He tells me, “You know what I really like?” And then he leans close, his mouth to my ear, and whispers, his eyes on the person next to us, “I really like it when I see old people eat ice cream.” And we watch her, her hair cut short and the white hairs sprinkles in the auburn of the cropped sides of her head, her back turned towards us, licking her ice cream cone. He continues, “It makes me think that 40, 50 years ago — they were once kids, enjoying ice cream like they are now.”
And I think about the way my grandfather smelled, when he drew us close to him so he could give us a hug, how his breath hung with the scent of cigarettes. I do not remember him without his mouth full of laughter, his eyes creased with glee, and him speaking gruffly in Hakka, and then laughing at his own jokes. I remember only picking up the edges of his conversations, matching word with word, but all in all, knowing that my tongue was dry and I did not know what to say to him. Did I only see him a number of times, the number of times that I can count on both my hands? But I grew up to learn that he was not always full of laughter, that his cigarette breath was not one of endeared memory, that he was a man who once left his family for the temptation of risk and gambling, for women who hung onto the arms of men late in the night. He must have bought my mother and her five siblings ice cream cones in the humid sun, as offerings of apologies. Though these are the details I do not know. Did he ever sit, enjoy it himself — and think about what he lost but still managed to get back.
I suppose I will never know the extent of how my family broke apart and somehow tied itself back, before I was old and conscious enough to wonder about my grandparents’ separation. All I remember is that when my grandfather fell into a stroke, his head hitting the floor of the little home he lived in, it was my grandmother — the woman he had left and left unloved, it was she who moved into his home to care for his ailing, frozen body. I do not understand that, only that any other option was nonexistent. This is my history, but perhaps not my legacy. But there are many questions that I still have — like why it is that my mother once hid from her brother, when she saw him unexpectedly in the mall on a summer visit back. And we hid behind that large column until he passed out of those sliding doors. And I wonder when a family starts to unravel, and whose fault it is, and why it takes so many long, long, dry years for all wounded members to begin to even realize they need healing. If we remembered what it was like to lick sweet, sweet ice cream from a dripping cone — maybe we could pick the simplest of feelings, keep them, and begin to patch up all the other broken ones. Maybe, one day.
