Kinesthetics
By Barbara Krasner
November 15, 2024
November 15, 2024
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He sat in the playroom in front of the television
in the easy chair, his arms opened wide for his grandson to toddle to him. His hug had nowhere to go except around himself, an embrace to ease the drain of dialysis and his impending death. A hug he wanted from his own mother whispering to him to come to her. It had been forty-five years since he saw her in her Mt. Sinai hospital room, withered by cancer and diabetes. Now he suffered from sugar load, too, as we all do, thanks to my grandmother’s maiden name, Zuckerkandel, rock candy. It should be a hard substance like the stick candy at Nanke’s Confectionary and Luncheonette at the corner of the Belleville Pike and Kearny Avenue. Suck on that candy of biological inheritance was not an instruction but a future fate. My father wanted to be somebody, broadcast his name in advertising, but the only job he got outside my grandparents’ general store was a field job for Coca-Cola until he opened his own supermarket with his brothers. He only had one grandparent to hug him and she was ancient, didn’t speak English. I know that hollow waiting for grandparent hug, grandparent cheek pinch, grandparent accent. By the time I was twelve, all my grandparents were dead. I only knew three of them and my step-grandmother who died when I was nine. I still remember the quietness in our house, a dreary spring Thursday, time stood still as her body at the funeral home. She had been so lively, a real macher, in the Ladies Auxiliary of the Jewish War Vets Sanford L. Kahn Post, so the meeting minutes attested, dropped into my house with must and mold. She made the best milkshakes and knitted dresses for my Barbie. She played mah-jongg with the ladies, a game I never learned. My sister has her set, the buff tiles in a leather case that otherwise might hold a violin. Or the viola I once held at age nine before my sister told me the strings were made of cat gut and I never touched it again. I hate cats of any kind, although some look cuddly. I won’t go into a house with a cat. But I love my son’s dog, obedience school flunky that Rizzo is. But then so was my son, so I’m used to it. All the dog needs is a hug to quiet her nerves. She sits in my lap and looks at me with adoring eyes and I wish my son could still do that, that he was still three and crawling into my lap for comfort, the way he wrapped my arms around his middle and rocked, muttering mommy, my mommy. Mommy, my mommy. My mother moaned in rehab, Mama, Mama. I stroked her arm, called her Shayne Leah, and she quieted. Her eyes pleaded with me or was it gratitude. All my father wanted was a hug. All my mother needed was a child’s touch. Me, too, Mama, Mama, me too. |
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Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Chicken Fat (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Pounding Cobblestone (Kelsay Books, 2018). Her poetry has also appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Nimrod, Vine Leaves Literary, Tiferet, and other publications. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.
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Author’s Note:
I often write about family and family history. It has deepened my understanding about my heritage and brought me closer to ancestors I never met or barely knew, like my paternal grandparents. I have been researching my roots since 1990.