Botched Heritage

botch (v.) [from ME bocchen, to mend] = to foul up, to bungle, to put together in a makeshift way



The day I woke up to find a hole
In my thick blue cardigan,
I knew I was in trouble.

My fingers are short and stocky
(Like my father’s; I have his knees too):
They are clever at blind-typing
But stall at pedestrian tasks.
So when I fetched my sewing needle
(The only one I own, slightly bent)
And the spool of thinned-out black thread
(Which I’ve had for decades, possibly),
I stepped into an unknown zone,
Pitifully incompetent.

Like a diver in a helmet,
Trudging heavy on dry land,
I was stumbling with each stitch,
I was losing thread and mission
In the narrow needle’s eye.
And all the while I knew, I felt
That this was a betrayal
Of my grandmother’s fingers,
Dancing delicately, playfully
For years, for decades, in pairs and patterns.

All the hours and patience and
Tenderness she sewed into it,
The Princess of Crocheting,
(Dreaming of children’s children perhaps),
All the cleverness she trained
In her fingertips, and willed
To the next batch -- evolved
(In the new millennium)
Into this earnest, but clumsy,
Botching of heritage.

My rough work, next to Baba Desa's pillowcase

This Is Not Nostalgia. This is How It Is.

In the car tonight, at the gas station in front of Marché Express, I felt America squeeze itself into a yellow glow of the neon sign, and the broad, well-lit space inside the store (and now I'm thinking of Walt Whitman in the supermarket, and of the Nighthawks too; this is the America I recognize and love.)

And I was all there, but not with or in it. Like a newly departed soul hovering above its own body, wide-eyed I was observing everything from a distance, at an angle, with detachment.

Meanwhile, my body was 4 years behind, in another car, swaying to other air currents, watching fields and trees flitting by from inside, from underneath. taking root everywhere. It is May, it is hot and dry, the windows in the car are down and the heat mixes in with the faint odour of gas (the chronic ailment of that car), I start to sing, just like that, an old "partisan" song that must have echoed throughout these parts for real once upon a time, and my mother joins in with her clear bell-voice

... and for an eternity of a whole minute we vibrate inside the same pitch, and inondate the landscape with unmistakable harmony, and are probably closest we've been ever since the end of my childhood. Or will ever be.

In the car tonight, in front of Marché Express, I thought of this, and knew it had to be written down instantly.