1913issue6online

79 following my scent to the crib. “When you were a baby, I told your mom, ‘If I should die early, put something in the casket that smells like her.’” Not long ago, my parents both wore sweaters for a day before sending them to me in the mail so that I could feel closer to them, which struck me as extreme. But both of them have lost parents, and know what it is to mourn something as simple as scent. This moves me more now, as my father and I have been distant lately. A series of fights during a road trip about a year ago have made things between us oddly fragile. Even though we talk often, every time we are on the phone feels like the first time we’ve spoken since our fight. This conversation is, by far, the most tender we’ve had in a long time. I don’t know what it will take to make the air between us lighten. A moment like this calls attention to our waiting, though, like the pending storm outside, for the time when the relationship will be released into a new state of being, and we can be present together. “When I was little, my father was doing the same thing with me. He pulled me to him, I realize, because he wanted to smell me. He would bounce me on his knee and sing a song in a language I couldn’t understand.” My father speaks with an air of pride when he refers to my grandfather’s time in Europe during the second world war. This is where, I assume, he picked up this song, which my father begins to sing, reconstituting the foreign sounds phonetically. “Buntum baby” he sings and repeats, energized by the memory of his father’s voice. Ø When I was sixteen, I spent New Year›s Eve in the living room of our apartment. I had strewn blankets on the floor, and my mom dozed on the couch, sleepy from the small glass of Gran Marnier that I›d poured for her. My father must have been traveling. On the television, home videos from our family vacations were playing. I sat on the floor with legs crossed as my mother snored, watching our family move through a set of familiar scenes. My mother had often complained during our family vacations because my father was always squinting behind a foot-long, news quality camcorder, which he held on his shoulder. He would film the woman at the cafe talking to the customer, in close up

1913issue6online

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