The birth of a raisin

I video called my grandmother on a Sunday. 
When she answered she was indisposed, wrapped in a towel. 
Up-down sweet-yellow-twine top-of-head weaving about indiscriminately. A blur of rhythm and sage. A race doll. Hung up. 

[I always seem to find 
perfectly inopportune time 
to call.] 

And when she called back she was wearing sunshine. Golden haired woman of a great golden age laid out on purple couch with eyes and a fickle nose. She was my grandmother. She was Marilyn of 86 [but don’t tell her lover that]. She was a dancer, a Pettinati and a widowerer, so to a therapist and a friend. We spoke on, rambling about love and beauty and family squabbles; the kind of things that are to be spoken about on a Sunday at noon: “What happened to your eyebrows? How is Joanne? Do you have a photo? Oh, how wonderful it is to be young and beautiful. You know I have a new friend now, right? He’s nice, a bit quiet. He’ll never be your grandfather though. Aaron, I got so mad at him the other day. I asked him, what are we? And he just chuckled, made some off remark. And I told him, you know what, I don’t need you. I have a house and a job and a family, you’re just for fun.” I think he wised up after that. 

She read him some Yeats. 
I read Alejandra with Joanne. 
We are alike in that way, I guess. 
Sometimes poetry works best. 
Sometimes it cures cancer. 

[finale]
But then, a tiny purple plum found itself being carried off by the wind; falling down from high vine wall, placed on concrete and rolled out under hot baked mosquito pie sky, to dry; of which bears little to no consequence here, only to say that much time had passed, that this too was coming to an end. And despite it’s best effort la ciruela se secó before a small Sunday seder. 

Then she hung up.

I stayed for a beat, on dusted concrete, to watch the birth of a raisin. And in between cries of one’s first open eyes, it all came rushing back to me again —— about how it was all so beautiful once, on a Sunday.

Francis
Cali, November 2023