Growing Up

On my father's desk sat a photograph, passport size, cracked and yellowed with age, tucked into the corner of a large frame. A boy's small face with round cheeks and large eyes peered out from it as I sat bent over my math homework, struggling through the numbers. The boy and my father had been friends back then. In the old country. They rode the tram together to school until, one night, it was burned to ash and glass, and they were forced to go to a different school. Such a picky eater, my grandmother used to say about the boy. His mother had so much trouble with him. I made him spaghetti when he came to play, but even that he ate plain. In the large frame was also a larger photograph of an old man sitting on a park bench in Upper Manhattan, wearing a cap and holding a cane. It was my grandfather, smiling at my father, now grown, holding the camera. When they left for America, my father was still a boy. There were three passports: one for my father, one for my grandfather, and one for my grandmother. For five days they took a boat across the ocean. In America they all lived in one room, but ate well. Passport size, but the boy's passport never came, so he stayed on as the burning spread and the ashes piled up to the skies. The murmurs of the murdered grew uncountable. Even cheese and sauce he refused, said my grandmother. Most nights I did my homework by the boy's photograph—thinking that he had died because he wouldn't eat.