Dinner at my grandmother’s house: Papa in his chair (looking how I imagine now how my father would look had he grown old) in rumpled t-shirt and itchy cardigan.  He once owned the corner grocer on the street where he still lived.  On some Sundays or lazy summer afternoons, we would traipse (in pairs or threes, there were so many of us) through Tower Grove Park with its fountains and carrousels and admonitions from our mother which areas to avoid on the long way home after dark. The park was our dividing line between an ordinary world and our grandmother’s, an adventure where everything was more: pot roast and mashed potatoes, steam rising, mounds we pressed our spoons into, creating pools with dark brown gravy; even her Del Monte green beans tasted better than mom’s.  Kathy, who wouldn’t touch a bite save the bread, which she rolled into little balls breaking off little bits with her fingertips.  Grandma indulged but chided, mimicking her voice,  I-don’t-like-it Leicht, drawling out the sound.  After supper we trooped to the corner store clutching the coins Grandpa gave us, imagining his days long ago behind the counter, our father by his side.

Grandma pulled us close before we left, nuzzling: A bushel and a peck and a kiss around the neck, burying her face in our necks, tickling.  She smelled of lavender soap and the Werther’s candies she kept in a little dish by Grandpa’s chair.

Years later after Grandpa (and my father) died, I visited her in her apartment with my daughter.  (She had abandoned the old house on Castleman where we roamed in the attic searching through the fragments of our father’s life.)  Emma was only two, watching old reruns on grandma’s black and white set, playing with my father’s trucks, rescued from the attic of the house long ago.  When we left, grandma pulled her close reciting the old refrain.