No words to say

Today I took a break from languages. I walked out into my mother's brown New York garden. Snow trodden early bloomers were recouping in the sudden sun. This small world she had eked out for herself latent with all the wonders she anticipated each year from memory. She can see things that aren't yet there and she talks about them as if they are always in bloom.

But I was still with computers and the events of the previous day. Then a squirrel stood before me. His one blind eye, bulging and blue. Half of his sight was seeing and half believing he could see. His blind eye twice the size of his real eye. His blind eye knew I was there as much from memory as from fact.

He scattered up the false cherry tree that blooms twice each year and sat eating scraps from the birds pretending he was watching me.

My mother can't use her right arm, now. The movement is coming back, but it will be a long recovery. Someday she will lock me up in one of those great hugs I struggled against as a boy. I stood in the yard where three generations of my family has lived and peered towards the river. Thousands of years of humans and squirrels have lived in this spot and left arrowheads, gardens and seed shells to prove it.

Between me and the river stood a grove of trees and the house of Mrs. Saki, the widow of Mr. Saki the lone Japanese man on our street. His ghost looms over me sometimes in the memory of my grandfather's warnings. He told me that Mrs. Saki was a life-long friend and that when she married a Jap after the war he was the only one to go to their house for dinner. I could see them in my mind eating alone each night and it made me shy to say hello when she would waddle out with stale cookies and mild and clasp her hand and tell me what a beautiful young lady I was. He said to be careful who you marry because people can't trust a Jap, not after Pearl Harbor and the war. He said you lose friends over a thing like that and friends are the most important thing in the world.

I imagine Mrs. Saki, who fell in love with a Japanese man when she was just barely an adult, who changed her name and her allegiances in so doing, sitting on her sun porch, nearly ninety, the memory of this street, as I know she does to spend her days after her stroke last year, watching me watch a half blind squirrel and realizing my mother must be hurt bad for me to come home from Kansas to spend a week with her and care after her garden and groceries.

I imagine how her life changed after my grandfather died. He first knew he was sick when he to her house to install a smoke detector because her husband was dead and she was too old even back then to climb a ladder. He stopped halfway up the stairs to catch his breath and died a half of a year later.

I wonder if when she looks at me she sees my death, like so many other deaths that have come and left gleefully. The way I see the death of this half-blind squirrel oblivious to a hungry hawk, exuberant to find such an easy prey.

I called my uncle today for the first time in so many years I am embarrassed to say. My uncle the devout Catholic, the Eucharistic Minister a product of the 50's, called to tell him how much I admire him and how I adore the things he said to me as a child that have taken hold in my imagination and given me a new life to grow into.

He listened from the other end of the phone and told me about the projects he is working on, teaching children to learn in new ways. A genius in his own right, but like my mom a terrible reader, the kind of person who loves words from behind a barrier, the way a cripple loves an athlete because of a body that can say the things his heart feels.

I have trouble with words. They come out of my throat like a broken vase. A gift one must apologize for. It is the thought that counts, but the prize that speaks for itself.

I told my mom today I have trouble sharing my feelings and I would like to keep it that way. If I could just tell her how I felt I might stop feeling it so passionately. Then when my undying love for her came swelling out in the middle of a snow storm, uneven, unexpected, too early or too late it wouldn't be because it had to, and she might not realize it is always there, the hug her lame arm will always feel, like the crocus her mother planted before she died from a heart attack that one Christmas day in a snow storm worrying that my mother wouldn't find her back from taking pictures with her new camera. She doesn't have to tell me she takes pictures to show to her dead mother. I know this silently, blindly. That crocus we stopped to look at and admire as it was pushing its way up between cracks in the walk, reaching for its short stint in the sun, sheltered by a sea of concrete from the storm that will take us all.

Then I lamented that there is no place for me in this town that holds my heart hostage and my mind at bay.