The day he died, the four of us were exactly the same height, just over five foot nine. We’d measured the boys in the pantry doorway the week before. It seemed a perfect symmetry, a whole family the same size but in different shapes. Now the children grow past me and past their father. They seem to grow by the day; they sprout like beanstalks towards the sky.
Week after week I continue to watch them at basketball practice with our beloved Coach Geraldine. I listen to how they deepen their voices to holler “BALL!” Coach G. tells Solo, “Get large!” or as his father told him, “Never be smaller than you are.” Be large. I watch how the young men on the team intimidate each other on purpose, how they enact their masculinity, in each other’s faces, controlled aggression that sometimes bursts over, how they manage the aggression. I watch them knock each other down and help each other up. I watch them master the codes of the court and the street. I watch them practice their swag. They are smelling themselves, as the expression goes, literally smelling their funk, feeling the possibility of their maleness. I watch their splendiferous gloating when they make a three-pointer, how they yell “BEAST!” to each other when they snatch a rebound. And I watch how they give each other skin for each job well done, this fellowship of beautiful young men, learning to be mighty together inside of this gym with an inspirational woman coach who loves them and is showing them how to be large, skilled, savvy, young men living fully in their physicality after their father’s body so suddenly stopped working.
Simon’s anklebones appear shiny at his pants’ hems. He complains his feet hurt and indeed his toes have grown and are pushing against the ends of his shoes.
His growing seems avid, fevered. It feels like the insistent force of life itself. Ficre looked forward to seeing his sons grow beyond him. If I could hear him, I would hear him laughing his great laugh at this latest development.
Two
Simon tells me three dreams he’s had in quick succession:
In the first, he goes down to the basement and finds Daddy sitting on the treadmill, rubbing his head and saying, Wow, I really bumped my head when I fell. In the second, he and his brother arrive at the hospital and I tell them, They did everything they could for him and then the last thing worked! And then Daddy comes out with a bandage on his head, smiling. In the third, Daddy is in heaven, dressed in the bright pink shirt he so loved. I’m having dinner with God tonight! he says. And I’m trying to grow a Fu Manchu mustache—you can do anything you want in heaven! In the dream, he told Simon he sits with Jackson Pollock in heaven and talks about painting, even though Jackson Pollock wasn’t supposed to be very nice.
To love and live with a painter means marveling at the space between the things they see that you cannot see, that they then make. White canvas, blank walls, his vision.
Today I see him where he is not: outside my office window, dressed brightly, waving. I jump up and let him in the building. He has brought me green tea with honey and sits in my office reading something, anything, from my shelves while I finish my work before we go to the movies. I love being in your space, he says, like always. There he is where he liked to be, on my office sofa, reading any one of my books, pulled at random from the shelves. Tonight it is Teju Cole’s Open City, wherein a recent immigrant from Nigeria walks the streets of New York, thinking, reading, talking, running into people, narrating what his new eyes see, ruminating brilliantly on questions of identity.
Rabbi Ponet writes about Jews as a book-loving people, and the erotics of the book. He imagines us dancing with the books we find sacred. I can see Ficre dancing with the books he loved. When he was a child one of his nicknames at Italian school was “mangia-libro,” book-eater, he loved them that much.
I see him at home on the little red sofa, reading Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table.
I see him on the rocking chair on the porch in Puerto Rico at Christmas, reading The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.
I see him sitting across the aisle from me on the airplane, reading Yoga Journal.