take stock

It's the new year, sunny and cold. January looks like December. The cat is nuzzled into a towel on the sunny part of the couch; I'm wearing two sweaters. One day I will not be too cheap for the furnace. Today is not that day. Three piles of laundry look lost on the floor. One of the piles is neat, a largish mound of sheets, towels, and sturdy cotton things, the other two are more haphazard because I started losing interest. On the street, a cold looking man crosses four lanes of traffic, pausing at the median.

Yesterday, I was in San Clemente to visit my dying grandfather. This week, my aunt and her husband, Kim, shared a small condo with me, and we took turns driving out to read to him or feed him his bad-looking meals. Kim grew up on the East side of Chicago, with hardworking parents and nothing to spare. He said to me, "I felt hatred, too, for men born on third base audacious enough to think they'd hit a triple."

Later, spooning rice and over-steamed vegetables into my grandfather's mouth, I picture him at 82, teaching my 8-year-old self how to body surf. His hair was mostly gone then, like it is now, and a pearly scar glistened from his thigh to his sternum as he rose from the water and shook himself. Starting in factories and working from sales to real estate, he's put three generations and counting on third base. He closes his eyes when I touch his hand. His skin is so fragile now that almost anything can tear it.

Stock bubbles on the stove, that small flame the only thing heating the apartment. Slices of beef left over from Christmas, leek trimmings, the skin of ginger, half of a wrinkled onion, two old chicken bones, some limp cilantro — what modest beginnings can render.