Not a Shore Thing

by Lisa Romeo

        I have been to the Jersey Shore about 25 times, and since I am 53 years old, was born in New Jersey, and have lived here for all but five years, that's not a lot.

        I'm not, strictly speaking, a shore girl.   

        So why, on October 29, 2012, when coastal New Jersey buckled beneath the brutal winds and steep sea surge of Hurricane Sandy, did I weep and turn away from the television screen?

        I was not bereft over a shore house I feared was destroyed, nor mourning the desecration of a particular beloved beach town where I'd spent summers. I had not lost my virginity, fallen in love, or watched babies nap under an umbrella on a Jersey beach. The Shore was not where my family gathered to laugh and bicker, where I hung out with high school friends, or where I escaped when life closed in on me in swarming, hectic, Essex County 90 miles to the north.

        My reaction to losing the Jersey Shore that existed before Sandy was more like losing something that for too long in my life had remained out of reach, was too-late appreciated, a place of promise, more meaningful to me as idea than destination.

        When I was about eight, I sashayed about my living room, empty Coke bottle in hand, singing along to the Drifters' sixties classic Under the Boardwalk. I hoped and wondered if I'd be kissed on a warm blanket in the slatted shade, people walking above. Eventually, I was that girl, or at least a version of her, though the kissing all took place right on the Boardwalk: some stringy blond boy whose name I'd forget, a high school boyfriend, my fiancé.  

        But before any of that, and even during some of that, I was a shore snob.

        My parents were to blame -- if showing your child the world beyond one's home state has anything to do with blame. When my father, an early polyester manufacturer, wanted to get away, he meant an airplane ride and five-star resort, where the beach was just one of 18 amenities. Boardwalk games, un-air conditioned rentals, motel pools, and waffles and ice cream were something other kids told me about.

        For me a beach vacation meant Miami Beach, Bermuda, the French Riviera, San Juan, St. Thomas, Mexico, California. It was all perfectly wonderful. But I wanted to toss towels and magazines and chip bags in a car trunk on a Friday afternoon and shoot down the Parkway, walk barefoot on splintery boardwalks, ride a roller coaster above the surf. When I asked my mother why we never went down the shore like everyone else, she asked why I'd want to do what everyone else did.  Once a poverty child during the Depression, she could not understand why a rich kid in a solid middle class suburb would long to do only what her less fortunate peers could manage. But I longed for normal, and normal meant going down the shore.

        There were trips to the shore for me, blips. My best friend's family took me along crabbing in Barnegat Bay and to an Elks' convention in Wildwood. Two high school boyfriends showed off boardwalk game skills in Asbury Park and Seaside. Once my mother and I spent an entire day at my aunt's rented shore house somewhere but only because Mom said Aunt Ida shouldn't be alone that day.

        By adulthood, the shore for me was something other people did; I was spoiled by then by what I assumed were better beaches, lovelier locales. I absorbed my share of ribbing about not being a Shore lover, but decided a gal could still be genuine Jersey, loving Bruce Springsteen and knowing the answer to "what exit?" without shore cred.

         My husband, however, had a thing for the shore, and his sister always had a shore rental, so we went; I was simultaneously eager and wary to see if I could discover the famous magic, late as I was. The charms of the shore, I found, were still on offer. It was not too late. I hadn't, after all, been shut out of a secret only accessible in youth. I did not immediately become a shore lover, but a shore liker, slowly discerning its spell. If slathering on soap under the dimming sun in an outdoor shower for the first time at age 26 could bring out a secret wildness in me, what else might happen between me and the shore?

        When our boys were preschoolers, we purposely began spending time at the shore—once for 10 days in a clean workmanlike motel blocks from the beach. There were scattered long weekends at friends' rented houses, but most often, we'd take over the extra bedrooms at our cousin Sharon's year-round home a half-mile from a gorgeous beach, where, if I closed my eyes and listened, and let the sand touch my skin, I could almost rewrite history, me as that girl, that Jersey girl at home at the shore.

        I should not have been surprised to come to enjoy if not quite love the Jersey Shore, but I was. Even before I understood the appeal, if anyone had asked me about New Jersey's good and beautiful things, right after mentioning the horse farms of Hunterdon County, I would have said the Jersey Shore. Because of course, it was. It is.

       

        In Avalon and Ortley, and at Sea Isle and Long Beach Island, Brigantine and Point Pleasant, in Stone Harbor and Lavalette, our small young family built sand castles, biked beachfront paths, played mini-golf, raced go-karts, rode coasters, ordered the same dinner three nights in a row because once we found a restaurant we all loved, it was ours. What I loved was seeing my husband see his boys loving the Jersey Shore he had always loved, and on each return visit, I noticed again that here was a place of solace and surge, grit and a kind of glitz, a composed wildness.

        When they outgrew sandcastles, the older son took root beside me under an umbrella with a book, while Frank and the younger boy plunged far out in the tumbling surf. I read and worried and after about two hours, I walked. Up and down the beach at water's edge. For miles along paved paths or boarded walkways where I could hear and smell and see the ocean or the quietly lapping baywaters on one side, houses or lunch places and surf shops on the other. I'd pretend a multi-million dollar beachfront vacation house was mine, imagine a diminutive rowed cottage had been in my family for generations, fantasize I lived there year-round, protected by dunes, the deep beach, the stalwart boats in the bay, even the towering coasters a kind of protective bulwark.

        On a blowsy day in Manasquan six years ago, I was especially buoyant, and lingered longer than usual on the beach, before leaving to walk the town, to stop in random shops for no reason. In the bookstore, what leapt to my hands was a memoir of an uneven suburban girlhood told in poetry and I stood there in my sarong pinned by the arresting narrative, especially the parts about longing for a father's love. I bought it, crossed the street to a café.

        I ordered something and settled myself to read in the speckled shade when my cell phone jangled; my father had just had a stroke. I was needed, in Las Vegas. We packed haphazardly, the boys silent and sandy. On the airplane the next morning, every time I closed my eyes, what I saw was Sharon's guestroom, a decade's worth of old beach badges displayed in a milk glass dish, white chenille bedspread, broom-swept floors, and the words on the pages of that memoir about another Jersey girl who missed her dad. What I heard were my husband's and sons' voices against the music of waves, and the sound of my feet walking the hard-packed sand at water’s edge. I was homesick, in so many ways.

        Late in August of 2012, Frank and I and our sons—one leaving the next week for college, the other ready for high school—could only manage two nights at Sharon's. We ate in the restaurant we'd discovered 10 years before. In 48 hours, there was biking and the beach, and as for me, I walked, eventually, inevitably, to the bookstore. By then, I'd met the author of the poetry memoir, and my father had been dead for six years. I sat at the same café, my phone silent. The year before, we'd spent a week in California, and while I loved Laguna Beach and Malibu, I couldn't fight a feeling I had there, the Santa Monica Mountains and their stilt-built houses so near my back—that I might somehow fall off the face of the earth. Back in Manasquan, I recall feeling somehow sheltered, cosseted—a kind of home.

        Eight weeks later, wind and storm surge leveled the dunes I'd walked beside. The calming baywaters screamed over roads, merging with the tumbling ocean. Some of the houses I imagined living in—well, a friend checking on her Lavalette bungalow told me she saw a beachfront house in the middle of a road a quarter mile inland, lying upside down.

        In the first 24 hours after the storm, TV images changed from taciturn Staten Islanders whose only homes were swept from their foundations, to Jerseyans crying over shore houses. I momentarily thought, "It's only a vacation house, get over it." But soon I realized they were not mourning ruined floors and furniture, things that can be tossed and replaced, but grieving things impossible to replicate, things that are not things: ways of being, the seasonal swell of community, a feeling and a place, smells and sounds that surge and merge into one inexplicable something known as The Shore.

        In a Springsteen song, "everything's all right at the shore," and he'll be right about that again, one day. But now, the Jersey Shore is more wrecked than the characters on that awful television show of the same name. The Jersey Shore I once longed for and didn't understand, the one I held at arm's length but came to tentatively embrace and feel at once protective of and protected by, that shore exists now only in collective memory, and I feel about it as I might a favorite aging aunt who I did not visit often enough, just to glow in her presence.

Lisa Romeo teaches in the Rutgers University Writing Program and at The Writers Circle. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times and O-The Oprah Magazine; in literary journals, including Sweet, Quay, Barnstorm, Sport Literate, and Lunch Ticket; and in essay collections and anthologies. She has work forthcoming in Under the Sun and Pithead Chapel. Lisa holds an MFA from Stonecoast and is working on a memoir of linked narrative lyric essays about grief and midlife. She lives in northern New Jersey with her husband and sons.

Why I Love Coffee

by Jesse Millner

I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was in my early thirties. I’d get up in the morning and brew in an old steel pot, then pour it into a “Virginia Is For Lovers” cup with a bright, red heart on it. The final touch was a shot of Jim Beam, which helped ease the caffeine jitters. After a couple cups of java, I’d be a wide-awake drunk.

There was something really beautiful about those drunken mornings. I lived in Chicago and on those cold winter dawns when everything smoked, when the sky was dark blue and frigid, during those hours the weather outside matched the desolation I felt inside in those frozen fields of my body.  I’d sit by a living room window and sip my coffee as my wife slept and an occasional car slipped down Addison Street. I loved the taste of the Maxwell House and bourbon, the bitter burning brew.

By the winter of 1986, the drunken mornings had stretched out for years and the shot of Jim Beam flavoring my coffee had become two shots, but the extra bourbon could not stop my hands from shaking, could not stop my first wife from leaving, could not keep me from losing my job.

In March of 1986, I was admitted to Chicago’s Alcoholic Treatment Center, a free program located in an old hospital building next to the Cook County Jail. I shared a cubicle with five other men. I had the cot closest to the north window that overlooked a wall with barbed wire at the top and intermittent guard towers.

The worst thing about treatment was the coffee: it was bourbon-less, for one thing. And worse, they only served decaf in the treatment center cafeteria. I’d sit around with the other lost souls, drinking the bad coffee, talking about the mess we’d made of our lives. One man had shot someone in a drug deal gone bad and had just been released from prison. Another was a Guatemalan man whose union-organizer brother had been killed and who’d believed he would be next. He’d fled to Chicago to escape the murderers but hadn’t been able to leave his craving for booze behind. We sat up all night around green, Formica tables drinking decaf. We told our tales of disappointment and despair. And drank more coffee.

After two weeks in treatment, we were allowed our first visit to the outside world. We were taken in vans to a Saturday morning AA meeting on Milwaukee Avenue. It was held in a big room over a dance studio where aspiring Polka dancers from the surrounding Polish neighborhood perfected their art. It was a breakfast meeting and there was a big buffet offering eggs and bacon, pancakes and the like. But best of all, there was real coffee. I ate a huge breakfast and drank three cups of coffee. I listened to people talk about their struggles with booze and their happiness about being sober. There was also a raffle at the end where several lucky winners won free passes to an upcoming AA dance.

After not having real coffee for two weeks, the effect of the caffeine was miraculous. I felt clear and happy. But my hands shook the whole ride home.

The early days of my sobriety were defined by coffee. Every AA meeting I went to had coffee. It usually tasted pretty awful because it was made by volunteers who were new to sobriety. To this day when I smell a cup of coffee brewing, I think of AA.

Twenty years later, I drink coffee every morning. Good, expensive coffee. Usually organic. My second wife, who’s only known me sober, sits at her computer in the next room, sipping a black coffee.

We met because of coffee. When we were both in graduate school in Florida, we attended a writer’s conference on the Panhandle, and my future wife was a graduate assistant who received free tuition in exchange for making coffee for the various workshops. The first morning of the conference, I encountered her in the kitchen of the house where my poetry class was to be held; she was looking quizzically at a bag of Starbucks and a coffee filter.

I asked her if she needed help.  She said, “Yes, I really do. I’ve never made coffee before.”

I looked at this beautiful woman whom I’d seen around school but never talked to and got really nervous, so I simply poured the coffee into the filter and added the water without measuring it. The coffee turned out really strong. The people in the poetry workshop complained. My future wife and I went out for coffee the next morning at a nearby restaurant that overlooked the Gulf of Mexico. It was one of those bright Florida mornings when anything seems possible. We drank coffee and laughed at the “Sunshine State” placemats which showed Disney and mermaids and oranges. A year later at the same writer’s conference we got married. 

Now I’m remembering the name of the restaurant: The Wheelhouse. And I’m even remembering our waitress’ name, Frankie Day. She was having husband trouble—her man was an alcoholic who’d disappear for days at a time, then check in from some small town in Alabama, or Georgia, or somewhere else within the Bible Belt. He’d be broke and hung-over, asking for money to get home with. Wiring money, like ending a sentence on a preposition, is a risky business, and Frankie was fed up with the dude, and I told her I didn’t blame her.

My wife had pancakes. She always had pancakes for breakfast. I had pigs in a blanket with a side of hash browns. The coffee was lousy but I enjoyed it anyway. I’d been sober for about a decade and I wanted to tell Frankie that there’s always hope. I didn’t. Instead I flirted with Lyn, and we laughed about the bad smell in the joint. We came to call it “The Cat Piss Restaurant,” instead of The Wheelhouse.

All these years later, I still love coffee. It wakes me up, helps clear away those very tangible cobwebs that linger from sleep. I see a horse running across a Kentucky pasture; I see my first wife crying when they turned off our electricity; I see drunken winters in Chicago, so cold the earth and sky turned blue; I see again the treatment center and taste the decaf; I remember those first sober days when I ran along the lake; I see Florida; I see my second wife, Lyn; and I see the stain and drip of years of coffee on my desk this morning, a sort of tattoo that reminds me of where I’ve been, where I’ve dreamed, and the meanings I’ve made of both.

Jesse Millner’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in the Florida Review, upstreet, Conte, River Styx, Pearl, The Prose Poem Project, Tinge, The New Poet, Cider Press Review, Real South, The Best American Poetry 2013 and numerous other literary magazines. He has published six poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, most recently Dispatches from the Department of Supernatural Explanation (Kitsune Books, 2012). Jesse teaches writing courses at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers.

Desire in Miniature: The Mystery of Sarah Goodridge

by Lori Lamothe

This is one story that really does begin on a dark and stormy night. I discovered Sarah Goodridge by candlelight in a century-old colonial, listening to the heartbeat of a summer storm. Considering the nature of Ms. Goodridge, the setting seems uncannily appropriate. Earlier that day I had been walking my dog when I noticed the stone marker on the front lawn of the house next door. I must have passed that stone dozens of times since I had moved to Templeton, Massachusetts a year and a half earlier. But I had never actually bothered to stop and read the plaque bolted to the stone. This time I did:

Goodridge Homestead

Erected in 1775 by Ebenezer Goodridge

Birthplace of Talented Templeton Family

Sarah Goodridge (1788-1853), renowned miniature

portrait painter of Boston, pupil of Gilbert Stuart

William Goodridge (1777-1835), built virtually every

church organ in Boston between 1805 and 1832.

Not exactly riveting stuff, but it was sort of cool to be living next door to the former home of the talented Templeton family. One of the not-so-nice features of my house was that it happened to be next to a chair factory; by that point I was definitely getting tired of the phrase,“I hardly know they’re there.” A painter and a workaholic organ-maker seemed like a definite improvement.

For the rest of the day I forgot about the plaque and went about my usual routine: changing diapers, making the pretense of cleaning, attempting to get more food into my daughter’s mouth than on the dining room floor. So it wasn’t until later, after my daughter was asleep and I found myself sitting at my dining room table, that my quest began in earnest. The storm had knocked the power out about an hour earlier and the table was covered with a cacophony of leftover scented candles. I sat a moment, watching the sheet lightning flash to the east, then booted up my laptop.

“Do you think you should be doing that?” my husband asked.
“Why not?”

Of course, he was probably right. Didn’t they say if you could hear the thunder, even from a distance, you still could be struck by lightning? On the other hand, the anonymous they always seemed to err on the side of outlandish caution. Before my husband could protest any further, my desktop screen appeared and I clicked onto Google.

I’m not really sure what I expected to find. Not much, I can assure you. Maybe a line or two on Wikipedia (a guilty pleasure) or the free version of Encyclopedia Britannica. If I were lucky, an image of one of Goodridge’s miniatures, which are the eighteenth-century equivalent of the family photos we carry around in our wallets. Without really giving it much thought, I had conjured up a rather dreary portrait of a matronly woman, hair pulled tightly back and lips grimly closed. Or perhaps her stout husband, all jowls and scowls, wearing a comb-over and a pocket watch. So when I clicked on the first Google result I was more than a little shocked.

I found myself staring at a pair of bare breasts.

I’m not talking cleavage—not your standard demure line rising out of a darkish gown. No, what I was ogling was a perfectly matched set of rosy nipples. I checked the top of the page to make sure I had gotten the right Sarah Goodridge. I had. I checked the date she had painted it—1828—and found that just as startling as the fact that she had designated the miniature as a self-portrait. She had titled her piece, Beauty Revealed and it was painted on a sliver of ivory that measured just 2 5/8 by 3 1/8 inches. Somehow the diminutive size didn’t make the self-portrait any less surprising.

What was a modest 40-year-old painter living in the Jacksonian era doing painting her own breasts? Exactly who was this Sarah Goodridge of the talented Templeton family? I had a fleeting impulse to Google the brother and find out just what his so-called organs looked like. It would be one thing if Goodridge had lived in the twentieth century; one might expect that sort of daring from a female artist. Georgia O’Keeffe comes to mind, or, at a stretch, Mary Cassatt. But at the time Goodridge painted Beauty Revealed women couldn’t vote and most didn’t even contemplate “making a living” at anything, never mind as artists. Frances Trollope wasn’t the only European to remark upon the diminished role of many American women when she said: “It is in vain that ‘collegiate institutes’ are formed for young ladies, or that ‘academic degrees’ are conferred upon them. It is after marriage, when these young attempts upon all the sciences are forgotten, that the lamentable insignificance of the American woman appears.”

Clearly, Goodridge wasn’t like that. Further investigation revealed that not only had she been quite talent at painting miniatures but that she had made a pretty good living doing it. Born the sixth of nine children, Goodridge had taught herself to draw at a young age with few materials. Her family wasn’t wealthy, so when she ran out of paper she would use a stick to draw portraits of friends and even farm animals in the sand. Eventually, she set off for Boston and managed to secure lessons with the famous artist Gilbert Stuart. Not long afterward, Goodridge set up her own studio and was so successful that she was able to support herself, as well as her mother and an orphaned niece. She had five exhibitions of her work at the Boston Athenaeum, and for nearly thirty years she painted two to three miniatures a week.

Now perhaps I should clarify that Beauty Revealed doesn’t represent Goodridge’s usual mode of composition. She didn’t go around painting married ladies’ bare bosoms. Beauty Revealed is by far her boldest, most stunning effort. So it was with much curiosity that I scanned the Google file to learn who, if anyone, was the recipient of the miniature.

The answer was just as interesting—and as puzzling—as the miniature itself. Not only had Goodridge painted Beauty Revealed for a man, but she had done so for one of the most famous men of her time: Senator Daniel Webster, the handsome lawyer-politician who would run three times for president but never win. Known as “Black Dan” because of his dark hair and fiery personality, Webster had commissioned Goodridge to paint his portrait before and would do so at least a dozen more times. At the time Goodridge presented him with her gift, she was 40 years old and Webster was a widower with three children. He had invited her Washington, D.C. in 1828 to paint his portrait and she had accepted. Less than a year later Webster married a second time—to a wealthy, subdued woman he barely knew—and Goodridge returned to her Boston studio. She never married, nor did she travel out of state again. The two continued to
correspond until her death, and when she died she left her paint box—surely her most valued possession—to Webster. Webster destroyed her letters it seems, but he kept Beauty Revealed with him for the rest of his life. After he died relatives discovered the miniature among his belongings and auctioned it off.

Just what was the nature of their relationship? I craved an answer but no answer was to be found. During the next month I visited the Boston Antiquarian Society and read through Webster’s letters to Goodridge in an effort to learn more. The 44 letters, written between 1827 and 1851, are brief and to the point. Webster would visit her studio at such and such a time to have his portrait painted. Webster was grateful for her miniature. And so on. Whether other letters exist is a matter for speculation, as is the question of whether the two were lovers. Barring a discovery in a neglected corner of some distant relative’s attic, no one may ever know.

*

Years have passed since that dark and stormy night. I’ve since moved, divorced and gotten a full-time job. Instead of spending my days changing diapers I’m usually trying to transport her to the right place at approximately the right time. There isn’t much time these days to chase down a love story more than two centuries old. But I do find myself thinking of Goodridge and her miniature rather often. In one sense Beauty Revealed hides as much as it divulges; at its heart is a mystery. The tiny self-portrait is painted on ivory so thin light shines through it if you hold it up to a window. Yet within this fragility is the key to the puzzle of Goodridge and Webster.

But what is most important to me is my conception of what Beauty Revealed represents. Though art critics and others interested parties have tended to agree that the miniature is remarkable, they have interpreted its message in very different ways. According to John Updike, the breasts are saying "We are yours for the taking, in all our ivory loveliness, with our tenderly stippled nipples." Another critic writes that the miniature seduces viewers while celebrating female erotic power. While I tend to agree with the second assessment more than the first (in my opinion Updike makes the miniature sound like the prototype of the personal ad), the miniature’s impact on me has more to do with Goodridge’s power as an artist and as an individual. At a time when men dominated the field, Goodridge practiced her craft and achieved success. She refused to become anything but the artist she wanted to be and she wasn’t afraid to reveal the extent of her artistic power to Webster. And she wasn’t willing to separate her art from her identity—or to accept society’s ideas about what a woman should be, what an artist should paint. In his essay on Goodridge’s miniature, Updike remarks that it was probably the first nude portrait done from life in American history. Had news of Goodridge’s gift to Webster gotten out she would have been vilified by the local gossips. Yet she took the risk, making it clear to Webster that she was a highly talented artist and a woman who refused to hide her desires. Thus a kind of symbiotic relationship between desire and art emerges: Goodridge’s desire imbued her art with power, and her power as an artist gave her the courage to reveal herself as a sensual woman. The act of creating art and the act of creating—or perhaps revealing—identity are inextricably linked. Goodridge devoted her life to art and art returned the favor, bestowing upon her the sort of emotional,
intellectual and financial freedom that was extremely rare for a woman in the early 1800’s.

The idea of art as an act of creating identity has a particular appeal for me. I write poems and continue to struggle with the question of who I am as a person and an artist. A poem is not so unlike one of Goodridge’s miniatures: it attempts to capture, in a relatively confined space, an image using a two-dimensional medium. I came late to poetry and when I did I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I’m not sure I know even now, but I do believe the act of writing has helped me discover who I am and to create an identity that derives, in part, from my relationship with words.

I can only hope to follow the example set by Goodridge: to use art to reveal the world’s hidden beauty, to continue to create an idea of who I am, who I might be. At 40, Goodridge’s breasts surely weren’t as perky, nor was her skin as creamy, as her present to Webster suggests. Yet she chose not to simply reflect reality, preferring instead to paint a portrait that captured a deeper depiction of her self. It is from that deeper self—and Goodridge’s willingness to use her craft to reveal it—that the miniature derives its power. In her journals Mary Shelley once lamented, “What folly is it in me to write trash nobody will read . . . All my many pages—future waste paper—surely I am a fool.” Yet like her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley sought a way to be more than what society told her she should be. The art of words offered her the means to do that. For me, all art always holds within it that same promise: the possibility that I can peel away layers of convention and false security to discover the beauty beneath.

Beauty Revealed, 1828

Sarah Goodridge

(currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Lori Lamothe has published poems, reviews, interviews and stories in various magazines, including 42opus, Blackbird, The Nervous Breakdown, Notre Dame Review, Seattle Review and others. She has poems forthcoming in Brevity, 5 Quarterly and Joy, Interrupted: An Anthology on Motherhood and Loss.

Picking out the Words

by Ryan Bradley

       

Grandpa Luis often told me stories about growing up in Mexico. My family lived in the in-law apartment of his big, white colonial house from the time I was three until the time I was five. He told me how their dogs lived on the roof to guard against intruders; how the government tortured his father to death during the revolution; how his mother sent each of his siblings to the seminary, and out of eleven, only two actually became priests; and how the Brothers at the seminary whispered about how deep in prayer he was as he slept in the pew.

        My favorite stories were about his medical school mariachi band, La Tuberculosis. He would sing me the songs in Spanish and translate them into English: I love you my darling, so please accept this lung-chunk. I coughed it up for you.

        The story he liked best was how they forgot their permit one night. Permits weren’t hard to get, and once they had one, the band could serenade as many girls as they liked. One night, all of them thought that someone else had got the permit, understandable with thirty medical students moonlighting as mariachis. A police officer rounded the corner as they were singing a song my grandfather often sang to me, “Cielito Lindo.”

        The officer asked to see their permit.

        “You know,” the officer said when they couldn’t show him one, “That’s my wife’s favorite song, and you play it beautifully.”  

        The officer brought them to his house, and they played it for her. And then another. And another. The officer made them serenade his wife all night, but a day of classes tired from playing music is infinitely better than one tired from a night in jail, not to mention what his mother would have said if she found out.

         

        He kept playing music in America. He would play guitar and sing with my Aunt Debbie when the family got together, especially around Christmas time. He loved music. A lot of people had trouble understanding him because of his accent, but picking out the words was natural for me.

Once I started playing guitar, he and I would play together. Of course, I wasn’t good enough to play much of anything at the time, and his sight was going, but we made it work.

        Medicine was another one of his loves. He stayed up late at night reading medical journals. He gave the entire Archdioceses of Fairfield free check-ups, and around Christmas time he would send families that he knew were tight with money their medical bills stamped “Paid in Full.”

        He believed that academics had helped him become what he was: a doctor, the father of six children, and a happy man. He came to all of my academic ceremonies and encouraged me. He said the same thing at all of them: “Learn as much as you can. Knowledge is the only thing that no one can ever take away from you.”

       

When he lost his sight, the state forced him out of practice, so he trained medical students to become doctors. One day he came in slurring words and his trainees caught it. They told us it was probably a stroke, but it was a malignant brain tumor.

        After the surgery, they weren’t sure if he’d know English or Spanish or any of the five languages he spoke. After the surgery, he seemed like he remembered all of them, but each day a few more words slipped out of his vocabulary. It wasn’t bad at first. Who cares what he called a tea cup?

        At Thanksgiving the names went. He hugged us, but the names were jumbled. He called Joe “Louis” and Kathy “Annie.” He broke down in the kitchen. My Uncle Joe was holding his left arm and my Aunt Kathy his right.

        “It’s frustrating,” he said. “I know your names.”

        “It’s okay, Dad,” Uncle Joe said. “It’s the disease. No one’s getting mad at you.”

        My Aunt Kathy squeezed his arm in agreement.

        None of them saw me, standing at the edge of the kitchen. I wanted to jump in. I couldn’t pick out the words to make it better. Instead I walked away. Knowledge is the only thing that no one can take away from you.

       

Every night a different child stayed the night with my grandparents. My grandmother was going crazy taking care of him and dealing with the pain from her diabetic foot sore. She wasn’t willing to stay in bed so her foot could heal while her husband died.

        Wednesdays were my mother’s days. She’d take him to get radiation treatments and then back to our house for family dinner.  

        I’d get out my guitar, and he wouldn’t want to play, so I played him song after song while my mother cooked. I showed him the things I thought he would like. The Beatles. Elton John. I didn’t sing at the time, so it was all just chords and accompaniment.

        The first time, he even got up and danced to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” And after each song, he’d say, “Beautiful, beautiful.”      

        After I exhausted the five or so I thought he would recognize, I’d play the stuff I wanted to play. Joe Satriani. Steve Vai. Yngwie Malmsteen. Speed metal and instrumental guitar songs.

        And after each, he’d say, “Beautiful, beautiful.”

        The last time I saw him, they’d brought a hospital bed into his entertainment room. He’d bought a sixty-inch television right after he went blind, and he’d put his nose on the screen to see the soccer players. His hair and his vocabulary were gone. I didn’t know it would be my last time seeing him, but around then, every time I saw him felt like it would be the last.

        I hugged him. He didn’t say anything. All the words were gone. I squeezed tighter. I looked down at him and felt the sting of dryness before tears form.

        “I love you, Grandpa,” I said.  

        He sat up a little bit and tried to speak. I didn’t understand him. I rested my head on his chest and hugged him tighter. “What, Grandpa?”

        He said it again, but I couldn’t pick out the words. I don’t know what he said, or if he tried to say it again after I walked out. I couldn’t take it. I left him there, mumbling.

        I tell myself he was trying to say, “I love you, too.” The subject is taboo in my mind. Grief, wrapped into a box somewhere on a shelf near the back wall. I should have stayed. I should have waited for the words that weren’t coming.  

         

        Two days later, my mother ran down the stairs to my father.

        “He passed,” she said.

        I didn’t cry that moment or that day. I held it in until the funeral. The weight of the casket shocked me as I carried it down the aisle. My Aunt Debbie sang beautifully, and he would have loved that. My Grandmother’s brother and Luis’s best friend Great Uncle Jim delivered a beautiful eulogy. I remember laughing at a joke about how Jim’s parents made him chaperone all of Grandpa Luis’s dates with Grandma Marie. Then I burst.

        I dribbled snot on the sleeve of my new suit. I tried my hardest to stop, but settled for not sobbing more than four or five times. Someone rubbed my back. A priest came off the altar to try and comfort me. None of it helped.  

        I’ll never know what he tried to say to me, but after six years the last words don’t seem as important as the ones that came before.

Ryan Bradley graduated from the University of Hartford with a B.A. in English with an emphasis on creative writing in May 2012. He has published work in the Missouri Review, Sundog Lit Blog, and at winningwriters.com. He will start work toward an MFA in Fiction at Emerson College in the fall.