shower in the dark

Like the last “vignettes on regret” posting this is something I wrote some time ago but have the unhealthy urge to share now.

Today my granddad came to Canada. More than fifty years earlier, his father had come to Montreal for farm work and couldn’t return to Tecumshun, Ireland. No pay, no way back to his wife, to his daughter or three young sons.
My nan came today too. She has Parkinsons—none of us know—and she’ll die in eight years. Fairies will come first, but she’ll still die.
And he’ll regret coming.
But today, he’s just nervous. Antsy. Hasn’t seen us grandchildren since we left three years ago. Asks me, eleven, to come walk with him. He walks us away from the house and the people over to the grass fields he sees by the school, then up on top of one of those big, round, fake hills.
Maybe that big mound was the highest he could get away from the ground he’d just landed on.
We laid on the grass, on our backs, side by side. Our backs curved with the round of the soft hill. Looking into the too bright sky, summer sun. He smelled to me of sweat, shirt undone, his white chest hair coming out, all curled over his white undershirt. He asked me if I minded being there, on the hill with him. I hadn’t seen him for three years. He put his arm over my head and around my shoulders. No, not at all. Not at all, Granddad.

When she was dying—
forgetting
how to cook soda bread,
how to get off the toilet,
him, us—
when she lay dying,
he regretted coming to Canada.

Like his father must have.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 2:54 pm and is filed under vignettes on regret. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.