

Rabbi Yitzhak was the first through the front door of the house, bowing slightly to make it under the threshold in his large black hat. My mom was the first to greet him, but Yitzhak remained silent.

“Eileen!” Rabbi Zev burst through the screen door, pausing only to place a hand quickly on the mezuzah nailed at an angle to the frame. He asked how my mother was coping, made small talk, but volunteered no hand to her in greeting.

Rabbis Zev and Yitzhak were complete opposites save for their identical black suits, black hats, and black drawstring belts—Zev short and slight, with the scraggly five-inch beard of a man who had just had his first child; Yitzhak well over six feet tall and easily 250 pounds, with a dark brown tangle of a beard that draped over the corners of his mouth and hung down to his solar plexus. Both were New York Hasidim, dressed for eighteenth-century Polish winter and then uprooted, whisked off for miles and decades to the California summer, to my grandfather’s doorstep.

My family stood frozen, staring at the mourning task force. Zev talked nonstop, chattering about deli or babies or my grandmother or maybe all three while the rest of the group filtered into the house; Yitzhak just stood in the corner like Zev’s golem. Finally, Zev announced how sorry he was for our loss but how happy he was to be able to share in the great mitzvah of honoring Doris’ memory. My family defrosted, the buzz of conversation drowning out whatever Zev was saying. My grandfather stood near Zev, leaning heavily on his cane, nodding.

I watched as Zev banked away from my grandfather and wheeled through the crowd, searching for a new target to talk at. We locked eyes, and I turned away an instant too late.

“You know, Seth,” Zev said as he walked up to me, “I’m the head of Chabad at Cal State Channel Islands. You’ve heard of this school?”

I nodded.

“Good. Beautiful school. Your grandfather tells me you go to Stanford. Also a beautiful school. You’ve been to Chabad services? Do you know Rabbi Dov?”

“Uh, no, I haven’t been. I haven’t met him.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. He’s a good man, Rabbi Dov. You go to Hillel?”

“No, actually, I don’t really—”

“Well, you would like Chabad. Give it a chance. You should introduce yourself to Rabbi Dov. Tell him Rabbi Zev says hello.”

“I will.”  I haven’t.

“Good. You’re a good grandson, Seth. Your grandfather is very lucky.”

I thanked him and excused myself to get a glass of water. My aunt was on the phone in the kitchen—my grandfather’s landline, an oversized handset with bold print for tired eyes, large buttons for arthritic fingers, and prodigious speaker output for deaf ears. She was talking in the hushed, rushed tones of someone clearly upset but not wanting to disturb the guests in the other room. “Guests” is a strange term for mourners, I suppose, but such is a shiva with catered food.

“We were told the deli spread would be here by five,” my aunt hissed, “and it’s almost six.” She turned, saw me and smiled, and I smiled back before turning around and leaving the kitchen, faint sibilant sounds echoing off the tile behind me.

Back in the living room, Zev was shaking a tin can about a third full with coins and extolling the virtues of tzedakah—charity—as a way of commemorating the deceased. The can had his Chabad chapter’s logo on the side.

I enter my grandfather’s house through the screen door, too, but much more quietly than Zev did. The Chabad visits lasted two more nights before my grandfather shut down the shiva, both because he was thinking about my grandmother all of the time anyway and because he was tired of having his house invaded by orthodox Jews he didn’t know every night. I can’t even imagine how the phone call to Rabbi Zev went—how do you tell someone his solace is more aggravation than consolation?—but my grandfather carried through, and Zev and Yitzhak haven’t been back to the house.

The house itself is back to normal. Zev’s tzedakah can sits, half-full, on a coffee table. The dining room table has been pulled back away from the wall, where it previously served diligently as a buffet line. The mirror in the entrance hall, hidden by a draped white sheet during the shiva, is uncovered, and my reflection in it catches me off guard.

“Pops?”

“Heeeeeyyy kid!” My grandfather walks out of his study, limping heavily on his cane. He doesn’t have the handballer’s strut yet, but arthritis and an artificial hip are conspiring to get him there. As per the rules of bereavement, he’s letting his gray hair grow—or at least not getting it cut—but other than that he looks the same as always: large-framed bifocals, thick silver mustache, plaid shirt with three pens and his weekly schedule in the breast pocket, blue jeans, white Nikes. He holds out his hand to shake mine, a stilted action he’s fallen into since I left for college. I give him a hug.

We sit in his kitchen to eat leftover deli sandwiches and talk about my summer job. I worked in an engineering lab, and my grandfather, and ex-electrical engineer, is fascinated.  At three p.m., my grandfather stops the conversation. It’s time for “Judge Judy,” a post-retirement afternoon ritual for him, so we relocate to the living room and turn on the television. Today’s case is as absurd as any other—someone lent a car to someone else and someone else returned it with the spare tire missing, or someone tried to make off with the contractor’s money from someone else’s half-dug pool, or someone’s dad bought someone’s girlfriend breast implants—and my grandfather insists repeatedly that he watches this show only out of sheer amazement over the litigants.

“Who are these people?” my grandfather asks. We both chuckle.

After “Judge Judy,” Pops has had a full day, and he says he’s going to take a nap before dinner. My aunt is coming to visit when she gets off work, so I tell him I’ll stay until she gets here. We both know this is the last time I’ll see him until I come home again for Thanksgiving.

“When do you get back?” he asks. “November twentieth?”

“I don’t know. Something like that.”

“Well, I’m going to see you when you get back, right?”

“Yeah, I’ll be sure to come visit.”

“That’s great. Let’s get the video chat working, okay?”

“Sure thing. Sundays are still good?”

“Absolutely.” There’s a pause as he looks up at me. “How tall are you now? Six one? Six two?”

I laugh. “Pops, I’m almost five ten.”

“Really? Jesus. You know, I used to be five ten and three-quarters. That was a while ago now, I guess.” He moves next to me and stands up straighter, trying to compare our heights. “Yeah, a while ago. Sure you’re just five ten?”

He’s at least two inches shorter than me. “Pretty sure,” I say.

“You get back here November twentieth?”

“Something like that.”

“Come visit, okay?”

“I will.”

“Okay then. I’m going to lie down. Have Wendi wake me up when she gets here?”

“Can do. Bye, Pops.”

“Bye, kid.”

I watch him shuffle into the master bedroom. I don’t have a book with me, and I’m not as much of an avid daytime television watcher as he is, so I head to the study, towards the internet connection.

I always used to think of my grandfather as extremely technologically literate—almost dangerously so for a man of his age. Before his move into assisted living, he taught computer classes in senior centers and elementary schools, and he had three working Apple computers and a laptop in his study. He gave me my first computer—a big, gray Macintosh manufactured around the year I was born, complete with an auxiliary external floppy drive for 5¼ inch diskettes. Now, his study has one working Mac and one broken laptop, and he struggles to check his voicemail. I get emails in all capital letters.

The blinds are closed and the lights are off in the study, but I’m too lazy to let in light. I turn on the working Mac’s monitor—a big, glossy, twenty-seven inch iMac—and am greeted by a blown up picture of my grandmother smiling back at me from inside the screen.  She’s wearing the purple sunglasses and red lipstick she always wore, her bangs curled as she would do meticulously every morning.  I think it’s a picture from the last time I went to lunch with my grandparents at the assisted living apartment they lived in before Leisure Village—I can hear my grandfather asking for a hot dog with sauerkraut and my grandmother rolling her eyes behind those sunglasses and saying, “Marty, the salt!” Files are strewn around her face in no conceivable order: detritus that seems to stem from not fully understanding how to find anything on the computer that’s not placed on the desktop. The Mac’s screen illuminates my grandfather’s desk, covered in piles of receipts and forms: detritus that seems to stem from the legal and fiscal consequences of losing a loved one.

I open up Safari thinking I’ll check my email or browse Facebook for a while, but I never make it that far. Safari paints a tableau of frequently visited pages on the blank canvas of a new tab, and between some YouTube video of a skateboard trick that I’m sure my cousin is responsible for and my grandfather’s Gmail account, there’s something jarringly out of place:

SingleSeniorsMeet.com.

I minimize the window quickly, and meet my grandmother’s stare again. The house is still hers in so many ways—the walls are covered in pictures of her and pictures she took; her desk sits as she left it in the sunroom; her hair curler is still in the medicine cabinet above the master bathroom’s sink. But her car is gone, and her smell is gone, and it’s close to four and she’s not in the kitchen starting to cook the lamb chops. And I realize what I think my grandfather must have realized: he’s alone in paradise, which makes it rather indistinguishable from hell.

I’m happy to leave when my aunt shows up—mostly because it’s almost five, and five o’clock anywhere near Los Angeles means it’s going to take me two hours to get home, half of which will be spent on one ten-mile stretch of the 405. I say my hellos and goodbyes at the same time and hurry out the door, leaving my aunt to the leftover deli food and the not insignificant task of waking my grandfather for dinner.

In my car, I slump into the polyester seats, turn the key in the ignition, and listen to the radio roar to life with the engine before swinging around the cul-de-sac to head back to the main road. The sprinklers are on and it strikes me that this seems like an incredibly stupid time to be watering the grass but then again something has to keep it green, I guess. The water droplets sparkle in the late afternoon sun. I flip down my sunshade.

The freshly mown lawns remind me of Death with a capital D, probably because people tend to talk about Death’s icy scythe that doth reap the cornstalks of our lives. That’s a ridiculous metaphor. It’s quick, clinical, precise, when obviously death is none of these things. The Talmud instead describes the Angel of Death as being “full of eyes.” I think I like this image better. We watched my grandmother for two months—watched, observed, studied—but now we see her. We see her around the corners of the empty house, by the unruffled half of the king-size bed, in the faraway sheen of my grandfathers eyes when he tries to talk about her and simply says, “She was a good kid.” I hope I can live up to the same epitaph.

There’s no security to leave the community, just a California roll of a stop as I wait for the guard booth’s automatic arm to open fully. A different security guard is stuffed into the stall this time, and he nods slightly at me as I drive through. Is the gate staffed for twenty-four hours a day? How long’s this guy’s shift? And who gets shafted with the ten p.m. to six a.m. shift in that little booth at the front of Leisure Village? But then I’m through the gate and it lowers behind me, shutting in my grandfather, shutting in the impressions my grandmother’s hospital bed has left in the carpet, shutting in the deli food and the rabbis and the patrol cars and the lawns and the golf carts and wrapping it all up with the sign hanging along the wall that separates Leisure Village from the rest of the world.

“Leisure Village: Safe. Quiet. Affordable.”

As the girl grows older, her grandmother sends her to do the shopping and she pumps her knobby knees to the local butcher and the outdoor vegetable market down the street. She returns home slowly, arms spilling with peppers, with eggplants, with nuts, with bright red meat wrapped in clean, white paper.
No longer needing a step-stool, she hovers by her grandmother every day until she leaves to boarding school, absorbing the motions and learning the ingredients that will soon form the recipes of her future.

What is the recipe for love?
My mother encounters my father in the summer of 1985. At the age of thirty-five, she has decided to make the permanent move from the Middle East to the Bay Area to study education. When she walks up to a dusty Toyota dealership on El Camino Real in search of a new car, she finds a curly-haired salesman welcoming her at the door. After they exchange hellos, she recognizes something familiar in him.
“Where are you from?” she asks in Arabic, assuming he will understand.
“Lebanon,” he replies back, trading his learned English for his native tongue.
“You don’t look Lebanese. You’re Iraqi,” she blurts back immediately.
“How…did you know that?” A blush pushes through his dark, craggy skin. He has been living in America since his freshman year of college and has grown used to people not having any conception of his birthplace. At 42 years old, he has long since decided that it is easier to offer an answer that people might understand.
“You can’t fool a fellow Arab,” she responds, her sharp black eyes smiling as she slowly scans his face.
Although she doesn’t end up buying the car from the charming car salesman, she remembers him a few weeks later when she needs the signature of an Arab in order to renew her old passport. He agrees and she invites him over to her apartment for a simple meal to thank him for the favor.
Hummus blended to garlicky perfection. Warm pita bread. Tangy bean salad. Rice that is slightly burned at the bottom of the pan. In Iraq, they call the burnt bits hokoka but my father just calls it love. Her “simple” meal tastes better than anything he has eaten in years. Looking around her tidy kitchen, he notices that there are no cookbooks to be seen, no recipes strewn across the counter. This is a woman who cooks by heart.
When he goes home later that night to the girlfriend he has been living with for five years, he can only think about the meal he just had and the woman who made it. He remembers the way her tight, pale cheeks folded into a bright smile each time she slid a new dish onto the table.
“I have a life to live with this woman I just met,” he finds himself admitting to his soon to be ex-girlfriend.
My parents get married four months later on January 29, 1986.

A leafy lunch
Soon after their marriage, my mother, pregnant, rises early in the morning and makes my father’s lunch. She presses her swelling stomach against the kitchen counter as she leans over the cutting board to slice a tomato for his sandwich. She slips the food into a brown paper bag and writes, “Have a nice day” punctuated with a smiley face on the outside. In this way, she goes to work with him.
Summer fades into fall. As the leaves parachute to the ground, I am growing inside of my mother’s womb. I like to kick her hello in the morning as she bends over to pick up fallen leaves from the driveway. She writes short love poems along their veins and places them in my father’s lunchbox.
She thinks it’s important to feed his soul. He has been lost for a long time.

Colostrum and Cuisinarts
My mom breastfeeds me for eleven months. She is very proud of this fact and likes to use it as scientific justification for pretty much anything.
“Your daughter is so healthy,” my doctors say.
“Well, I breastfed her for eleven months, you know.”
“Your daughter is so intelligent,” my teachers marvel.
“Well, I breastfed her for eleven months, you know.”
“You and your daughter are so close,” her friends chime.
“Well….
The first real word that gurgles out of my tiny mouth is not “mom,” but haleeb, the Arabic word for milk. I speak the soft syllables to summon my mom to me when I need her the most. When she tries to gives me a bottle of formula, I screw up my face and refuse the tainted goods. When she offers me a bottle of her own milk, I accept it. Even as a baby, I know that my mother’s food will always be better.
After my mom finds a sliver of glass in a jar of Gerber’s mashed peas, she calls them to complain because she considers herself “a consumer advocate.” The company sends her coupons but that cooing baby-face label will never be seen on the pantry shelves again. I will not be a Gerber Baby. Instead, she invests in a mini Cuisinart and blends her own brand of baby cuisine for me. At one-year-old, I have already experienced more vegetables than some will taste in a lifetime.

The ties that bind
The three of us sit down to breakfast every morning before my dad goes off to work at the car dealership which he now owns. When he returns from work, we always sit down at the table for a homemade dinner. In between bites, my mom asks us about our days. She starts with me, and I ramble out the tiny details of my day as she continues eating. She tries to ask my father questions, but he would much rather chew than answer, so she turns back to me after he says a few words. I am more than willing to talk with my mouth half-full.
At the end of meals, my father and I traditionally chime an Iraqi saying he has taught me.
“Ashe-ayadiki,” we say to my mother as she swoops down on the table to clear the plates. Bless your hands.
“Shukran,” she smiles back. Thank you.
Even after she starts up an educational toy company and works as many hours as my father, if not more, she still manages to feed us every morning and every night. This sounds a lot like a ’50s sitcom, except it’s not. I am allowed to leave the table before my father finishes eating and my mother never wears an apron and still never, ever cracks open a cookbook.

Sunny Solstices
Everything tastes better in the summertime when my mother brings the life of our garden to our mouths. Onion bread laced with rosemary from the herb patch. Tart apples boiled with brown sugar and cinnamon and drizzled over French vanilla ice cream. Fleshy figs, little loquats, and sweet strawberries swirled into compote. Baby zucchinis stuffed with rice and ground lamb meat. Bowls of bing cherries that we eat until our lips are stained dark red.
On bright afternoons, I play outside while my mom works her magic in the kitchen. Sometimes my dad pushes me on the garden swing, pressing his palms against my bony back so that I can ascend higher than my knees can take me. He leaves me and goes to pick an orange from our tree, unpeeling it on his way back while I try to pump higher without him. As I feel myself losing momentum, he begins pushing me again with one, distracted hand. He eats the orange with the other hand, occasionally placing a slice into my laughing mouth as I descend from the sky. Even though he is pushing me away from him, this is the closest we will ever be.

Weekend mornings
On Saturdays, my dad makes breakfast. He wakes me up early to embark on our exciting expedition, scooping me out of bed and carrying me towards the garage. I float through the house in his arms, weightless until we reach the car. When he lowers me, I climb into the passenger seat, curling up in my cotton pajamas and closing my eyes again as he starts the engine.
At La Boulangerie, I pick out a dozen donuts dotted with fluorescent sprinkles and several pastries, pregnant with chocolate or fruits. When we return home, my mother removes the pastries from their baby pink bakery box and cuts each one into three parts.
“We have to be fair,” she likes to say as she places the pieces onto our plates.
After breakfast, my dad either dozes off or disappears somewhere. He has done his duty for the day. My mom then takes me to the Farmer’s Market, where she weaves through the stands with purpose as I follow her sandaled feet. She lets go of my hand to gently squeeze some peaches or rub a cantaloupe before holding it up to her nose. I hold my breath as she laughs and lingers with the fish vendors, trying to find the freshest pick of the day.
On the drive home, the leathery scent of my mom’s sedan is masked by a curious blend of citrus, salmon and fresh flowers.
I love the smell of Saturday mornings.
The moment we arrive home, she pours the produce onto the gray granite of the kitchen counter and begins to wash each fruit and vegetable, one by one. Every so often, she summons me from a nearby couch, where I am absorbed in a book.
“Come look at this eggplant, Natalie,” she gasps. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“…Sure, mom,” I reply. I never quite understand what she’s talking about, but I want so badly to see what she does.

I carry your heart with me
No matter how busy she gets with work, my mom prepares my lunchbox every morning. While my little comrades stand in the cafeteria line or peel the sweaty plastic from their Lunchables, I stare into my lovingly packed mini-Igloo, trying to decide what to eat first. It is different every day. Hummus stuffed into triangles of pita. Homemade fruit cups. Pesto pasta salad. Sugary rings of dried pineapple. Celery stick logs lined with chunky peanut butter and raisins. A savory sample of mixed nuts. Cream cheese and raspberry jelly pressed between two pieces of whole wheat bread. She has somehow mastered the art of making healthy food delicious.
She sharpies “Be Good” onto my white paper napkins and draws two smilie faces underneath the inky letters. In this way, she comes to school with me every day for most of my life.

A missing ingredient
When the car business proves less than lucrative, my father abandons it and becomes a different sort of businessman, a “financial consultant,” he tells me. I don’t really know what that means except that he’s not around as much anymore. He leaves to Geneva, Switzerland to embark on a business venture when I am seven-years-old, and I sob under my covers for hours after we drop him off at the airport.
Although he no longer sits at the breakfast table, I hear his voice through the telephone line every morning after I read the comics. I ask him when he is coming home and he always says, “soon.” It takes me a year to realize he is lying to me, and it takes him two years to come back.
When my father is gone, I go through a series of stages. For a few weeks, I want to eat nothing but raisin bread. I was never a picky eater before.
In the morning, my mom eats the Sun-maid toast with me as we sit alongside each other at the kitchen table. I always nibble alongside the crusty border first, wanting to savor the small square of butter-saturated swirls for the last moments of breakfast.
The raisin bread is harder to come by at dinnertime. Sometimes I catch my mom eyeing me as I mash my barely-eaten bean salad into the corner of my bowl with a fork. She and I both know it will not disappear the way I want it to.
“Natalie, you’re eating like a bird,” she sighs.
“I don’t feel like eating this now,” I reply. “Can I have some raisin bread, please?”
She stares at me for a moment and my throat constricts until she silently gets up from the table to get a box of Saran Wrap from the counter. She tightens a layer of plastic over my abandoned meal, slides it away from me, and walks towards the toaster. A few minutes later, she sits back down again with the bread in hand, and I begin my path around the crust as she resumes eating the now-lukewarm meal she cooked us for dinner.
My raisin bread stage eventually subsides as I approach my seventh year. For my birthday dinner, my mom crafts a three-tiered black forest chocolate cake, each dark layer lined with a different fruit: raspberry, pear, peach. When I squeeze my eyes shut to blow out the candles, all I can wish is for my daddy to come back.
“It’s just you and me, Natalie,” my mom says sometimes after she hangs up the phone in the morning. I can’t see her eyes because her glasses have clouded over from the steam of her Earl Gray tea, but she sounds sad.
We learn to turn that lonely declaration into a mantra.
“It’s just you…,” she starts as she tucks me in at night, gesturing towards me with her index finger.
“And me,” I reply as I smile and point at myself with my thumb.
Sometimes we reverse it and though we know this makes no grammatical sense, it gives us a strange sort of comfort. We are in this together.
By the time I am blowing out the candles on the chocolate cake my mother makes for my eighth birthday, I no longer am wishing for my father’s return. His absence has become more familiar than his presence.
Only months after my father’s return in 1995, my mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. She puts her business on hold, but she keeps on cooking and taking care of the household while he spends the entire day on international business conference calls. It is like he never came back. Although she is back in good health after a few small surgeries, her relationship with my father has taken a less-than-benign turn.

Dough
At least once a month, my mother devotes an entire day to baking. She wakes up early with a certain look in her eyes and soon, the kitchen counter is coated in chalky flour. When my mother bakes, my mother bakes. Chocolate-chip cookies with walnuts. Oatmeal raisin bars. Anise biscuits. Banana bread. Foccaccia Bread. And my favorite: a Swiss Bread reminiscent of challah. I stand beside her at the counter, watching as she kneads the dough briskly with her pale knuckles. She lets me braid the elasticy strands before we slide them into the oven.
Hours and dozens of trays later, we sit down to enjoy the labors of our day. Before she raises anything to her mouth, she will hold it gently for a moment, her eyeglasses slipping down her nose as she rotates it in front of her. When I laugh at her, she tells me she has the right to admire her creations.
Sometimes I catch her looking at me with the same thoughtful tenderness.
When I am in middle school, my mom confirms that I am, in fact, a baked good.
“Children are like bread,” she explains to me one night as we talk about the kind of person I am and the kind of person I will become. “You can choose which ingredients you will add to the mix when they are babies and there is still time to shape them after the dough has risen. But once you put them in the oven, it’s hard to do much else.”
“You’re already in the oven,” she tells me. “It’s all you now.”
“But don’t worry,” she goes on. “There’s always time to add a little egg wash or some jam once you’re out of the oven.”
She had a point. I am not that much different from my 11-year-old self, except for a garnish or two.

Letting Go
A few weeks into my world history class the summer before ninth grade, we are learning about ancient Babylon and Hammurabi’s code. That same week, I learn that my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer again.
After a few minor tissue removals, her doctors tell her that there is a chance that the dense cells within her breast can become invasive. Because my mom hates taking chances almost as much as she hates the possibility of prolonged suffering, she rejects a lifetime of medicinal cocktails and radiation treatment and opts for the most extreme solution.
“Just take them both off!” she shouts at her doctors, even though the cancerous cells are only ravaging the right side. She labels her breasts the “the bad and the balanced.” She’s always been a fan of symmetry.
She spends the days before her mastectomy in the kitchen, preparing meal after meal and freezing them in Tupperware containers. My father spends the days in his room, shouting on his phone to business people who are somewhere far away, somewhere that isn’t here. He reemerges at dinner time with a guilty look on his face.
In the anesthetized moments before she rolls into the operating room, I cannot even hold her un-needled hand because it is painfully swollen with stress and sadness. I sleep in the hospital next to her bed for the next two nights.
Only one day after my mother’s surgery, my father departs on another business trip, leaving me alone to take care of my mother, even though it is she who always ends up taking care of me. I bring juice boxes to her in bed, and she insists on getting up to reheat the food she had so carefully prepared the week before. The only other time she gets up is to clean the drainage pumps that are connected to the flesh where her breasts once hung. I sit on the bathroom counter as she cries out from both the physical pain of her lost flesh and my father’s final, stinging abandonment. Every time she screams, I hate him more.

A Broken Table, a Battlefield
The kitchen table used to hold my family together and it is at the kitchen table that I realize my family has fallen apart. At breakfast, I hide behind the newspaper so I don’t have to confront my father’s empty stare or my mother’s sad eyes. Dinner is either thirty minutes of silence or an endless verbal joust:
You’re never around. I’m working! You never tell us anything. In due time. Why can’t you just tell us the truth? It’s more difficult than that. We’ve been at your mercy for years. Why do you have to bring up the past like that? We’re financially instable because of you, we never know what tomorrow brings. Why don’t you go back to work   again. I’m trying to hold this family together.
Their words incessantly swirl into the same, sad story every time.
It is at the kitchen table that I also begin to wonder why my parents didn’t separate years ago and what kind of joke it is that we are trying to sit down together for a civilized meal.
My mother now hates preparing food for him. “My brother always told me that you shouldn’t even fry an egg if you aren’t doing it with love,” she tells me.
But she keeps cooking anyways. “The two of us have to eat, too. What’s one more plate?” she mutters as she removes three forks from a kitchen drawer.
The acid dripping from my parents’ daily arguments begins to burns my esophagus, and I develop heartburn at the age of fifteen. When I start to acquire gastrointestinal problems, my mother takes me to my pediatrician, who chides me for my “Type A” personality. I never seek her medical advice again. She doesn’t understand that my body is grieving.

Reconciliation and Rotisserie Chicken
During the summer before my junior year of high-school, my mother takes back her maiden name and accepts a job to direct a Montessori school in Kuwait for a year. She leaves in November because she can no longer handle my father, but also because she wants me to learn to love him again.
An hour after the Super Shuttle takes my mom away, it is dinner time and my father and I move towards the kitchen. I walk to the fridge, where a final meal has been left for us with careful instructions about rearranging and reheating.
“I can help,” my father tries as he leans against the kitchen counter, swirling a glass of Merlot in his hand.
I shake my head no. Only one interloper in her world at a time.
He retreats to the table and leaves me to bumble about. The kitchen never seemed this big before. Was the microwave always so loud? When I open the spice cabinet to get salt, fifty clear Tupperware containers filled with crushed powders stare back at me. Her magic ingredients. I can barely stand to look at them.
I scoop the warmed meal onto two plates and bring everything to the table, now littered with my dad’s business papers. He pushes them aside and starts tucking into the food while I settle in my chair across from him.
When I try to raise the first bite to my mouth, I break. My fork falls from my hand as I bend my head down and start to quietly cry.
“Natoolie,” my dad murmurs, invoking the nickname he called me when I was a little girl. He has stopped eating.
I shake my head no once more without lifting my eyes. When I hear his fork clinking against his plate again, I steal a quick glance across the table. His big, watery brown eyes look cloudier tonight. Maybe, in some way, he misses her, too.
“It isn’t too late for him to learn how to be a father.” My mom’s voice echoes in my head as I blink at the empty seat on my right, remembering the conversation she and I had only hours before she left.
Maybe she’s right, but I’m just not ready for it to happen yet.
**
As the weeks pass, my father and I slowly negotiate our relationship in the kitchen while we stretch the potential uses of rotisserie chicken in every meal. I find myself regretting that I hadn’t always paid close enough attention to my mother when she urged me to watch her kitchen techniques, but there’s something fun about the ignorance that my father and I share.
On good days, my dad and I work together to make a meal and only argue about how much olive oil should go in the pasta sauce and whether or not rotisserie chicken really jives with ravioli. We laugh about the moody oven when I make brownies out of a Betty Crocker’s box, an event my mother would have considered blasphemy.
On bad days, we butt our stubborn heads and our arguments are bigger than the space of the kitchen. I am trying not to see him through my mother’s angry eyes, and I know that every time he looks at me, he sees her. In my inability to forgive him. In my acerbic rejoinders. In my laugh, in my smile, in my silent tears.
“I can’t take it anymore! Can’t you do anything right?!” I shout at him when something explodes in the microwave.
“I’m sorry, Natalie.” He looks hurt. “I wasn’t paying attention. Let me clean it up, at least.”
On most days, we exist sort of like tolerable roommates, acknowledging one another’s presence pleasantly while mostly staying out of each other’s way. We prepare breakfast separately each morning, but we eat together. Occasionally we will exchange a quiet smile or even a word as our newspaper pages overlap in the middle of the table, a picture from my features section resting on his business article.
I do all the food shopping, not only because my dad has a tendency to come back with everything but what’s on the grocery list, but because I find solace in the shelves of the supermarket. I remember my mother as I now linger in the produce section, sniffing the cantaloupes as nearby shoppers stare at me, bewildered.

Meals for One
My mom returns home just before my eighteenth birthday and my last year of high-school. For my birthday, we celebrate not only my entrance into legal adulthood, but also my parents’ divorce. It has been a long time coming. We continue living in the same house until high school is over. Probably not the best idea, but it is convenient and my parents have been living estranged for so long anyways that we’re all used to it. We drive to my graduation in separate cars. I go with my mom. My father goes alone.
Just before I leave for college, my parents finally go their separate ways. My father is now the fully realized version of the working vagabond he has always itched to be. When I see him on rare occasions, we always meet in a different place, a different country, a different restaurant table. An Indian restaurant in London, an outdoor café in Spain, a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles. We talk about college, about my future. We talk about the food in front of us, neither of us able to say what we really think: She can make this so much better. We also talk about his current business ventures; when he starts to ramble about a new project I have to remind myself that he is a lot like those characters in the books I read as a child who constantly invest in new-fangled contraptions that almost always fail. Sometimes I can just nod and go along with it, but sometimes the talking becomes too much for me and I rush to the bathroom, crying against a stall door as the past comes flooding back. Give him a chance, I convince myself, as I walk back to the table with a red nose and a tight smile.
I go home to my mother whenever I can. At the kitchen table, my body is purged of dining hall food, of college commotion, of constant motion. We talk about everything over plates of food. Fruit salad infused with rose water. Spicy curries. Homemade raisin bread. At breakfast, I study her hands, curled around a mug of Earl Gray, and I trace her startlingly blue veins with my eyes. Later I will stand beside the kitchen counter and carefully follow these hands as they fly across a cutting board and sprinkle spices into three different boiling pots. I don’t want to forget a single step. I am finally ready to learn.

Some possible hooks:

1. The pain. Ice pick jabbing into flesh. An electric shock. As though the wind has stripped your skin. The image of my grandmother’s face, skeletal and raw.

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These are the sounds of Sunday School: an off-key guitar spitting songs against the stained glass windows. The whispers of boys in vans and kippahs. This is what Sunday School tastes like: grape juice. Challah toasted with honey. This is what the synagogue smells like: a vacuumed rug. This is how I feel: like I don’t belong. Eleven am Sunday brings me here against my will. I am 12 years old and I have better things to do than shift awkwardly in a pew while pondering why the lady with the guitar is always so happy. The room is dark, the windows full of jewels. Stand up, sit down. The red cushioned pews make a whooshing sound when you land. The boys giggle. I mouth words in Hebrew. I don’t know what they mean. Words in my mouth like skittles, full of sweet, innutritious familiarity.

Secretly, of course, I love it. The whole thing, especially the pretending not to love it part, especially the feeling out of place part. I love the songs. I love the crazy lady with the guitar. I love the lamps dangling like angels from the ceiling. I love the doors that hide the Torah, painted with some fantastic abstraction of color and swirl. I love the food, pieces of sweet bread rationed out, savored like chocolate truffles, and cups of juice so tiny they make you thirstier. This is a world unlike my own. Food is scarce and treasured. People smile for no reason. Songs uplifts without meaning. Most of all, God. God! Who is this God and why doesn’t he live above my house too? He must love all those tiny pieces of Challah with honey. He must love music and color and shiny happy people.

Sunday School is an alternate universe where the 10-12 year olds of my largely Jewish town go to learn how to be Jewish Adults. We do not know the truth: This ritual is an excuse for our parents to outdo each other with big fancy parties when we turn 13. I go compliantly every week. I am always late (my parents’ fault – our house, unlike Sunday School, does not run on time, nor does it include morning smiles or songs) The day includes a half-hour service in the chapel and an hour-long class. Here, the jewels of Jewish wisdom are fitted for our ears. We learn about the Torah and our holidays and our great ancestors of the past (yay). We learn about  Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (boo). We learn traditions and food and stories and games and charity.

We sing songs and color and bake and smile. It is one of those places where you know you are being treated much younger than you deserve, like summer camp, or the pediatrician’s office, but you tolerate it. As a kid, you can see there is, perhaps, something inappropriate about this kind of world view, and yet, it is all you really know.

It is here, among honey and music, among the fellow jeans-and-Skechers-wearing sons and daughters of the commandments, where I first learn about Zionism.  Zion. I think I’d heard the word once in a Bob Marley song. Little did I know Zionism was INVENTED by a Jew. His name was Theodor Herzl and he was born in 1860. Cut out a picture of him, color him, put him on the wall. Zionism is a tangible religion. It yields results; the state of Israel was founded in 1948. Cut out the state of Israel, color it, put it on the wall. Many people helped establish and care for this wonderful place. Cut out a picture of Chaim Weizmann,
David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, color them, put them on the wall. However, the Zionist path is paved with hardship. 1948. 1956. 1967. 1973. 1982. And yet we prevail. My name is Amy and I am a Zionist. Color
it, put it on the wall.

I will not remember the face of a single Sunday School teacher I ever have. I will remember every crevice, every eyebrow out of place, every intonation and awkward kitchen smell of my grade school teachers since kindergarten, but I will not recall a face or even a gender of a single Sunday School teacher from these few years. This is who I will remember: Ben Goldberg. Oh how I love Ben Goldberg. He is skinny and white with orange freckles and matted brown hair smashed against his forehead like thick acrylic paint. He always wears the widest leg cargo pants out of everyone, with silver chains that hang  mysteriously from the pockets at his knees, and too-small striped colored shirts. He is the prototypical, alpha, Jewish, 12-year-old Male. Always raises his hand first. Friends with everyone. Wideeyed. Smiling. Always doling out purple pieces of Bubble-Tape from one of his many pockets. Plus, he stutters, spewing words and spit with the kind of delightful enthusiasm that only boys of 12 can expound.

One day we are discussing Anti- Semitism and Unidentified Teacher asks us if we’ve ever experienced prejudice because of our cultural and religious affiliation. I rack my brain. I love to talk in class, but this one has me stumped. I always think racism, or anti-Semitism, like World Wars and black and white TVs, is a thing of the past. Ben raises his hand, my heart pounds and the skin below my fingernails feels warm. We are seated on the floor and Ben rises to his knees. He stutters through his story, loudly chewing his purple gum and rocking his hips back and forth to absorb some of that explosive boyish energy. This is the story: one time Ben was called a Kike. I have never heard this word before and I am rapt in attention as the teacher has Ben explain what this word means. Ben tells us and then elaborates on how he stood up for himself, telling the offender not to use offensive language. Oh Ben, my heart. How dramatic! How righteous to be slandered and given the chance to show such strength and moral standing. What a hero, what a knight. In my charmed middle-class town, the worst name I’ve ever been called is a Robot. I secretly romanticize the strife of a persecuted people. Perhaps it is my legacy. My confused sense of guilt. My 12-year-old brain cells born from bruised and exiled women now buzzing in the shadow of a hatred I’ve never really known. My family’s history is like a phantom limb, a third arm, the one that’s always raised, asking a question.

The teacher tells us about Israel’s “problem.” The problem, as I understand it, is Anti-Semitism. It is beautiful Ben being called a Kike. In regular school we learn about these assassinations: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. JFK. Now I learn about the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It has been three years since he was shot and Israeli dreams of peace fell to the ground like snow. Show a picture of Yitzhak Rabin, reaching over the body of President Clinton to shake hands with Yasser Arafat, cut it out, put it on the wall. This tragedy joins the  other benchmarks in my mind. There is a quiet air that settles over a classroom when you speak of important assassinated people. Children learn at a young age not to ask questions about the dead.

But there it is, my third arm, raising again. My phantom limb knows death, knows about the darker things that come from silences. Knows about hatred as more than words and history. Knows about historical cycles that build slowly like musical crescendos. There are always questions. And we, our tiny legs tucked under single desks filled with colored crayons, will learn to ask the right ones one day.

I raise my hand. Who killed him, I ask. The teacher does not answer right away. Who? I ask again. This is what I will remember most: we are surprised that Rabin is killed by a Zionist. Already my mind is forming blockades, easy smiling compartments, black and white, good and bad. The teacher does not want to disturb the clean desk drawers of my young mind. I don’t understand. Why did he do it? I will not remember the answer. But don’t all Israelis want the same thing? Aren’t we on the same side, the right side? The questions
loop in my mind like blank typewriter tape. Forming words into punctuated sentences until there is nothing but the loud hum of misunderstanding. If I could remember, I would see in my teacher’s eyes the reflection of cracked stained glass windows. The tumbling compartments of my mind, sticky with honey and breadcrumbs.

Years later I will go. I will climb the steps, one foot at a time, to the spot where Rabin was shot. I will go to his memorial monument. A pile of black rocks lit with orange lights. An Israeli soldier with sad eyes will whisper in my ear that Rabin’s peace was false, a show, a sham, a detriment, of course the man was shot. He will mumble something more in Hebrew, the drawers of his brain sealed shut, the whole desk wobbling. And mine: unhinged. I will stand and read: Here, at this spot, on Saturday, November 4. 1995,  Israel’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered. In capital letters, scratched in marble plaques: PEACE. In black spray paint on stone: PEACE. On paper, in murals, around necks. PEACE. Cut it out, color it, put it on the wall.

His first concrete memory, an awakening from that dream-like state that usually ends at around six or seven years of age, is of he and his brother coming home from school and finding their compound empty of the usual servants and passing relatives, who had not come back from the hospital with the baby. It was 1956, 1949 on the Ethiopian Calendar, when his mother died as a result of complications following child birth. His father, then a judge in Ethiopia’s Supreme Court, was left to raise his three sons, my farther being the youngest, and his two daughters by himself. Those were the first days of anything resembling modernity in Ethiopia. My grandfather and his friends were among the first to purchase American cars and wear suits and ties. He spent most of his wealth building a church in his ancestral homelandu, a few hours north of Addis Ababa, in the harsh cold of the over-tilled highlands. There, the silhouettes of fierce warriors defending the heartland of the Empire pass through the plains on horseback, casting their shadows over the barren landscape belonging to the proudest and poorest tribe of the proudest and poorest nation. u

My mother likes to tell stories whenever we’re stuck in an elevator, or when the power goes out as it often does in African cities, or when something else leaves us somehow in the dark, vulnerable or despairing. It may be that she remembers growing up in constricted spaces, in army barracks where her father (a colonel in the army), her mother and three sisters shared a single room and electricity was scarce. Or it could be that she remembers how far we’ve come
and that darkness and constriction remind her of crumbling jail cell walls and that room stuck somewhere in time where they broke her feet in, demanding to learn something she could not tell them.

Though he lived in what was then a mansion, she in the barracks, though he barely made it through his English-language boarding school, while she was a stellar student at the only French school in Ethiopia, they both ended up part of the same great irony in Ethiopia’s destiny: it was what they shared in common. uThey were the first generation of young Ethiopian elites to be sent abroad for their education, and the materials they found there, the banners and books, the pamphlets and the paraphernalia, brought out an abeyant udisgust with their own privilege.

There was always something of a rebel in my father. My grandfather would often tell his two younger sons of dreams in which it was revealed to him that their older brother would die young, my father would turn the peasants against him—a peasant rebellion was the best his unconscious could do to grasp the rift that history had yet to bring about—and the middle brother would be left to carry the family name. He would often refer to his youngest son—whose darker skin, curvy nose and chubby cheeks evoked the typical features of the subjugated peoples from the south, servants to the highlanders—as that slave-boy. He would get nervous when my father would ask why they had so much and the servants and neighbors, whom they all knew by name, whom they clothed in the winter, and fed during holidays – why they had so little to fend for themselves. He was of the first generation to ask how this happened.

He left in 1969, the first of his family to attend college, the first to really grasp what college was. He had heard from friends that Sweden was a land of beautiful women where the men were all homosexuals. As he boarded the plane, someone shouted out to him to bring a pair of metal boxers along in case the temptation was too great. This is what he remembers—not the agony of leaving everything he knew and heading to a cold and quiet place where he would be poor and alone for the first, but something funny that happened at the airport.u

While my mother was completing high school, before she knelt in front of the Emperor to receive his blessing before leaving for France, my father had already decided to leave Sweden for a socialist country. But his plans to leave for Poland failed, bureaucracy in the Eastern Bloc being what it was, uand he and several fellow Ethiopians stayed. They began staging demonstrations in support of protests by soldiers and laborers back home. In the midst of days spent picketing and partying, they occupied the Ethiopian embassy in Copenhagen in December of 1970. A group of loud twenty-year olds with afros and little red books, displaying the naïve optimism that would come to define their generation, crossed the narrow channels into Denmark, and, armed and trying their best to convince themselves they were angry and ready for a fight, took matters into their own hands. But my father’s anecdotes on the subject are as self-deprecating as they are wistful.

We went in there…we all knew the guy, the ambassador, our hostage. He was the father of… Imagine! No sleep, no food for two days…we didn’t even think of that, we didn’t really know what we were doing…

No matter how naïve or criminal their actions were, there’s pride behind the laughter we share today when we look at the picture of him being brought out of the embassy door. With Che-like facial hair, and a puffed-up stature, he caught the attention of someone in the Danish police, who thought he had identified the leader of the group. The policeman grabbed my father by the arm, then click, front page of the Danish daily. uMy father’s memories sharpen at this point in the story, he talks about it like some elaborate nuisance he just can’t forget: And they sent me off to one of those little single-cell jails where they lock up the alcoholics for the night…All the others got to go back, and I spent one more day, still no sleep or food. The guard brought me out the next day, and left me out in the snow saying you can go this way or that way or that, he points forward and to his sides, laughing at the punch line of his embassy-occupation story.

But my laughter veils a nervousness: we all want to emulate our fathers, uis this an example to follow? Revolutionary fervor has long since given in, but the glaring inequalities continue to exist, and I feel particularly aware of them.

Even my mother, relatively speaking a prude, devoted to religion and the traditions of her country, that isolated, exotic place in which every street, hospital and building is named Haile-Selassie, could not help but turn her back on it all once abroad. The first few years in Aix-en-Provence were difficult. uShe was alone most of the time, and hitchhiked to her sister’s place in Montpellier over the weekends. She had not experienced May ‘68, hadn’t been one of the thousands of naked youngsters who had gone out onto the streets and, by the sheer force of disobedience, ended up bringing down their Great Leader, who like Haile-Selassie uhad cemented his power during the War. She could not have imagined she’d do the same one day.

Perhaps it was to overcome her loneliness. Perhaps she missed her country and wanted to help however she could. Perhaps it was, as she says, that she was outraged at the way in which the famine had been covered up. But in 1973, my mother began attending a study group with a few Ethiopian students who would eventually become a branch of the Ethiopian student movement.

My parents met in Berlin later that year. She worked on women’s issues and recorded minutes at the annual gathering of Ethiopian student activists in Europe which was held in a hall within Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. Once their eyes met, they ignored what was being said about the evils of feudalism and the example of China. For a while they only met once a year in Berlin for the annual conference. uThey would leave the halls and go off by themselves, get lost in a city neither of them knew.

I have been to Berlin since, alone. It is no longer the same city, the wall is down, the architecture all new, the stadium remade. My understanding is they mostly stayed in the Eastern part of the City, while I wander aimlessly back and forth looking for old lines of demarcation and traces of the past.

My father admits, today, perhaps out of bitterness for the way things turned out, that he wanted to marry a woman dedicated to the cause he would die for. And so I can say I came to be through the revolution, but my parents clearly had no plans to found a family in these circumstances, so I also almost came not to be. uThe little gap between, the incidental happening just short of not-happening, the billion prerequisites of which each of us are a product, opened just wide enough for me.

In 1974 the lid blew off. The nation’s three thousand years of monarchical history were suddenly over. uThe vacuum left by the most profound social revolution in the history of the developing world put an end to century-old feudal relations, a state that hosted (and still hosts) the gathering of African nations, and a leader-symbol known as Ras Tafari, then Haile-Selassie, who had spent sixty years in an exalted position from which he sipped tea with giants the likes of JFK and Churchill. For him, both of my grandfathers and three of their parents had successfully resisted the Italian occupation of the late 30s. For him, the starving masses that he routinely ignored would do anything. They would comb neatly the little hair left on their children’s malnourished heads and sweep the dust-covered fields in front of their homes where he’d pass by in a motorcade. And then there were those two pictures side by side on pamphlets and placards, one uof the little child with a protruding rib cage and huge sorrowful eyes, the other of him and his clique feasting and feeding their dogs choice cuts of meat. At the time, he seemed a godly figure—the Rastafarian religion committed itself to that impression. That usobering, straight-sitting, light-skinned, roman-nosed patriarch, dressed in elaborate military garments bearing all kinds of flags and medallions, seemed an embodiment of the dignity, morality and resiliency of his people. Only he was so senile by the time of his eightieth birthday that his inner circle reportedly succeeded in keeping news uof the famine from him, for fear of ruining his mood.

No one was particularly angry with him; the enemy was feudalism. But the shock of shedding a burden that had been worshipped as a savior, of him being escorted away by the military, suffocated and buried under a toilet for blasphemy’s sake, was never truly absorbed for lack of time. Soon thereafter, the killing began.

The students still in Ethiopia experienced a year of great hope and accomplishment in 1975. The Zemecha mandatory volunteer program mobilized thousands of young people who went out to the country to learn from peasants, while setting up literacy programs, opening clinics, and distributing grain. Eventually, however, cultural differences emerged, and the elite, urban, educated classes continued to find it difficult to relate to the masses, while simultaneously trying to solve their problems.

The gap persists. I live in a different land, speak a different language, and yet call myself their countryman, in some cases their kin. I ended up being from the poorest and wealthiest nations on Earth, the meekest and the strongest. This must have been what it felt like to live on my grandfather’s compound in the 1950s, the disconnectedness of never having been to a normal person’s house, never knowing what they eat or how they scrape by for a living. Yet I, like my parents, have always leaned as far left as I can, have always decried the idleness of the non-productive classes. uHow does one lead, represent and sacrifice ufor people he does not know and she can never understand? But they tried. My father gave up his right to scores of hectares of land—willingly gave it, stole it in effect from his father—by signing onto a revolution that he would have given his life for, along with his wealth. In March of 1975, a few months before my parents’ return, the most successful land reform in recent memory was carried out in Ethiopia, granting all land to “the collective Ethiopian people.” uThis remains the principal, if not the only gain from the revolution. The vacant, steep terrain now belongs to every one and no one, the “collective Ethiopian people” are fleeing it. Those in the rural areas converge on the capital, those who used to live in the city have spread to the corners of the Earth.

The people controlling power behind the scenes were a shadowy bunch, a provisional military government, who declared themselves nationalists and slowly took on a more Marxist tone, as a leader uemerged in the form of a short, fiery Colonel from the South whose humble beginnings inspired romantic hopes and whose hysterical speeches captivated audiences. The Colonel’s picture began to appear regularly in government press by late 1975. At first he and his cohorts had the official head-of-state, a General and member of the new ruling military committee, ukilled by driving a tank into his compound and opening fire on his bedroom. That same night they shot sixty dignitaries, the closest people to the Emperor, threw them into a ditch and covered their bodies with lime. My mother’s father had escaped this fate by declining a promotion to General a few years before.

As the old imperial structure fell, and the atmosphere in the city ugrew more leftist, the American government closed down any relationship with its former favorite “regional partner.” Almost immediately the Cubans, the Soviets and the Chinese began congratulating the new head of state, the young southern Colonel, who would continue to purge the ruling committee of potential rivals. Meanwhile, my parents had decided to come back.

Late one evening in 1975, my mother and father are arguing over the phone. They are back in Addis Ababa, she works for the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, he at the Yekatit 66 political school. She is asking that he come stay at her mother’s place, which makes him uncomfortable. The revolution is already changing familial conventions, but there is still no way of explaining the concept of a boyfriend to a woman like her mother, uwho’d been married off at sixteen. She does not want him to stay over at the school’s dormitory, she says, ”and you know why…u”

By now the young couple and their friends are active in the smaller of two splinter parties emerging from the student movement in Europe. The larger party, the EPRP, uwas uvastly more popular, while theirs, the AESM, uwas already being accused of being a kind of elitist clique, whose members worked for ministries and political schools under the military regime. The AESM was ualso accused of opportunism due to their strategic support for the military junta, who had yet to begin the campaign now known as the Red Terror. But the larger splinter party, which insisted on the immediate creation of a “people’s government” had begun recruiting people to target umembers of my father’s party, of which he was a central member. This was the reason for my mother’s fear.

He hangs up and turns his attention to his work. He is sitting in the campus library, preparing his materials for the next day. Eventually, unable to concentrate, uhe goes back to his dorm room to find his roommate sprawled out on his bed. Already furious from fighting over the phone, he climbs the bunk and gets under the sheets of the only empty bed left in the room, the upper bunk belonging to the slumbering roommate. uSeveral hours later, he is awoken by an explosion.

They tell umy mother the next day that he is dead. The charred body they’d found was lying where he should have been. He would spend the next five months in a hospital bed. But pain and relief are not a part of the story as he tells it, nor is the feeling, for the first time in a long series extending over the next three years, of a brush with death and the unmistakable presence of divine intervention. After all, he was a Marxist. But many years later, in prison, when the executioner died the day after my father dreamt of taking the Eucharist—and as I began to sip from the cup a block of ice came and stuffed my mouth and the wine spilled to the sides—he awoke and announced to his fellow inmates that he would not be executed in three days as was planned. When the executioner’s death led to an indefinite hold on executions within their army-barrack-turned-prison-block, he must have begun thinking things over. Today, when I find him in his room kneeling, hands outstretched, a serene smile on his face, I understand that the humor in his anecdotal history is an expression of gratitude for life itself.u

Once he was fully rehabilitated, they decided to get married. Few friends attended their wedding, now that members of both parties uwere being gunned down in the streets in broad daylight.

As members of my father’s party began to be exterminated by fellow leftists, the tragic and self-consuming nature of the Revolution emerged as the main talking point in socialist magazines through 1975. In response, the smaller party would point out members of their rival faction to be killed by their allies, the military government. Depending on the day, it is difficult for my father to admit that they were wrong in allying themselves with the old officers who now stand trial, paraded in front of government-owned television. But everyone shares some responsibility, as well as sympathy for the seventy year olds stripped of their uniforms, their faces marked with unmistakable regret and self-loathing, on trial for murders they committed while in power thirty years ago. Is there any just way of dealing with the past?

Through it all, he refused to officially recruit my mother as a member of the partyu, out of his desire to protect her. At this point, the conflicts in their relationship all had to do with the fear of losing the other, similar to so many couples they had befriended. With no revolution to fight, no one to fear, it is perhaps unsurprising that after everything they had been through and seen since returning, uthings between them were doomed to fail.

By August of 1977 the relationship between their party and the government uhas finally become strained. The young ex-patriots uhad rushed to grab power when it fell as if from the sky like the last rains of August, signaling the promise of New Year. Now the generation sent abroad to be the country’s future is assuming that role, while dethroning and embarrassing their parents. uThey have to wonder if their altruistic urge is weaker than they believe, whether they are truly willing to die, now that the deluge of summer monsoons continues on well into the harvest.

My father goes to visit his father, in the old compound on the Eastern side of the city. The grounds seem undisturbed, Eucalyptus lines the stone walkway leading up to the old colonial-style house of colorless brick and uwooden floors. He finds his father waiting for him by the gate—had he heard the car approaching? Now in his seventies, usually sitting immobile and fixed in the living room, his demeanor is slightly frantic. They have hardly seen each other since his return. After six years in Europe and three in the revolution the passing years have replaced distant lands in keeping father and son apart.

I know why you’ve come. The patriarch hugs and kisses his son for the first time since the airport and the joke about metal boxers that he hadn’t understood.

What is the matter, father? Mine udrops the theatrical affectation of the guerilla and tries, awkwardly, to kneel before his.

I know why you came, you have to leave town.

What do you mean?
Though the order could be imminent, so far the party has decided to stay put in Addis and face the heat from both directions.

I had a dream that you were leaving and you came to say goodbye. You could have just called, I don’t want you driving around, not now—

Later that night, while chain-smoking by his apartment window, my father gets a call from a muffled voice speaking in encoded language. He meets the rendez-vous person in a back alley late at night, jumps into the passenger’s seat, and hears the man refer to him by his nom de guerre.

Well, Teodros, the man in the driver’s seat says, the time has come for us to leave.u Teodros does not have the time to wonder how is father knew.

The flight from Addis on the following day—a day of festivity known as Bou-hay, in which families gather around bonfires singing songs, lighting embers, and making wishes—is perhaps the only successful thing their party accomplished during the revolution. After all the meetings and policy seminars, no true ideological position papers exist. They had been willing to die, and now, it seemed that’s what they would do. There was no longer any time to think of why, they were revolutionaries now, no longer intellectuals.

My father and nine other men left the city through the Northeastern gate and ended up stranded in the countryside surrounding Addis Ababa with the goal of mobilizing the peasants and eventually liberating areas from the junta. They scouted the terrain and sought refuge from locals. How they split up determined their fate. My father’s life was twice saved inadvertently by a friend of his from the movement in Europe. First one of their leaders entered a hideout, soaked from the rain. uThe friend from Europe suggested my father replace him for the next scouting mission. Later, when tensions developed between my father and one of the ten, who had managed to scare the peasants into informing the authorities of their presence, he suggested a switch that would allow the two friends to continue on, while the man with whom he was angry went in a different direction. The undercurrent of class tension reappears here, of all places, as my father felt an antipathy towards the man who happened to be the child of peasants, a native of the area they now roamed, and preferred to roam and hide and perhaps even be killed with his old acquaintance,
with whom he could talk because they had so much in common.
Both of the men my father replaced—the party leader who entered the hideout soaked from rain and the unfortunate peasant with whom he quarreled—ended up dead two weeks later when the army surrounded them in a granary where they had stored their arms. Two of them had shot themselves rather than senselessly kill any average soldiers coming to get them, while the other three met their end in the form of bullets sprayed from the outside, crashing through windows. The remaining five had split apart a few days earlier. They hid in a ravine when they heard the soldiers coming. The next morning they climbed out and faced the harsh wilderness, feeling for the first time the real desperation of their situation.

The mission was over, the movement crushed, and the return was a hellish, three-day event in which they neither slept nor ate, and the anecdotes my father tells me uare those of peasants who felt sorry for them—as if they had finally managed to become not just the peasants’ brethren, but beggars at their doors—and would open up and let them have a handful of cooked barley, just enough to keep them moving. Aside from that, he conveys disappointment at being told there was an organization prepared to help them once they reached the region the party had chosen as destination for the flight, uand at the poor athletic shape of some of his comrades. The whole thing reeked of pretension and neglect that had already cost lives.

After hitching a ride from a covered van, they were captured at the edge of the city, the last true obstacle to freedom, and handed over to army forces that had been ordered to shoot them on the spot. The order was ignored, however, when the soldiers took notice of the sheer number of witnesses watching the commotion from a bus at the checkpoint, including one famous journalist whose political reportage was widely read abroad.

Instead, they were led back to a military hall, where they were humiliated, dragged about in chains in front of a cheering crowd of men in uniform. Meanwhile, my mother had been arrested, detained, and tortured, all so she could tell them where the ten central committee members were. Not being a member herself, she could not respond and had to accept the pain helplessly. By not letting her in despite her intentions and qualifications, he had meant to spare her, and had wound up eliminating any chance she had of being spared. He has no anecdotes for this story, and I wonder if he has ever forgiven himself.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that their marriage did not survive the end of the revolution. They were released after spending four years in prison, during which time they wrote each other letters everyday. He learned and mastered chess, taught himself three languages, headed the sanitation committee, directed and wrote for a secret improvisational theatre, and chaired an even more secret study group. She had survived well, but struggled with not knowing when or if she would ever be released. She was jealous of all those who had been sentenced unlike political prisoners who were simply taken away in the night, never told why or for how long. The others at least could prepare and plan and see a light at the end of the tunnel. She worried that she may never have that opportunity. When released four years later, the warden asked her why she’d been imprisoned, and insisted they had made a mistake. She had difficulty accepting that she had lost all those years because of their mistake—if not her own. After their release, they could hardly speak to each other for the next several yearsu.

As for my father, whose oldest brother had died while he was in prison and whose other brother had stayed in Sweden. His father had remarried to a resentful woman, whose many peasant relatives now occupied the compound instead of his own family. He began to feel like a stranger in his own home. uBroke and friendless, it took years for him to find his way. One night, she left for America, where I would be born some time later, the result of an attempt at reconciliation.

It is the summer of 2007, and I am working at the Ethiopian News Agency while visiting my father, now a professor at the University of Addis Ababa. It strikes me as ironic that I ended up, like them, coming from abroad and working for human-rights violating government, despite, I assure you, the best intentions. Still I somewhat enjoy telling people, with varying degrees of self-irony, that I fine-tune propaganda for a government they hate.

My job actually consists of writing and editing articles on the coming Ethiopian “millennium,” the celebration of the year 2000, by our still delayed calendar, and other such meaningless hype. Everyday we print articles announcing how tens of thousands of “Ethiopians in the diaspora,” which I recently learned includes me, were coming back and investing in the city and Ethiopia was on its way to being a “middle income nation within the next ten years.” Or else I work on articles on reconciliation between the government and opposition leaders uwho had just announced that they took full responsibility for organizing crowds of young protesters who were brutally beaten, some killed, during the protests. Some think it is justifiable, even honorable, to have admitted wrong. My father insists this is a shameful act. As we drive through the city, he talks about how the revolution was now thirty years ago. Those who are fifty, were twenty then, those who are forty, ten, and so on and now his voice melts into mine, his frustration becomes mine, because I too see that no one remembers or even cares. “Those were communists back then,” they say, believing that a change of ideology towards pro-American democracy changes the nature of cowardice. uThose so-called leaders of the opposition, self-proclaimed democrats and freedom fighters, in signing an admission of guilt, proved that they were out to save themselves. After serving a couple of years in prison, they had begged for mercy and were to be released. uBetween pointless articles, I use my government-issued computer to search for other instances in history where a revolutionary force commits itself to forcefully overthrowing a government, leads others to their deaths, only for its leaders to recant for personal freedom. uI still can’t find one.

We are driving through mercato, a bustling open-air market, the largest in Africa. On the way to my office, we pass the statue of Abuna Petros, patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the 1930s who was shot in front of that building over thereu, after ordering that all who collaborated with the Italians were to be excommunicated. Around him and his outspread saintly arms, young gangs and drug fiends lean against pillars along the side of the street where tens of thousands of small boutiques built of corrugated iron pack in together. My father points him out to me, reminds me who he was and what he did.

After a pause, he mentions the ufive comrades killed in the flight of August ‘77.

“It will be thirty years soonu,” he pauses, “we will light a candle for them.” He curses the men he recently supported, the new opposition, many of them friends and colleagues at the university. He had allowed himself, like the entire city, to believe in the possibility of bringing down an unjust state without creating something worse. Instead, the latest burgeoning movement collapsed of its own volition. With no ends or brighter future insight, all political engagement appears to be about means—about being willing to kill and being willing to die. The youth continue to look for opportunities to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs, but the belief is lost on me. I only know of anecdotes and miracles that infringe on the Big Story, on the headlines I churn out for this paper full of transparent lies. When laughter surrenders its sense of gratitude, it often seeks the opposite, signs of decay in its surroundings to satirize and disparage. But unlike most of my countrymen and kin, I can afford to laugh because I can always leave. Who will sacrifice for them?

Download “August Rain and the New Year” as a PDF.

There is a tiny, wrinkly person without eyebrows sleeping in my bedroom. I am three years old and hiding under the crib. It is dark and smells like new carpet. My back hurts because I have been curled in the same position for so long, and since no one knows where I am I may have to stay here forever.
My brother begins to cry; soon I hear my mother’s footsteps in the hallway.
“Paul Boy,” she sings, “Paaaaul Boy…” Her pale feet appear in front of the crib, glowing against the deep blue of the carpet.
“Mommy?” I say. “I’m stuck.”
“Where are you, honey?” She sounds startled.
“Here,” I say.
I see her face peering at me through the shadows. “What are you doing down there, sweetie? Do you want me to help you get out?”
“No,” I say, and shrink into the wall. “I don’t want to come out.”
“Well, you come out when you’re ready,” she says, and disappears from sight. “I’ll be waiting right over here.”
My brother grows quiet, and the sound of my grandmother’s old rocking chair fills the room, a rhythmic crick-crick, crick-crick.

Before my brother was born, I told my parents it would be a good idea to name him Johnny, after Johnny Appleseed. I’m not sure they much cared for my opinion; in the end, my vote was cast aside and he entered the world as Paul. Paul like ball. Like bathroom stall. Like crawl and wall, and please don’t fall. I was disappointed, but since my parents were considering becoming overseas missionaries it made sense that they wanted to name him after the man who spearheaded the first century Christian movement. I should have seen it coming, especially since part of the reason I had been named Mia was because it translated so easily into other languages. Never mind that ‘mia’ means mine in Spanish and Italian, wife in Thai and Lao.
My mother admits that there was a time when she toyed with the idea of naming my brother Grey, a name I think would have suited him well. He is prone to bouts of creative angst, artistic genius, and mild depression, and as he matures into young adulthood, there are many times where he seems more like a Grey than a Paul. Moody, particular, wildly talented; when he started college he moved up north on a music scholarship, to the birthplace of grunge, Jimi Hendrix, and the Seattle jazz scene.
I’m glad I left the Bay Area, he tells me. I like it better here.
But are you ever coming back? I want to ask. Are you staying in Washington forever?

By the time my parents were ready to move to Laos, I had lived in four different places. Since I was too little to remember any of those moves, however, I was taken by surprise when my mother began going through my drawers and packing lesser-used items into boxes labeled MIA CLOTHING. She found all kinds of things in the back of the closet: broken toys, stuffed animals, a pair of purple tights with holes in the heels that no longer fit me. I learned that along with getting rid of old belongings and putting boxes in storage, unearthing old memories was all a part of the process.

Things we have forgotten: The precise location of the garden gnome that disappeared from our backyard while we were away. Exactly how long we lived in Southeast Asia. When we left America. The number of feet in a mile. Old phone numbers. Why we used to fly United. How many times we have flown across the Pacific, breathing dry, recycled air and counting the hours until arrival.

* * *

When we first arrived in Laos, Paul was a baldheaded little boy with a high-pitched, toothless giggle, and I was a stringy-haired four-year-old who put him in a headlock every time we posed for a picture. I felt it was my duty as an older sister to make sure he was behaving properly in front of the camera. Look at the camera, Paulie.
Our parents were young, naïve, and painfully out of place among the thatched roofs and dirt roads of Sapangmoh Village, but they thrust themselves valiantly into the foreignness of Lao village life. Our mother got lost whenever she tried to drive home and my father asked for diarrhea one time at a restaurant, but they couldn’t be blamed for either of those things. In my father’s defense: though Lao is grammatically uncomplicated, it has five different tones which are easily confused and represent a wide array of meanings. In my mother’s defense: there were no paved roads, traffic lights, or street signs in the early days.
Our primary caregiver during those first few years was a young woman named Anita. My father’s boss had hired her to take care of our household because having a maid, we learned, was simply a fact of life in former French Indochina. Anita was a nervous, frail little thing when we first met her, and she burst into tears when my mother asked what her name was. I don’t know how we communicated because I spoke no Lao, she spoke no English, and Paul couldn’t talk, but somehow we got along.
As I remember it, my brother and I had a wonderful first year in Laos. We thought it was all a part of some fantastic jungle adventure dreamed up by our parents. If I dig deep enough, however, there are other memories: Paul running through the backyard with heat rash and dirty diapers, screaming in terror at the termite mounds, five-inch wolf spiders, and bright red centipedes bristling with tiny legs. His monsters didn’t hide under the bed. They lurked in the backyard.

It is early January and we are halfway through our first year in Laos. At the dinner table, my mother picks up a slice of lumpy carrot-covered dough and lifts it slowly to her mouth. Anita has been in the kitchen all afternoon and emerged with something halfway between a pizza and a Lao papaya salad: a birthday surprise for Madame. My mother takes a bite and starts bawling, elbows planted on the table, head in her hands, hair stringy and matted from the humidity. She is thirty-four today, and the strangeness of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic is too much to bear. Anita rushes into the dining room, terrified she hasn’t cooked Madame’s falang dinner correctly, and my father looks around the room helplessly.
“Go get your mom a tissue,” he says, as my brother opens his mouth and starts wailing from his highchair.
I freeze. “A tissue?” I say, barely able to hear myself over the confusion. “From the bathroom?”
“Yes, from the bathroom. And Paul, please. Do you want me to send you to the corner?”
I swallow and force myself out my chair. Standing in front of the bathroom door, I shut my eyes, rush in, and grab blindly for the toilet paper on the edge of the bathtub. I am trying hard not to think about the cockroaches behind the toilet, even though they aren’t the only things in the bathroom that scare me. The sink came crashing down one time while my father was brushing his teeth, and I heard the porcelain shatter from the other end of the house.
I run back to the dining room trailing a toilet paper tail behind me.
“Mommy,” I cry. “Mommy, tissue!”
For a moment I hardly recognize her. Her face is twisted into an ugly expression I have never seen before, and she reaches out and pulls the toilet paper from my hand. Crumples it into a loose wad of rough gray fiber.
“This is not tissue,” she hisses, as Paul, barely two years old, sobs quietly in the corner. “This isn’t even toilet paper.”

Though I wish I could conjure up a sugary sweet childhood for my little brother, he didn’t get the picket fences and mother-daughter play dates I did, and I would be lying if I told him otherwise. Our parents were unable to lavish the same amount of love and affection on him as they had on me when I was a toddler. He grew up under such troubled family circumstances: abrupt international dislocation, parents struggling with cultural alienation, a mother shell-shocked by the horrors of third world poverty.
It’s not fair, I imagine him saying shrilly, you always get the good stuff.
I’m sorry, Paul, I want to say. I don’t think there’s anything I can do.

When we moved back to the United States, Paul began roaming the red and white-checkered hallways of his new school with a grim mug on his face, beanie pulled low on his forehead. High school sucks, he’d tell me over the phone in the gravelly voice he’d developed since moving to the East Bay. It sucks. I hate everyone. When things got particularly bad I would curl up in bed, phone pressed close against my sweaty ear, and clutch the bedcovers around my neck. I no longer remember the details, just the feeling of his words breaking against my eardrums and washing my face in clear tears that taste of salt and loneliness.

Things that never should have happened: International displacement. Hepatitis B. Paul dashing down the fourth floor hallway of Bumrungrad Hospital, IV stretched taut from his thin wrist, the metal stand rattling after him. Waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of my father barking GET OUT at the thief crawling into the window of my parents’ bedroom. Losing a string of best friends in quick rapid-fire succession.

* * *

Paul and I are older now, and more capable of holding conversations about our shared childhood in Laos, though he usually describes it as either a blank spot in his mind or a series of memories that are too painful to revisit. Every now and then, however, he lets something slip about Scotty’s mysterious disappearance, or Hamish’s shooter jets, or Blane’s American Embassy parents. I am flooded by bittersweet emotion when this happens—sobered by the gravity of his stories, grateful he has managed to hold onto something of our history. I have discovered that his natural tendency is to press blindly toward the future, whereas I cling fiercely to relics of the past. My need to recollect fragments of family history is an unrelenting obsession. My brother’s desire to remember is a faint shadow that disappears without a trace whenever a new dawn arrives.
Sometimes I wonder if we are simply operating out of a need to distinguish ourselves from each other. Is that why I don’t listen to jazz, play video games, or drive my parents’ car when I’m home? Is it because my brother does all those things? Is it because he does them well? Is it because we are jealously vying for a competitive edge that if one of us excels at something, the other refuses to show the slightest interest in it? I hate reading. Well, I hate listening to music. I hate lifting weights. Well, I hate swimming. Are we trying to maintain equilibrium in the constantly shifting dynamics of our family? Or are we simply different?
A jazz studies and percussion major, my brother deals exclusively in sound and rhythm. An English major, I spend my days crafting prose and mining the encoded meanings of words. Driven by manic overachievement, I injured my hands in college from overuse. Too many papers, too many grant proposals, too many art projects, and now, three years of carpal tunnel syndrome. So far he has spent most of his undergrad career listening to indie music and telling friends to just chill over coffee. I can’t sleep in a room if the furniture isn’t arranged in a way that feels just right. He lives in a state of constantly evolving chaos. I don’t know how we came to embody these oppositions, but it’s almost as if someone whipped out a pen before we were fully formed and decreed that if I was ever thesis, he would be antithesis.
When we were little kids in Laos, our mother used to throw us in the shower together to save time and water, hosing us down in one giant spray. My brother was always the one who squealed for hot water, I was the one who demanded cold. Later, when we were old enough to tend to our own hygiene, he became the King of Dirty and I, the Queen of Clean. It wasn’t until high school that I began wearing the same jeans multiple times a week and taking showers every other night rather than every day. That was around the time Paul began exfoliating his face and obsessively needing things like mouthwash, special skin toner, and pimple removal gel.

Things we have lost: Nerf gun darts, trapped on our grandmother’s roof. Chess pieces. Picture books from our childhood, donated to the library because we didn’t have enough boxes. Photo albums, eaten by Lao termites. Baseballs. Noon and Bubba, our two dogs. Micro Machines. Best friends like Scotty and Hamish. Grandpa Roy.

* * *

My extended family got together recently to pay our respects to the dead. Visiting cemeteries is something my brother and I never did as children because we never had any relatives buried in the same hemisphere. We grew up believing that the only certainty lay in uncertainty and that people didn’t die, they just moved away. We always approached people and places with the guardedness of the knowledge that this too shall pass. In our case, the end we feared was not death, but the end of a parent’s two-year term overseas.
Since relocating back to the United States, however, we have come to learn about things like roots and stability. With the exception of my college-bound cousins, none of our extended family members have moved in the past decade. Perhaps even the past two decades. While our life has been typified by constant change, all our relatives have known are quiet lives of dogged permanence. In recent years I have slowly become absorbed into the patterns of their life. I go to church two blocks away from the elementary school my grandfather attended in the early 1900s. I celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, and oshogatsu, Japanese New Year, with complicated networks of extended family members. I accompany my grandparents to the cemetery every six months to leave flowers at our ancestors’ headstones.

The wind from the San Francisco Bay is rolling in quickly and my grandmother is having trouble making it up the hill to Grandpa Roy’s gravesite. “Don’t forget the deer spray,” she shrills from behind her walker. The wind picks her voice up, scatters it like white ash, bears faint traces of it up to the summit. “The deer will eat those roses right up if you don’t spray them good.”
My grandmother feels strongly about many things, and deer spray is one of them. Because our family comes from three generations of Japanese American rose-growers, flowers are seen as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Quit dawdling. Get those roses in boxes and ship them out. Hustle hustle, hurry up now. Those roses are your college education. I follow her up the hill to my grandfather’s grave, pulling my windbreaker close against my body and pressing into the wind. My grandmother’s walker jerks across the patchy grass in starts and stops, a slow, painful journey that takes several minutes to complete.
“Do you have the deer spray?” she asks, after catching her breath.
“Oh no,” my Auntie Marge says, turning to her sister. “I think we forgot the deer spray.”
“Oh, Marge,” Eiko says, pulling a few strands of hair from her mouth. “How could you?”
“Wait here,” Auntie Marge says, and presses her armful of chrysanthemums and lilies into my icy hands. I watch her run down the hill to check her car. Her husband follows quickly behind her.
“Don’t forget the deer spray!” my grandmother calls after her.
Auntie Eiko reassures her that Marge will find the deer spray. We gather around the graves of our grandfather, great-uncle and aunt, stripping long-stemmed flowers of excess leaves and snapping the bottoms off. I stand to the side and thread ferns through my fingers, just for the thrill of it.
“How’s Paul, by the way?” my aunt asks, picking the wilted petals off a peach colored rose.
“Paul?” I say. I twirl the feathery tip of the fern against my palm. I spoke with him on the phone two days ago. He was sick with a low-grade fever and had been tossing and turning on the eighth storey of his giant concrete dorm for a week.
“Paul’s fine,” my mother says. “He’s doing great. He loves Seattle. He misses everyone, though. He wishes he could be here.”
“Is he coming back for Spring Break?” my aunt asks.
“No.”
“No?”
“But I’m going up there to visit him for my break,” I say, just as my other aunt returns, deer repellent in hand. I’m trying to keep this family together for as long as possible, I add silently. We’ve gone through too much to pull apart across the miles.
“Got it, got it, got it!” Auntie Marge says breathlessly.
“Okay good,” my grandma says, from behind Grandpa’s cemetery plot. “Spray it good and hard. And don’t get it in our faces.”

Things we miss: Each other. Everyone living under the same roof. Driving around town on Daddy’s motorcycle, the two of us sandwiched between our parents on the slippery vinyl seat. Family trips to the zoo. Feeding tiny clusters of banana to the elephants. Sticky rice, eaten at breakfast with peanut butter and jam. The thrill of landing in San Francisco after twenty hours of flying. Disappeared friends.

Later that afternoon, our relatives gather around a table at our favorite Italian restaurant. My artist uncle, the retired high school teacher, asks me if I still miss Laos.
“It was almost home for you, wasn’t it?”
I swallow the mussel I had been chewing the past few minutes, grimacing a little at the dirty dishwater taste it leaves in my mouth.
“It was home; back then, at least. I’ve started feeling so at home in the States, though. I just get used to places quickly, I guess.”
“I just remember this one time when you guys were back for the summer, I heard your little brother say he wanted to go home and I thought wow, he still remembers that house on—on—”
“Pomona Avenue.”
“Yeah, that house on Pomona Avenue. The one with the shutters. He was just a little guy when you guys lived there.”
“He wasn’t even two.”
“And then I realized,” my uncle feigns a look of amazement, “I realized he meant he wanted to go to Laos. And I thought, now isn’t that something.”
I shrug and stab at my linguine.
“Isn’t that something? He was talking about Laos, and I thought he meant the house on Pomona. I thought that was really something. Seemed like he didn’t think America was home.”
“That’s about right,” I say. America never was home; not for Paul, not for me, not for my parents either, after fifteen years of living overseas. I turn to the vegan cousin sitting on my right. Too much talk about my family’s fractured history makes me uncomfortable.
“What did you look like when you were born?” I ask. My eldest cousin has just had her first child, and our grandfather’s memorial luncheon has been dominated by conversations about colicky babies and breast pumps.
“Well,” she said, “my mom said I was stringy. Long and stringy, with a big head.”
“At least you weren’t red and wrinkly,” I chuckle, thinking of all the times in Laos I scoured the molding pages of our old family photo albums for a sense of home. “That’s how Paul came out. We were looking at his baby pictures last summer, and I told him he looked like he’d been beamed down from outer space.”
My cousin laughs and forks a naked leaf of lettuce into her mouth.

When Paul left for college, I didn’t expect to feel sad, mostly because my family is so well versed in the art of leave-taking. Leaving is normal. Leaving home is something we have practiced over and over with dogged persistence. Leaving extended family is another; we have had a lifetime of practice. Over the years we have become so good at saying goodbye that it has become mere formality. We experience the faint clench of fingers around our heart as a vague unnamed emotion; little more than a twinge. It does not register as sadness, merely a sign that there is something new ahead.
Bidding farewell to Paul, however, was an iron fist that curled around the heart and refused to let go for days. We were not used to that feeling. During the long drive from Seattle to San Francisco, my mother cried in the front seat. My father drove in stony silence. I sprawled out in the backseat and stared out the window; as we made our way through the city and crossed the Bay Bridge I counted the taut iron cables that held the bridge suspended in open air, wondering when the goodbyes were going to end.

Things we wonder: Is this worth saving? Do you think we’ll need that? Where did this old thing come from? Who forgot to label this box? How long until we move again? Why are we doing this again? Are we ever coming back?

* * *

When Paul came home last year, our parents decided it was a good time to move. They had been planning to move back to the Pomona House for several months, but the tenants had taken longer to pack than expected and my mother wanted to repaint the walls before settling in.
A few days before Paul flew back to Seattle, the four of us filed into the house with mops and brooms. We immediately set to work cleaning up after the last tenants, a mysterious biracial couple that dropped the rent off on our doorstep without knocking, and then disappeared without a trace. The only things they left behind were a cracked ceramic vase, a mug with the handle broken off, and three mysterious rolls of Chinese brush paintings hidden on top of the china cabinet.

“Give me a hand in here,” my dad calls from the master bedroom, his voice muffled by the noise of the vacuum cleaner.
My mother leaves us in the living room and disappears into the bedroom. We hear her voice echoing down the hallway, “Are we keeping this dingy blue carpet?”
“Hey, give me a piggy back ride,” I say, reaching for Paul’s shoulders. “Come on, genius. It’ll be fun.”
“Fun for you, maybe. Do you know how much you weigh?”
“Shut up, genius.” I swat at his face and launch myself onto his back as he staggers around the room, crashing into walls and bookshelves.
“Yeehaw. Hold on tight, little sister!”
My laughter fills the house as we careen around the room. Paul pauses for a moment to catch his breath and we hear our father moving into the hallway with the vacuum cleaner, sucking up dust and leaving swaths of naked floor in his wake.
“The vacuum is coming, the vacuum is coming,” I shriek, and Paul takes off at full speed, jostling me roughly. “Stop—running—so—fast!” I gasp through desperate peals of laughter. “I’m going—to—fall!”
He starts turning tight circles in the center of the room, spinning faster and faster until my legs are splayed out like propellers and the world becomes a blur.
“Paul!” I scream, and suddenly, without warning, he stops.

Later, we gather in the empty living room and survey the bare shelves, the swept floor, the single lamp standing in the corner. The lines of the house are clean and spare, and we stand measuring the dimensions of our home, lost in silent worlds of private thought. Much has happened since we last lived here. In my mind I test the weight of this home, the first house we lived in as a whole family, against the memory of all the others that followed.
Our parents move toward the door and step outside. Paul follows soon after, mop and broom in hand. I am the last to leave, and as I turn to take a final look at the dark interior of the house, my father says behind me, “We have a lot of work to do here.”
I turn around with the words, “How long do you think—” on my lips, but the breath is caught in my throat before I can finish. I fall silent at the sight of my family standing luminous against the purple sky. Their faces are open, waiting.

Things we have saved: Ba Ba, Paul’s once colorful baby blanket that is now mostly gray flannel. The Chronicles of Narnia. Monopoly. The fear of moving. The uniforms we wore in middle school. My sixth grade teacher’s address. Photos from our parents’ wedding. Belief in God. The house on Pomona Avenue. Memories of us running barefoot through the dusty streets of Sapangmoh Village, dodging stray dogs and marveling at the strangeness of it all.

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