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listen to something
     else an equal number of times while seated in a rocking chair, but the earlier, bedridden method fails to comfort me, as I’ve
     forgotten the code, the twitching trick needed to decipher the lyrics to that particular song. I remember only that at one
     time the story involved the citizens of Raleigh, North Carolina, being herded into a test balloon of my own design and making.
     It was rigged to explode once it reached the city limits, but the passengers were unaware of that fact. The sun shone on their
     faces as they lifted their heads toward the bright blue sky, giddy with excitement.
    “Beautiful balloon!” they all said, gripping the handrails and climbing the staircase to their fiery destiny. “Wouldn’t you
     like to ride?”
    “Sorry, folks,” I’d say, pressing my nose against the surface of my ticket booth. “But I’ve got other duties.”

get your ya-ya’s out!
    It was for many years my family’s habit to drive from North Carolina to western New York State to visit the relatives we had
     left behind. After spending ten days with my mother’s family in Binghamton, we would drive the half hour to Cortland and spend
     an afternoon with my father’s mother, the woman we adressed as Ya Ya.
    Ya Ya owned a newsstand/candy store, a long narrow room fitted with magazine racks and the high, wall-mounted chairs the townspeople
     occupied while receiving their shoe-shines. She lived above the store in the apartment my father had grown up in.
    “A shithole,” my mother said, and even at the age of seven, I thought,
Yes, she’s right. This is a shithole.
    My mother’s parents also lived in an apartment, but theirs had been arranged with an eye toward comfort, complete with a bathroom
     door and two television sets. I spent my time at Ya Ya’s wondering what this place might have been before someone got the
     cruel idea to rent it out as an apartment. The dark, stifling hallway had been miscast in the role of a kitchen, and the bathroom
     looked suspiciously like a closet. Clothespinned bedspreads separated the bedroom from the living room, where the dining table
     was tightly wedged between the sofa and refrigerator. Surely, there were other places to live, perhaps a tent or maybe an
     abandoned muffler shop, someplace,
anyplace,
cheerier than this.
    I recall one visit when she carried on about her recently deceased pet, a common goldfish she kept in a murky jar up on the
     apartment’s only window ledge. Ya Ya had returned from work and, finding the jar empty, decided that the fish had consciously
     thrown itself out the window.
    “He no happy no more and think to have a suicide,” she said.
    “Commit,” my mother said. “He
committed
suicide.” She threw her cigarette butt out the window and stared down into the littered alley below. “You don’t
have
a suicide, it has you.”
    “Okay,” Ya Ya said. “But why he have the suicide? Is pretty, the fish. Why he want to take he life away?”
    “You’re asking
why?
” My mother lowered her sunglasses. “Open your eyes and take a lucky guess.” She emptied the jar into the sink. “This place
     is a dump.”
    “What Sharon means,” my father said, “is that a fish is incapable of thinking in those terms. They have tiny little
kaphalis
and don’t get depressed.”
    When speaking to his mother, my father used his loudest voice, drifting in and out of pidgin Greek. “The
psari
didn’t know any better. It wasn’t your fault,
Matera,
it was a
lathos.
”
    “He have the suicide and now I sad sometime.” Ya Ya stared into the distance and sighed. I imagine she had spoken to the fish,
     had loved it the best she knew how, but her affection, like her cooking, was devoid of anything one might think of as normal.
     She regarded her grandchildren as if we were savings bonds, something certain to multiply in value through the majesty of
     arithmetic. Ya Ya and her husband had produced one child, who in turn had yielded five, a