NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

THE ORANGE, THE FIG, THE WHISPER OF GRAPES

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Dear Daddy,

All my life, from the early Mississippi River days to the steamy Texas summers, people have said you're cute, you're funny, you're adorable, what might their lives have been if they had a daddy like you? Singing in the shower in Arabic. Poking around with a shovel in the dirt, your pants rolled up. Lifting the night with your laugh. Short smart sentences. Coffee in tiny cups. Waving your hand back when you speak—as in so what, who cares, are you kidding? Talking to your fig tree, handing bags of ripe fruit to any Ethiopian lady who hikes down your street.

Take two, take more. Saying I love you 20 times during the same phone call. I have grown-up friends whose fathers never said that yet. Whose fathers are dead with no more chance of saying it. Your love was a solid mountain, not a hope or a guess.

You said, The house is happy when you're in it.

First one to say I love you in September!

Hi darling. Did you know I'm proud of you?

Rarely did you say—Do this, don't do that—because you were trying to figure out what to do yourself.

Let's have an orange party. Humid St. Louis evenings, savory fragrance of overturned earth in our lungs, sunstruck weeds and mown grass, you'd peel the orange skin around and around so it came off in a single springy coil, placing cool sections into our mouths. We closed our eyes for the sweetness. Somehow you and Mommy brought us up to taste a sweetness everywhere. Not to be scared.

You'd say, This pear is AMAZING!

The grapevines told you a story in their own language. You translated for us. Today, the fig tree you planted in my yard, born of a single magical stick, child of your own enormous tree, towers over our clothesline. White shirts billow forth beneath it. I pinch my eyes shut, sailing to the old country of smoky stones, figs and birds.

What were you thinking of at sundown when you stood outside in the yard staring at the sky, hands locked behind your back? You grew so silent. I always imagined you making a get-away. I worried about it. You and I, the fiction-writers of the family. But I never had your endless immigrant gaze.

Once in the dark somebody cut all your sunflowers' heads off, leaving a startling line-up of giant empty stalks. Heads on the ground. Refugees don't need that kind of weirdness.

Refugee: one who flees for safety. One who flees to a foreign country to escape danger or persecution.

Well, you never seemed as if you were fleeing. You seemed more comfortable everywhere than most people do. You settled in. How's my friend? to the salesman you'd never seen before. But when I gave you Allen Say's beautiful book Grandfather's Journey with the Japanese-American grandfather feeling homesick for his other country no matter which country he's in, you understood completely. You said, "This is me."

When the drunk man crashed through the brick wall of your house in the night, he ended up apologizing on his knees, hugging your legs. You were groggy in pajamas. He was Eastern European with a heavy accent. The police asked him if he knew where he was and he said, "I'm home!" The hell you are, you said. But then—didn't you invite him to dinner or something?

We never talked much about how brave you'd been to travel by yourself to a new land, but I think of it often now. Now that I have a son and the thought of him going anywhere far pierces my heart. Though you were known later as the least brave of our family—you couldn't stomach blood, hospitals, funerals, and if anyone vomited in your presence, you vomited too—we must also consider: you took a spanning leap wide as an ocean. Sailing off on a ship—Ensha'Allah!—with your mother's wild tears fanning out behind you. Immigrant courage, leaving the known lands, and every single person who had steered you, far behind. Till they became smaller than sesame seeds.

I couldn't do it. Couldn't be the person who goes away so far forever. Never, not for the sake of any country or dream. But you saw your own country being pummeled all around you. You trusted the horizon that much.

Once my college class watched a Jerusalem documentary filmed in 1949. The Old City, Dome of the Rock, then there you were with a BBC microphone, solemnly reading the news. I shot forward in my seat. My father, before he was my father! Wearing a khaki uniform, lean and serious in a black-and-white world.

Impossible to say what the pain of Palestine's struggle has done to shape your psyche, your heart. A part of you never leaves there, of course, is bound forever to the terraced olive trees, the sprouting fields, the quest for simple honor. A part of you is always going back. Home, you called it, which, after many years, made our mother mad. "Isn't this home yet too?" How hard for you to hear the twisted evening news again and again. Walk outside, stare at the sky always a horizon to bandage the wound.

Now that your mother is dead, along with all your brothers, the full and the half ones, what is left? The heart of the story. Outliving everyone's words. The land and its fastness. Memory, history, strong blue thread. Jericho oranges sweeter than Texas. Children shouting, wearing tattered jackets, wandering cobbled streets where you once ran. And all the Palestinians scattered 'round the world who extend the borders of their lost land wherever they travel... still bound together. I see you in their eyes when they find me. What is his name? Where did he go to school? They want to remember you from way back, to know you shared a desk, a circle of bread, a pen.

You are Palestine and you have always been free.

At Ellis Island I step into the main building, where you didn't get off your boat (oh, some unknown pier, some dock, I don't know where we landed) and the heap of suitcases, rattan carriers, displayed in a beautiful tumble of arrival, all that hope and trust, even if the linens and cottons and silks have been removed, makes the tears spring up in my eyes.

There is no prize for such bravery.

Now that you are getting old and you hate it, what will you do? Your restlessness haunts me. Your distractedness. How does one emigrate away from age? Your anger with me because "I don't see your side of the story." Daddy, don't you know I consider "the other side of the story" my daily duty? Oh, the hell you do, you say. Maybe other people's, not mine.

All I want is peace, you say. Yet that may never be yours—elusive peace in your first homeland, your marriage, your wildly scheming dreams and plans. Is elusiveness what makes you mad?

I would be happy to keep our first relationship intact: daughter delights in father, sits on father's shoulders, looks at the world. Father is laughing. Daughter is laughing. Daughter knows very little.

I am the one who could never let go of first things.

Better for people to think we are less than we are and have less than we have. You'd say, Not me! I'll take the opposite! Being bigger. Being Someone. You bought 50 acres with a little house on it. You bought a donkey. You called it a ranch.

I found your first American drugstore in Kansas once—the archival SODA FOUNTAIN vintage. Freshly arrived at the university in that little town in 1950, you'd visit that drugstore, sit on a swivel stool at the counter, buy a Coke, and stare. An ancient druggist was in there when I went, polishing silverware with a white towel. I asked if he remembered as far back as 1950 and he pulled himself up proudly. "I remember everything since 1935! What do you want to know about any of it?"

My father. Used to sit here. At this counter. Would you possibly recall? Palestine. Jerusalem. Thick black hair. And before I could say your name, he said, "Aziz!"

The druggist held two spoons up high. "He would put his head down on the counter between sips of Coke. I thought he was either awfully tired or awfully lonely. We hardly had any foreign students here in those days. He really stood out. He didn't talk much. But I asked about his parents and the holy places. You know. Back there where he was from. He would put his head down on his arms, then lift it and stare so hard as if he could see right through that mirror over the fountain."

The mirror had clouds around the edges of it, Daddy. Your same old mirror. First one to say I love you every day from here on out.

Who would you see if you looked into that mirror now?