When I wrote these vignettes which began with the Mongol colored pencils, I entitled each vignette the name of a color.  Some of my favorite names of colors were magenta, heliotrope, burnt umber, lemon yellow. I tried to choose the name of a color as a title to fit each vignette. There were too many vignettes for me to be able to make that idea really work, however.

In these vignettes, I, the one telling the story, grow from a young child to an adult.  It was easy to have the language fit the young child. After that, I didn’t really know how to make the language fit each ensuing age.

His first night in this country my daddy sleeps on the floor of a cousin’s porch. Daddy cries. I never know the name of Daddy’s cousin. Daddy is eighteen.

Daddy makes X’s with a stone on the corners of sidewalks so he can find his way. He knows only one bathroom, and he takes a ferryboat ride to get to it.

He gets his first job at a huge wholesale butcher’s.  He bones the meat. Other workers near him make fun of him because he’s a Greenhorn. They throw their cuttings into my daddy’s waste can. The foreman shows my father that he’s throwing away too much meat with the fat and the bones.

Daddy waits until the workers go home for the day. Then he tugs the foreman by his arm and shows the foreman: “Please, put me by myself away from the others, and you will see what a good job I do.”

The foreman puts Daddy by himself, and the foreman sees what a good job my daddy can do.

Then when my daddy learns English, he has his own meat market and grocery store. And I have colored pencils and a bicycle. He never had any. Not even one time. He is happy his children have them.

***

It is Sunday, and we sit at the dining-room table. Sunday is the only day Daddy doesn’t work at the store. He takes his citizenship papers out of his wallet. It’s one paper, but it’s always called papers. It has a gold sticker on the corner. Daddy unfolds his papers and looks at them. Daddy loves his citizenship papers. He puts his head back and reads me the words with his eyebrows up high.

His citizen papers say he became a citizen on the “24th day of September in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-five and of our independence the one hundred and fiftieth.” They say he was a subject of Russia. They say:

Age 42 years  Height  5 feet 7 inches   Color white.

His papers say he was a subject of Russia.

They say:

Complexion ruddy. Color of eyes brown. Color of hair dk. brown.
Visible distinguishing marks none.  Names, ages, and places of residence of minor children none.

I am not even born yet. Isn’t that funny? This is before my father and my mother get married. His first wife can’t have babies. It is all right for my daddy to divorce his first wife if she can’t have babies. I never saw her.

When Daddy looks at his citizenship papers, he says: “If I had been born in this country, what I might have been.”

“You could have been ANYTHING, Daddy,” I say.

“Who knows, a lawyer, a criminal lawyer…” he says.

“Or an ARTIST!” I say.

“Maybe even a judge,” he says.