Sunday, September 12, 2010
Laur @ 1:04 AM
My Grandmother Calls Me Mija
You speak to me in jumbled Spanish, call
me mija,
and I don’t know
how to tell you
that I chose to take French, and then
Ancient Greek (of all things);
you don’t remember—because you remember
so little
now, in your
eighty-sixth year—but
you once
refused to teach me
the language that my last name is in.
You could not have known that after seventeen years of living alone
after the death of your husband
in a small, yellowing house in San Marcos, Texas
with nothing but
football games and soap operas
on the television
to stimulate your mind, it would
degenerate,
regress
back to its first language, your
native tongue—the one
that you abolished in your household
in the interest
of your boys, that they
might assimilate, and
become successful.
My father tries. He says si and sometimes
agua, but
like me, he would be just as lost
in a Mexican market as he is
when you ask long, rapidly-fired
questions in slick
syllables of Spanish that
bounce
off of our earlobes, rejected
by our minds’ inner-dictionaries.
Yet if I could ask you anything, it would be
how to make the best flour tortillas, because
somehow
I know: if you deprived me of my culture,
you must have had your reasons.Labels: grandma r
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