Since my grandfather divorced and remarried before I was born and my grandmother never remarried (well, neither Nellie or Billie did - Nellie's husband died a long time before I was born), I've always had three grandmothers and one grandfather.

 My nanny, Nellie, was my only stereotypical grandmother. She gave me candy if I behaved in church, bought me new clothes from J.C. Penney's (even though she always called it "Belk-Tyler's"), played piano, and had chocolate hidden in her house for me. She wore floral dresses and sweatshirts with her church's logo on them, and the worst word I ever heard her say was "shoot," on a day she fell into our television set while trying to walk, again, without her walker.

She loved Jesus, but she never talked about it, even though she went to church twice a week. She always told me it was good to go to church, but never said much beyond that. Now that she's gone, I have her Bible in my bedroom, and when I flip through the pages, it's obvious how serious she was about her religion. On the very first page, in her cursive handwriting, is a note that says, "You never have an experience in life that doesn't draw you closer to God, or cause you to get further from God." Is this how she saw the world all those years?

 She lived, until her Alzheimer's took too much, in West Virginia, in a big white house that smelled like old carpet and popsicle sticks. A house that was filled with puns - a quarter next to a tiny wooden hammer with the words "quarter pounder" written in sharpie, a photo she kept in her wallet of her "pride and joy" - two bottles of house-cleaning products, and a plaque that says "I'm always high, I live in the mountains."

 Billie, another grandmother, is the one who smokes two packs a day - Tahoes - and never learned how to drive. She says "goddamn" more than any person I've ever met, decided she was going to raise a child when she was in her late 60s, writes poetry, loves Obama, and does homework with my little nephew every school day. She was the oldest of a bunch of siblings and the child of parents who died too young. Because of that, she became a mother before she became a high school graduate. She's the queen of "when I was your age" stories, and even though she was probably perpetually hungry growing up, she never makes us eat food we don't like or have room for. (Just save it for the dogs; you don't have to eat it.)

 She's my mother's mother and nearly every day, they sit in Billie's apartment and flip through medical books, talk about their symptoms, and diagnose each other with illnesses - all while chain-smoking.

She grew up in Washington DC and Maryland, and I can still hear the north in her voice when she talks. If I write the word "water" how she says it, it becomes Wort-er.

She is a poet, but she doesn't like poems that rhyme. And she often speaks like a good poem, pointing out the beauty in having your own jar of peanut butter no one will ever put a jelly knife in. 


My last grandmother is the one my grandfather married thirty years ago, Utku, who speaks with a Turkish accent. Utku loves books, and she loves to travel. She's been more places than anyone I know; she's been all over the world and all over America. She loves trying new food, and she identifies as Muslim, although she tells me to never worry too much about religion because it can be a bad thing. 

I used to stay with her and my grandfather for three weeks every summer when I was younger, but it was always more like bootcamp than vacation. If I spoke, it had to be in yes ma'ams and no thank yous. She assigned me a book to read every year and made me write in a journal - made me write about the book and my life- and then she'd read it to make sure I did it. I always had to help with dishes and cleaning and bringing in the nets full of flounder early in the morning. Every night I was required to fix the drinks and set the table, and everything had to be perfect: no forks or knives on the wrong side, no un-matching plates. If I spoke a grammatically incorrect sentence, she refused to acknowledge it until I fixed it. No ain'ts allowed, "they was?"

She also taught me how to paint and took me shopping at craft stores. We'd collect rocks and paint turtles on them to sell at the sea turtle hospital she still works at. We'd find shells at the ocean, only the kind with holes in the top of them, and we'd make our own wind chimes. We'd wake up early in the  morning, right at sunrise, and search the beach for nests of sea turtle eggs that were left there in the night, and then we'd rope them off, to keep them from being stepped on.

Whenever I go to the ocean, I always imagine a globe, and more than that, being ON the globe, at the place where the land meets the ocean and turns into blue. A place like that should be wild, almost holy, like the ocean itself.

It's not. The ocean is saltwater subdivision, divided up and heavily taxed properties, a prime location for gift shops.

Why can't we have just this one thing?

Wedding vowels

I always used to think wedding vows were wedding "vowels," like A, E, I, O, and U. It didn't make sense, but when you're a child, the things adults choose to do with their time never make a lot of sense, anyway.

 Since I love silly things and words and letters and poetry, though, I've decided to compose my own set of wedding vowels.

But don't worry, I'm still a cynic!



A
We will always do what's best for our marriage:
always sit beside each other on city busses,
always add the other's requests to our own grocery lists -
even on the day before thanksgiving,

when it's hard to push a cart without hitting an old man.
Or a shelf trembling from too many boxes of stuffing
being grabbed from it at once.

We'll always do what's best for our marriage,

until the day we need to do what's best for us, 
as whole people
who sometimes need to put a marriage second. For a 
sick sibling, for a trip for work, or for some time alone.

E

Beautiful people are everywhere.

Marriage is not a drain for the hormones
in our bodies,
the serotonin in our heads,
the devices between our legs.

Marriage is a sign that says stop!-
Just as Diana Ross used to sing-
in the name of love. 

Love the one you're with, 
love the one you're with, 
love the one you're with,
love the one you're with.



I

If one of us gets a stomach bug,
even if we're scared,
we'll never stay in a motel.

If we get into an argument,
we'll never be resentful; we'll try not to
yell; and we'll choose our battles wisely:

There are things more important than who
does more to clean the kitchen,
who does more to raise the baby,
and who said the right answer first while
watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

O

Bishop wrote One Art because she knew
losing is the one thing we do,
over and over again, until even our
own lives have been lost from our bodies,


and found in another, if you're buddhist. 
Or found in the sky, if you believe in heaven. 
Or scattered about the earth, in the energy of it all, 
if you're a scientist who knows nothing is 
created or destroyed. 


We'll lose things, too, eventually. 
Our vision, our hair, our memory - 
maybe the things that made us like 
one another - those could leave us, too.

If we know this, though, maybe we can
be prepared. To love through all the losses. 
Or to become a loss ourselves,
if we find that leaving is the better way to love.  

U

Until death do us part.

Or until we change in opposite directions,
and we start to find we're better off
as just ourselves,

not being one flesh anymore,
like the Bible said we'd become.

But flesh hurts to be torn, and even
Eng and Chang Bunker had to be surgically
removed from one another
(but Eng refused - for love), 

and there's no way to take back all the years
we'll spend - no memory-removing device,
except time - with its horse and carriage to pull it
sweetly along -
to make it so we never met.

In a way, this is permanent;
you are permanent,

until death do us part.

Documenting another happy moment!

"We watch and watch and watch these for so long, and when it's all over, all we remember is that they were fireworks." My grandmother said this tonight as we watched fireworks on her porch, and she's right. Now that they're over, all I remember are colors and styles. The golds and reds and greens, the ones that crumble into sparks and the ones that grow out into the night like noodles.

From the porch, it looked like the fireworks were going to fall onto the beach houses and boats that lined the ocean in front of us, but they never did. They always dissolved in the sky before the sparks ever reached a roof. Over and over again, though, I imagined a spark landing on a boat, somewhere near the gas tank, and in my head we'd hear an explosion, see a burning sail, and a fire would be floating on through the water, its owners away watching a better firework show somewhere else.

I'm so happy tonight. I don't know if it's because of the fireworks or because every time I hear them now, I think of my grandmother (who now wants me to call her anne, which is Turkish), or how they sound like the drums of a Bon Iver song. The ocean was so beautiful tonight, and my mom had the teeth that had been hurting her fixed today, and I've gotten so many new books lately, which always make me feel more whole and like myself somehow.

I used to be so happy all the time, like overflowing with happiness, and I want to get back to that.

keep your hand on the door because you know that it
might be a lesson in letting go, 
it might be a lesson in losing the best things,
it might be a lesson in never again 


Chris Pureka