(no subject)

I want to write about my grandfather tonight.

Tonight is his yahrtzeit, the first anniversary of his death according to the Jewish calendar. I couldn't write much at all about it at the time. I'm still not sure I can.

I want to write about my grandfather tonight.

New Orleans, the city he lived in for most of his life and for the entirety of mine, the city that is inextricably linked with him and Grandma Cecil in my mind, is flooded. Grandma and my other local relatives have gotten safely out of the city. Thousands haven't.

I want to write about my grandfather tonight. His name was Schneur Zolmon Levin. Most people called him Zolly. My father called him Papa. I called him Grandpa Zolly, and didn't learn until only a few years ago how much he would have preferred to be called Zeide.

I've been thinking about National Novel Writing Month coming up in a few, and saying things like maybe this time I'll actually finish one. He always used to ask what I'd written lately.

I want to write about my grandfather tonight, and I keep thinking in other people's words. All true wealth is biological is the phrase I keep coming back to.

He was a small Jewish man with a short scrubby white beard and sharp blue eyes and a sense of humor rivaled only by his sense of principle. He taught me handslap games and Hi-Q and nonsense rhymes, and he tried to teach me discipline and responsibility and respect, and I know I disappointed him more often than not, and my uncle Elliot told me at the funeral that I was always Grandpa's favorite.

I miss him so much.

I want to write about my grandfather tonight, and I will not put it off again.