In their new place

This is a pencil-drawing of my grandparents, now hanging in my new home. That's Portland's Fremont Bridge reflected on my grandmother's chest.

This story begins with an old stiffly-posed sepia photograph with serrated edges, made of these two mis-matched people in the year I was born, in Hendersonville, North Carolina. They never really got along, my grandparents, after a whirlwind courtship and the illusion of love that faded before the orange blossoms from the wedding had dried out. They fought and bickered and worked at jobs they endured. He sold rope and nails, glass and seeds in a hardware store; she supervised lunchroom ladies in the regional schools. They went to church and did their duty by each other, their parents, and their children. He had a long-term affair with a woman she called "the hussy." She had a group of friends she played cards with. He hunted (though he hated to kill things), and she sewed and baked (though she didn't like it and wasn't very good), and when their daughter brought home an unwanted baby (me), they sent their girl off to another town to live down the shame, and they took care of her baby, as well as they could, both of them still working at jobs and working at home, keeping chickens and mending, making do. They poured into that baby girl the unexpressed longings of their lives, and they gave me the best there is in me. They were proud of my memory. They would stand me on the yellow hassock in the living room and tell me to recite Bible verses for company, and I did so, my hands folded behind my back and my chin lifted. They called me "the little professor" from the time I was three, but they were both gone before I became a big professor.

That old sepia photograph of them, dogeared, worn, and creased, came down to me pressed between the pages of my grandmother's Bible. I gave the picture to Allen Woody, a working-class artist with his own long story of postponement and suffering, and he made this pencil copy of it, which I hung in a working-class frame (plastic made to look like silver, plastic sheet made to look like glass). It's still in that old frame, which seems right for it, for them, for the pencil drawing of the sepia print.

My uncle, about whom the less said, the better, paid them the ultimate insult. He bought a tombstone for their graves and inscribed it, "Together Forever." I pray it isn't so. It would be hell indeed.

My grandfather loved to fish. My grandmother dreamed of travel. The two of them, though annoyed by each other's presence, would be happy to be gazing at the Fremont Bridge over the Willamette River in far-away Portland, Oregon, a place they might have dreamed about. They're here now, watching.

Clearer bridge reflection here.