Carolyne Wright
A Truth, a Lie, and a Photo
of my grandfather Harry as a young swell
in knickerbockers and high collar
lounging under the shoeshine parlor
awning, by the barber's striped pole.
East Saint Louis, 1910. But that was only
one lie twinkling in my granddad's blue eyes
with their hazel flecks as giveaways.
He never was in Southern Illinois
and he wasn't born in Pensacola
either. The only Louis was the Pater Israelita
fingered on his birth certificate
who Englished the names of his shtetl forepapa
under the Lower East Side chuppa.
And Louise, his shiksa South German mother
who took Jesus' name in vain when young Harry
sauntered out of his P.S. and crawled under
the chassis of yellow cabs in Far Rockaway
and later the dirt-disking John Deere
curry-combing the track at Belmont.
Which is where he took yours truly
one Sunday afternoon of my eleventh summer
--hazel-blue squint in his eyes from the stogie
poking from his bristle-brush moustache. "Kiddo,"
he chuckled as he dropped me at my Aunt Mabel's
brownstone in Queens. "I never shined shoes or cut
hair in my life. And your grandmother" (who was
peering with my mother through Aunt Mabel's louvered
blinds) "polished the numbers on my taxi driver's
badge and counted every fare as I circled
the avenues from 42nd Street to Union Square."