Days Given Over to Travel

Abstract

When Mama came for me, my older boy was sailing off the coast of Brazil. I'm not kidding. My boy, sailing off the coast of Brazil. Of course, I always think of him as little but he wasn't so little anymore, he had a wife, a family and they were grown, and he was a man enjoying a big fancy trip on a big boat. A ship, he called it. The kind our people never traveled in, not even in the old days when my father first came to this country from the old country. My father, God rest his soul and I hope to meet him in just a little while, crossed in steerage, the way you see in the movies, below the deck, the cold Atlantic beating against the side of the boat, the inside of his stomach beating against the wall of his chest. Ten days before my son left on his boat trip he told me about it, at the wedding in Connecticut where we all had gathered, my cousin Marvin's daughter's wedding, which makes it sound like a distant relation except Marvin was always like a nephew to me. He and his wife Phyllis, they made a nice wedding for their daughter Susan and her fiance. The weather was cooperating. A cool night in November, but it hadn't snowed yet so it still seemed like early autumn. The food was delicious, the music was playing, I was waiting for dessert and coffee. At the table in my wheelchair, where lately I had decided to sit, it wasn't all that comfortable. My companion, Irving, went to the bathroom. My older boy was bringing me a fresh drink, he was always so polite to me, asking if I needed anything. Here's your scotch, Mother, he said, handing me the glass. I was leaning to one side in my chair what a lousy contraption, that I should ever have to ride in one! The music was nice, old songs, Strangers in the Night, Slow Boat to China, and old country music, f reilichs and whirling around, all the young ones even they knew them, jitterbugging, and the lindy, and the dancing in a circle while the clarinet sounded like a sad child wailing