Between A Kingdom and a Country - S. G. Sawaged (best book reader TXT) 📗

back. Her features are soft and radiant, her eyes black with a thick black line that accentuates the upper lashes. She is wearing a white blouse, short sleeve, with a simple cross necklace dangling from her neck. She has but the slight impression of a smile.
My mother is to the left of her, wearing a brown sweater. Her hair is black, cut short, over her ears, and neatly combed back, and you can clearly see her small gold post earrings. She is not smiling, but rather a look of curiosity, perhaps as to why a photographer would take interest in photographing her. This is the only professional photo taken during her life back home.
In the second photograph, she is sitting alone in front of her grandfather’s house, Jiddo as she called him and as I call my grandfather. She is wearing a pair of shorts and long sleeve shirt with white collar. Her feet are dangling off the side of the porch. Her hair is curlier in this picture. She squints her eyes to shield them from the sun. She seemed to have no idea what was likely, what was possible.

After chores, we would go into the family room where she would open a drawer to the coffee table to find her journal and my colored pencils, sharpened to half their length, all bound up in a rubber band. When the weather was nice as it was that day, we would go outside and Momma would bring out Hy-C fruit drinks with curly straws. I had been working on a drawing called Rainy Day with big clouds and drops of rain and a field of grass and huge earthworms popping out of the ground. I told Momma that Frankie liked to pull the earthworms so they break in half. Frankie told me that if you cut a worm in half, one end would be a new worm, but the other half dies and I kept wondering if the new worm remembered the part that died. Momma would say ya haram, have mercy, (not for Frankie, for the worm).
He called them the B values, short for being…values such as wholeness, perfection, completion, being alive and living without forced choices…inherent needs that are characteristic of higher levels of human potential, necessary to grow, to become more, to fulfill our biological destiny..when forced to live without them, there comes despair, alienation and varied degrees of cynicism….perhaps that’s what Hemmingway went through or Toulouse-Lautrec, the French post impressionist painter made famous by his paintings of the Moulin Rouge….one shot himself and the other drank himself to death…wasn’t it Twain who said the fear of death follows the fear of life… I did not belong here, ..The truth is, I come from nowhere. I am rootless, tribeless, adrift. (I have recently found a subtle way of saying this, that didn’t stop any conversation and make people study their shoes.)

On that Saturday, she went to her bedroom and came back a moment later with something in her hand.
Here, she said, this is for you.
In my hands she placed a velvet square shaped box and inside was a circular row of beads, barrel shaped, made of red coral with a white tassel.
Oh, I said, these are like what Jiddo has.
Yes, that’s right. He brought them back from his trip last year, he brought an extra set back for you. I thought I would keep them awhile longer for you, but you might enjoy them now.
I never knew what Jiddo called them.
Prayer beads, she said. There’s the rosary that we pray, but these are special too. You can rub them, whenever you need a little help.
She smiled a half smile and looked down at her hands.
We’ll call Jiddo later so you can thank him. Go on now, wash up, how does McDonald’s sound for lunch?
Yay! I said.
I went to my room, placed the prayer beads on my dresser, with the lid opened
Imprint

Publication Date: 03-27-2010

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
To RFA- Had I not met you, I would not have written this book. Had I not loved you, I would not have written it as well.