Stearns, guest blogging: The unknown, remembered gate (Part 1 of 3)

Scene: a family reunion


One of my great uncles—Ralph, the brother of my grandmother—pushes the screen door open with his back because his hands are full of my aunt’s baked corn, the dish she brings to every reunion and every Christmas. This is the uncle that still gives me a shock every time I see him, which is only once or twice a year. When I was younger, I asked my mother to tell me what my Papo looked like. Papo is Grandma’s father who died when my mom was in the ninth grade. My oldest uncle couldn’t pronounce the words ‘Grandma’ or ‘Poppop,’ and so they became Mamo and Papo.

“Sophie, he’s the bald one in the picture on Grandma’s TV.”

“The one in the green frame, or the gold?”

“You know the one, Sophie.” Her arms were half-way to the elbow in cold water with dead soap clinging to the edge and bits of cereal floating around. She was scraping out pieces of food from earlier meals that had clogged the drain. I had tried this several times and every time had rushed to the trashcan dry heaving, in part earnestly, and in part to ensure that my merciful mother never made me do it again.

“Oh, that one.” I didn’t know, of course. With a busy mom and an attention-demanding older sister, I just wanted her to talk to me, and even at this age I had a sense that if I made our conversations a stressful experience, she would be less inclined to talk with me—not on purpose, but just because that’s how it worked. I learned to manipulate early. I like to think of it as ‘training,’ or ‘conditioning’ in the pavlovian sense, but I’m not so sure that’s all that much better than manipulating.

“Yes, well, that’s Papo. Will you wipe off the table?” The dishrag was in my hands before the question was finished. I had given her knitted dishrags for the last two years on her birthday and on Mother’s Day. Besides scarves, rags were the only thing I could make. She insisted that she loved them: loved the way they got the food off the dishes, and loved the way they felt on her hands. She even wrote me little thank-you notes for them, which of course was in order to cultivate that practice in me. Later, when I read a story in which a son saves up his money and buys his exhausted mother a new mop and bucket for her birthday, I was still young enough to feel the sinking shot of despair, and ran to my mom apologizing. She still insisted that she loved the dishrags, especially the ones I did in multiple colors. Exactly what I’d expected. I desperately wanted her to laugh with me and tell me that of course she didn’t like getting dishrags for her birthday, but that it is the thought and the love that mattered to her. But she stuck to her story. I was certain that was because she thought I was still too young to know the truth, and so I noted in my diary: ‘In three years, ask Mom if she really likes dishrags.’


to be continued