My grandfather poses on the front steps of – I assume – their first little house in Alameda, California, bags of groceries cradled in his arm. Not quite thirty years later, he would die three months before I was born. Sometimes I fancy that, in utero, I actually felt their grief: a vast, blanketing silence of everything they would hide from me: not telling me about my cousins or the aunt I never knew existed until her eldest child, a girl, came looking for our grandmother and found us. They would not tell me the accusation my aunt was raped by her her first husband-uncle, later to become architect of the university of California. Then the second marriage and six half-siblings, again hidden from me, growing up in Boss Tweed’s insane asylum outside New York City. Name of Blythewood, the same that Bill W wrote about. The inspiration for Now, Voyager. Bette Davis would become my aunt. Our family is still alcoholic. I wonder if my grampa, twice an unwitting father-in-law, had carried coffee in one of those bags, the brown paper sacks where I daydream a hundred years later, or perhaps he brought home my daddy’s favorite – mine, too, now – nutty grind peanut butter. I point to a bunch of celery, perfect for dredging the last bits from the bottom of the jar, poking its stalking head from his coat pocket – no room, I guess, in a brown bag. But that is not all. No, my dear grampa Morris, emigrant from Ontario, your face looks out at me from one and another photograph: the young sailor who got tatooed in Shanghai where he bought the ring I lost ninety years later; the (usually) sober traveling business man who demonstrated and then sold medical equipment – artificial plastic feet, hands, and their grinding machines; a shot of our old joker sticking his head under a boulder in Yosemite; or the jaunty tam’o shanter ensconced in an open-top coupe they used to drive around the west. There he is, reincarnated on digital screen or paper print-out. Yes, Grandma’s handsome boy growing older through several decades of photographic footprints. Yet, after all that, it is this one image, caught on the front steps, which captures me the most. Bringing in the bacon. Honey, I’m home.
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