He used that big heavy iron key to lock the front gate.  The gate in front of their house.  You could just hop over it to get beyond it, so the key was really just a symbol of security, a pretense of privacy.

The gate led to his garden, that he took such pride in.  The neighbor ladies would always stop on their way to the market or their way home from church to admire his roses, his dahlias, his tomatoes.  My grandmother and I always marveled at how he could stand by the gate and carry on such long conversations – this quiet man who usually had so little to say.

He spent most of his day tending the garden, no matter the season.  In the winter he would sharpen his tools, and prepare fertilizer.  In the Spring he would sort through the seeds he had saved, or buy more, and plant something every few days.  Summer was a busy time of pruning, weeding, and harvest.  He who had grown up in poverty, through two world wars, would be sure to give baskets of cherries, peaches, and then potatoes, to the neighbors.  He could work magic by grafting two rose bushes into one or somehow repairing a hose with a piece of string.  He, who had to leave school at the age of 12.  So much potential, buried.

We took the bus to the hospital to visit him.  My grandmother knew the way from her year of Tuesday visits.  In the little leather bag were a comb and brush, a razor and soap, some chocolate and some pie she had made.   We entered Building 8 and signed in at the nurse’s station.  My grandmother asked the nurse how her daughter was.  We went down a hallway, passing a zombie of a man shuffling down the hall in concentration camp-style striped grey and white pajamas.   And another in a wheelchair, with his mouth hanging slightly open.   I was 16, I shouldn’t be afraid of this.  His door was open and he was waiting for us.  He seemed impatient.  My grandmother whispered “He is upset that we are a few minutes late.”  She hugged him and set him back into his chair by the bed.  His room-mate, a surprisingly young man, quietly rose and left the room.

I kissed his cheek, with such mixed feelings – happy to see him again but horrified for it to be here, like this, in his prisons.  He opened the bag and found the chocolate, unwrapping it gleefully and gobbling it down, a trickle of saliva running down his chin.  He carefully put the pie away in his bedside table drawer.

My grandmother was chattering away, quietly, telling him mundane details of who she had passed on the street, what she had eaten.  She unpacked the shaving things from her little bag and wrapped a towel around his chin.  He sat, docile, like a little boy.  Waiting. She began to shave him with such tenderness, I felt I should go.  Then I began to tell him about what was blooming in the garden and that the peaches were delicious, juicy and sweet.  He looked at me.  A light was there behind his faded blue eyes and he reached for my hand.