Distancing #21: Dear Science

As we watched our grandmother in her hospital bed, my uncle Jean, twenty-two years my senior, told me about the rite of passage that bound us: from him to my aunt to my mother to my brother to me, she spanked us all. Of course, blood and corporal punishment weren’t the only things linking us. Jean spent that hour a year ago effortlessly picking out anecdotes, stories for which I had to reach to the beginning of my memory. In one, my grandfather smiles one of his last smiles at Jean’s wedding—a fact acknowledged in retrospect. And did I remember when my mom told him I liked lettuce and hated tomatoes, and vice versa for my brother? I did. He, his brother, and their three sisters learned our tastes right after they emigrated from Haiti, shortly before the Millennium bug. At least four of them at a time lived in that two-bed apartment in Flatbush. They’ve all since moved out to start families of their own. Uncle Jean is now a director of something in the medical field. I forget what he’s the director of; the point is he’s a director. I grew up watching him work his way there from the bedroom floor, yet I looked at him that night as if he were telling stories not about slow progress but about miracles.