Strings Attached

The Grammar of Memory

52 The Grammar of Memory A young girl, my grandmother Sittu looks out her window at the mountain in her Lebanese village. She describes it: soft purple, yellow and gold—a smear of fig jam on warm buttered toast. She knows the nature of mountains, how they change, respond to the sky—to seasons that move in and out with the freedom of migrating birds. And how it blocks her view, how the road there stops abruptly, a period at the end of a sentence. She never imagined one day her son, deaf from an accident, would find a job cracking rocks on the gravel path near their home, stacking them to build houses for others, a life for himself. How he would read lips, the onslaught of words we simply listen for, how image by image he would decipher the lilt of voices, the exclamation points, question marks. Sittu knows what it means to be cut off, forbidden to speak her mind, even to learn to read and write. She learns too soon how to be a woman—so early, she can’t remember being a child. In my suburban Detroit home, I curl up in bed, my body a comma, punctuating the passage of one day to the next. I read stories and poems, read for both of us the way I used to read to her after school, watching the indelible mountain inside her diminish in her eyes. It’s said we sleep to improve our recall, to remember the big moments, but also to get rid of minutiae that would overwhelm us— our brain editing what it doesn’t need—the brief encounters, the wilting of wildflowers, the dark clouds. ...