PICTURES OF 1936

My grandmother keeps pictures of San Francisco on the refrigerator, and Friday afternoons after school when I’m thirsty for milk stare at them before opening the door. Some of the scenes I recognize: the Golden Gate Bridge, the red interiors of a restaurant in Chinatown, the hills that lift and seem to drop to nowhere. Some of the pictures are mysteries: the bald heads of men I don’t know, a birthday cake, a baby in black and white stripes. “She knows worlds I’ve never glimpsed,” I tell myself, “worlds beyond the other side of mine and time.” Mine’s her kitchen, where we eat soup and slices of apricot pie, and sometimes play Progressive Rummy in the evening. I’m here because my parents are dead.

No one speaks too much about the accident that killed them. I was only four at the time, and remember little of the funeral. They say I looked up at the white flowers; they say I saw people crying and cried because they were; they say I fell asleep on a pew of the Lutheran church. When I awoke I was seven, and a year later I was suddenly nine. Time means little to a boy like me. I go to school. I stop at Mr. West’s on Broad Street for a root beer and a pretzel rod. I do my. homework at the kitchen table while Grandmother cooks. I like math because the numbers have colors in my head, and I like geography because our book’s got pictures of San Francisco that look like those on the refrigerator. Somebody with a camera wants a boy like me to learn about the world. Today’s another Friday afternoon. It’s March, and Grandmother’s soaking beans in a great big pot on the counter.

She calls them navy beans, but she doesn’t answer when I ask if the men in the navy eat them too. I know about the navy because I know what the newsmen have begun to call the “Menace of Japan.” I know about Europe, too, because Adolph Hitler’s voice is on the radio she keeps on the other side of the kitchen counter. To me, he sounds like a determined man, a man who’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants. Sometimes President Roosevelt comes on the radio too, and he sounds calmer, like he just took a swim or had a nice meal of roast beef and mashed potatoes. It’s hard to say which voice I like better. Grandmother says the two men are coming to “a colliding,” but when I hear the word “colliding,” I think of Joe Louis punching James J. Braddock at Comiskey Park on the radio. She doesn’t think there’s gonna be another war. She says another one will sink us all, and I believe her. I want to be a boxer, but Grandmother says a boxer is a stupid thing to be. “People pay good money to see men get their heads bashed in. I don’t understand it.”

Mr. Williams at school, who fought in France in the Great War, calls another war “inevitable.” I like him because he keeps peanut butter crackers with jelly in his desk and sometimes gives me one, but I disagree about the next war. Grandmother says he’s got “battle blood in his veins and more than anything needs a wife, a good Lutheran woman to straighten him out.” He teaches geography, and coaches for the high school football team in the fall. Our Grizzlies have a good fullback this year and a defense that gets to the ball. Sometimes Grandmother and I go to the games. She likes the marching bands at halftime. I like a hot dog with mustard and a root beer. She doesn’t know anything about football, and how can I explain? And how can I explain that football’s a thing for grandfathers and grandsons, fathers and sons, and that I won’t be a part of such until I’m older? Grandfather died of a hemorrhage after he fell off the ladder. The ladder’s in the basement, and it’s still got his blood on it, brown smears that aren’t mud, no matter what Grandmother says. If I’m not in the kitchen, I’m in the basement looking at the ladder and other things. The basement is my sanctuary, like the part of the Lutheran church only allowed to Pastor Adamson.

In the basement I can think. It’s got things that are worth being thought about: the ladder, the boat motor, the baseball cards I’m not allowed to touch because Grandmother says they might be worth money someday. It’s got tools, the screen doors the neighbor boy puts on in April, lots of pennies in lots of jars, and three unopened packs of Lucky Strikes Grandfather didn’t have the chance to smoke because he was in the hospital getting ready to die. It’s also got shelves on which Grandmother stacks things she can buy on Grandfather’s pension: soap, coffee, tinned beans and cream corn and tomatoes and that sorry stew-meat unfit for dogs. She calls them her “just in case shelves,” just in case the President’s wrong and the country will be in The Great Depression for a while longer. I trust the President; he’s got a soothing voice, but like I said, he seems a little too sure of himself sometimes. Grandmother says the Roosevelts have more money than the Carnegies and Rockefellers combined, but Mr. Williams says that’s a “load of crap.” He says the Carnegie family could buy out the Roosevelts at the drop of a hat and that they want another European war. Williams has a saying: “what’s bad for the world is good for the American industrialists.”

I don’t think Grandmother can understand things like that—or else she doesn’t have time to. She’s gotta shop and cook and clean and make sure the grass is mowed and her Buick stays clean. Taking care of a boy wasn’t part of the bargain, and I know she wants to see San Francisco again and visit her brothers up in Washington state. They’re the bald men in the pictures, I presume, Frank and Milton. She doesn’t talk about them much. Sometimes they talk long-distance on the telephone, when it’s still daylight out there and here’s in the dark, but when they talk she talks softly, like old people do when things are gloomy or uncertain. That’s how she talked when theneighbor lady, Mrs. Rice, got sick. That’s how she talks to me when I bring home a bad grade in history class. Afterward she goes to the bathroom to scrub out the tub whether it needs scrubbing out or not.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at Dokuz Eylül University.