I want to see my family and my first home under better circumstances. I would’ve liked to.
I’m going to Hartford, CT with my grandmother to bury her son. The son she and my grandfather outlived. My mother’s little brother. The uncle who was only 13 years older than me but still a father figure I wanted to be like.
What I remember about my Uncle Rick was swagger. And he always seemed to be in motion. I remember him and his girlfriend hanging out with me and my mother at the Garden St apartment – where we lived next to Aunt Esther who seemed too young to be Granma’s sister even though Granma didn’t seem old, where we had the gigantic red sofa cushions I would make into a triangle-shaped club house, where we had Playboy on channel 16 and a cable box remote I had to use both hands with, where I used to dip my wet finger in the sugar dish, where Tammy and I practiced kissing in the basement with my heart thumping fast and feeling like it punch through my ribs, where I had three homeboys: Chauncey, who was fat, and Scooter, who was Puerto Rican, and Lavar, who lived on the other side of Aunt Esther and thought I was lying about my 7th birthday (or 8th). I wish I could remember her name instead of only recalling her being light-skinned and short and nice to me. I remember one time they came over and her belly was big. There was a baby growing in it. She let me put my ear on her stomach, and I got to listen him playing out dreams in his mom’s belly – that little boy who has probably looked just like I remember Uncle Rick since puberty. I didn’t meet him before I left on a one way flight to Alabama – where the air was thicker but smelled better and where instead of sidewalks there were ditches.
Me and my first cousins have never met. They’re taller than me if they took after their dad. We’d probably notice something familiar about ourselves if we crossed paths accidentally.
“Ricky”…It always makes me smile hearing Granma say either of her children’s names. No one sounds like her. So proper and so alpha.
It’s not right to have to bury your children.