Good Dirt

Hold the Moment

Hold the Moment

1999

T heir grandmother’s kitchen was filled with the aroma of something crusty and saucy.

“I made pot pie,” Grandma Bliss said.

“Yum!” Ebby said.

Their mom’s mother had always liked delicate-looking foods. Puffy and melty-topped dishes that might fall apart as soon as you put a fork to them but still tasted pretty good.

Grandma claimed to have been an attorney once, but as long as Ebby could remember, she had been working on artsy things out of a home studio. The room was filled with swatches of fabric, little rectangles with different paint colors, and before-and-after photos of hotels, hospitals, and houses that were even bigger than hers.

“You two having a good time?” Grandma asked.

“Uh-huh,” Baz and Ebby said in unison.

“Uh-huh?” Grandma said. “ Uh-huh? ” Grandma put a hand to one ear and squeezed one eye shut as if she hadn’t heard them properly. Baz and Ebby lowered their heads.

“Yes, Grandma,” they said.

“Now, that’s more like it,” Grandma said. “You know I don’t tolerate any uh-huh kind of speech in this house. How many times do I have to remind you two that you are not donkeys?”

Baz shrugged. Ebby did the same.

“Your grandfather and I,” Grandma Bliss said, “and your dad’s parents, too, worked very hard to make sure your mother and father had excellent educations. And your parents are doing the same for you. Not every child has this privilege, even though they should. So don’t you ever take your language for granted, children. Claim your language. Love your language. Use it well.”

“Love your language,” Ebby and Baz said in unison with their grandmother, because they had heard some version of this lecture before.

But at age fourteen, Baz was already questioning the idea of language and what was proper.

“But isn’t uh-huh part of our language, too?” Baz asked their mother that night. “Can’t we love expressions like uh-huh ?”

“Yes, that is part of our language, too, Baz,” she said, nodding. “And unlike your grandmother, I do believe there are times when it’s fine to use colloquial expressions. It depends on the context. It’s just that, at your age, you need to be sure to master the standard language first. Expand your vocabulary. Embrace the variety of words available to you. Make sure you can command the language in such a way that no one can ever doubt your ability to do so.”

Their mom tapped Baz under the chin with a finger. “Don’t look down, Basil,” she said. “Listen to me. Always look up. You’re becoming a young man, now. A young, African American man. People are always going to look for excuses to question your capacity to do things. Fair or not. And then they will use that as a reason to take away the rest, all of those expressions, colloquial or cultural, that make language more interesting.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Good. So none of those donkey sounds for now. At least, not when you’re talking to your grandma, or she’ll send you over to the neighbor’s barn to live with the other animals, and she’ll put me out there with you, too.”

Their mother was grinning. Baz scrunched his shoulders and started into an exaggerated, hee-haw kind of laugh. She mock-slapped him on the arm.

“And please, do not tell my mother that I said saying uh-huh is all right. Just be sure to answer her properly. Remember…speak better…”

Baz joined in now. “…walk straighter, be smarter, be kinder.” Ebby, listening from the doorway, mouthed the words with him. Another family mantra. But that was only the first of several times that Baz would ask their parents about language and dialects and what was worthy of consideration. That summer, Ebby saw her brother reading a book. The title was long but Ebby could make out the words linguistic diversity .

“What’s that?” Ebby asked her brother.

“Library book,” Baz said. He looked up from the pages. “See, we have different kinds of English, and this here talks about that. People don’t use only one kind of English. Not only the kind that’s in the dictionary. We need to embrace all kinds of language.”

“Then why do we have the dictionary?” Ebby asked.

“We still have to study the standard, like Mom says. Learn vocabulary and grammar. So we can study for exams and get jobs and talk to people from all backgrounds. The standard is like an intersection in the road, you know, where we all meet. But we’re all coming from different directions.” Baz lowered his voice now, as if sharing a secret. “Did you know there are entire peoples whose cultures have been supressed because other people keep them from using their language?”

“Uh-huh,” Ebby said. But actually, she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure how such a thing might be done. Did they tape up people’s mouths? On top of which, she thought embrace meant to hug someone. Could a person hug a language?

“What did you say? Uh-huh? ” Baz said. He heaved his shoulders up and down and pawed the floor with his feet. “Hee-haw,” Baz said, and he and Ebby both laughed, her laughter a high giggle, his voice already on a downward slide toward adulthood.

“And anyhow,” Baz said. “Have you ever heard a donkey go hee-haw ? Donkeys do not go hee-haw, but that’s what they write in the books. Don’t believe everything they put in print.”

Ebby frowned. “But you believe what’s in that book.”

Baz frowned back and pointed at her. “I am thinking about the book. I don’t have to believe everything I read in a book, just think about it.” Ebby nodded, though she felt unsure of what this meant. She leaned toward her brother and put her arms around his waist. He pulled her head against his chest and gave her the knuckle.

“Owww!” she said.

“Ha ha,” he said. “You walked right into that one. Come on,” he said, and Ebby, as she had since she had learned to walk, followed her brother. They went down the hallway, through the kitchen, and into the backyard.

“Can we play hide-and-seek?” Ebby asked.

“Hide-and-seek, again?” Her brother rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you getting too old for this?”

But Ebby was grinning. She already knew he’d give in and play. Later that day, Ebby opened up one of her school notebooks and scribbled something in the back. Grandma Bliss always told her and Baz to write down one thing from each day of their visit that they wanted to remember.

“Hold the moment,” Grandma would tell them. “Write it down, just a word or two, on any kind of paper you find.” On that particular day, Ebby wrote two words in her notebook in uppercase letters: Best Broth er. But mostly, she and Baz would write things like Swimming in the pond or Ice-cream soda or Red Squirrel on a piece of scrap paper and attach it to their grandmother’s fridge with a magnet. Grandma had a junk drawer in the kitchen filled with pieces of discarded paper that were printed on one side but blank on the other. One day, in the years when there were so few wild turkeys around that no one saw them in their gardens much, Ebby wrote Mama Turkey with Chicks!

“Not all the moments will be good ones,” Grandma said. “That is part of life. But it’s nice if you can hold on to something you have appreciated.”

And then just like that, Baz, her brother and number-one friend, was gone. After he was killed, Ebby went to visit her mom’s parents and saw the way her cousins and other relatives would follow her with their eyes while pretending not to. She could tell everyone was thinking about Baz but didn’t want to mention him when she was around. Ebby had been the only other person in the house when those robbers shot her brother, and this fact lay like a gulf between her and the rest of her family. But not with Grandma Bliss.

Grandma would say things like “I made that cobbler that you and Baz always loved” or “Are you chilly, baby? Why don’t you go get your brother’s old sweatshirt from the back room.” She must have known that something in the feel of the cotton sweatshirt would comfort Ebby. Remind her of how Baz used to pull her close and bore his knuckles into her head. Of how he could get on her nerves in that way that she missed.

When it was time to go and her parents were loading up the car with overnight bags and leftovers, Ebby pulled open Grandma Bliss’s junk drawer, looking for scrap paper. She didn’t have to jiggle the drawer to get it open. It was nothing like the ones in her other grandmother’s kitchen. Granny and Gramps Freeman were proud of the fact that much of their home’s interior dated back to the nineteenth century. But Grandma Bliss had made a point of installing modern drawers that were whisper-quiet and smooth.

Despite the age of the Blisses’ house, this kitchen had nothing old in it, and the broad granite countertops were completely free of clutter. The only things sitting on the counters were a food processor and a coffee maker. The only sign of jumble in the kitchen was the fridge, whose exposed right side was dotted with candid photos and a couple of hold-the-moments from the last time Ebby and Baz had been there together. Baz had written Grandpa’s Goggles on a piece of paper because the night before, they’d been looking at Grandpa’s old photographs from his time as a military pilot.

There was Grandpa Bliss in a group of trainees outfitted in coveralls and headgear with goggles. There was Grandpa in the cockpit of a P-51Mustang. There was Grandpa in his dress uniform. And there he was, 153 combat missions and three decades later, giving a talk to high school students in Springfield. The Tuskegee Airmen had not been the first black men to pilot planes in the United States, Grandpa explained. And still, they’d had to prove themselves worthy to join the World WarII effort.

It had been fun looking at her grandfather’s photos that day, but the moment that Ebby chose to hold closest to her heart was another. One filled with the smell of sunshine on freshly turned earth. She and Baz had gone to a nursery with Grandpa and helped him to choose a tiny maple tree, which they planted in the backyard. Before leaving the house, Ebby took a blue marker and the scrap of paper she’d found in the kitchen drawer and wrote Baby Maple, and stuck it on the fridge.

Within a year both Baz and Grandpa Bliss would be gone. Ebby overheard one of her older cousins saying Grandpa had died of a broken heart after what had happened to Baz. But her grandmother said it had been Grandpa’s time to pass on, and no wishing otherwise was going to change that. Over the years, the little maple tree grew to be much taller than Ebby, and every autumn, its leaves still turned bright orange. Then the leaves would fall away, and the tree would seal off its branches to protect itself from the onslaught of winter.