a lot of pitfalls when writing about the immigrant generation. or, to be particular and personal, i find it very difficult to write directly with any honesty about my parents, who i know worked harder and persisted in ways it’s not even in my constitution to comprehend. as, one assumes, was partly the goal. but from which a division is necessarily born.
N E S T S
I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
—Joe Brainard, I RememberI remember my mother remembering her father.
I remember walking with my mother through the woods near her home. She points out a small purple flower. She says they called these “ring-flowers,” and in her childhood they would pluck these flowers and make from their stalks a kind of ring. I remember she didn’t stoop to pluck one but mimed the act… [Read the rest here.]
