1.
We called her Sittee,
the Arabic term for grandmother.
She sat in straight-back chairs
to keep her posture, baked muffins
for breakfast, encouraged saving.
"You'd be surprised how much you'd
have at the end of the year if you
saved a dollar a day," Sittee would say
and her son, my Dad would answer,
"I'd be surprised if it was anything
other than $365."
When we drove past a field of sunflowers,
Sittee would sing in her vaudevillian voice
which could reach to the cars on the other
side of the highway.
"You are my sunshine. My only sunshine.
You make me happy when skies are grey,"
and the way she looked at you, a 12-year-old
stumbling through life to find your way,
you knew what she sang was as true as
the yellow petals!
Sittee was a philosopher.
"The first hundred years are the hardest,"
she proclaimed, and now that I am halfway
there, I have to agree that this was a
very fair assessment.
2.
"Whatever is alive, dies,"
my father said. And when
the time had come for him,
our tears spread on a garden
bed, watering his handiwork,
salt to the earth giving birth
to a row of jonquils since nothing
can kill a properly planted idea and
his flourish in each of his offspring,
mathematically compounded like
interest.
When we planted his coffin,
his spirit wasn't there. It had spread
out into the air. He was a physicist,
you see, and often recited the first
law of physics to me –
"Matter cannot be destroyed."
And he mattered so much,
our eyes see through his.
His wisdom transfered, yet missed.