Mi Ma and Me

The date, stamped on the scalloped edge of the black and white photograph, says April 59. I am less than three months old. The woman holding me up to the camera is my grandmother, known as Mi Ma. She has a slight smile on her face as she looks down at me in her arms. She is somewhat familiar. I recognize the ears - large. I inherited them. She wears round, button, earrings. The kind my mother used to wear. I stare into the camera. I am bald. My eyes are wide open. My lips are pursed. We are in front of a mantel. There is an Easter basket, a bunny, and a card behind us. The picture might just as well be of strangers. I will never know her.

I was born to my mother and father out of grief. My brother, Jamie, had died at age three of a tonsillectomy in November of 1956. I was born two and a half years later when my parents were forty-two. Mi Ma was in her mid-seventies. Over seventy years between us that day in April 59.

As I look at the photograph, I feel an ache. But it is not for the grandmother I never knew. I ache for my mother. I miss her. And now as I look at the photo, I realize I will never know my grandmother because whatever I might have known, died with my mother. I can't ask her anymore questions like whose mantel are we standing in front of and is the Easter basket mine? I wonder who took the picture. Probably my father. He took most of the pictures in our family.

Yesterday would have been his ninety-third birthday. I can't imagine him old. He died at sixty-four jogging to the office. My children will never find a photograph of him holding them. They never knew him.
Nor did I know my grandfathers. My mother's father died in the influenza of 1918. I don't know what year my father's father died. There are no pictures of me with them, either.

I have no sense of what it feels like to have been grand parented. The black and white photograph is as close as I'll get. On the back, written in slightly smudged, red ink, in my mother's perfect palmer-method handwriting is, "Amy and Mi Ma 2 1/2 mos." Maybe that's why I can't stop looking at the photograph. It is the caption on the back that says it all. In a moment in time, I did have a grandmother. And she held me in her arms. And it mattered to my mother.