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Look away a little bit.

Article Excerpt
Trudging alongside my grandmother through the sweltering sweets of her Brooklyn neighborhood, I couldn't believe that she wasn't finished shopping yet. For what seemed like hours, she had dragged me from one fruit and vegetable vendor to another, squeezing the merchandise with the same abandon that she pinched my cheeks. Protests from owners were ignored. She wanted the best. She intended to get it.

Time after time, she would complain to a seller, "Your prices are high sky."

I flinched whenever she said it but I didn't have the nerve to correct her, not even when she asked if the "asparagrass" was fresh, Instead, I did some complaining of my own.

"I'm hot," I grumbled. Despite the promise of my newest favorite book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, we might as well have been in the desert. We seemed to be following a nomadic path without an oasis in sight. I, at least, was wearing shorts and sneakers. My grandmother wore a thin black-and-white short-sleeved dress and stretched-out black pumps, her stockings knotted under her knees. She carried an old black leather handbag in one fist, the one that also clutched the packages. The other hand gripped mine.

"Can't you let go of my hand? I could carry a package, too," I pointed out with nine-year-old logic. Besides, I was as tall as she was. Either I was big for my age or she was short for hers. Either way, it was embarrassing.

Shaking her head from side to side, a motion that prompted a sparkle from a large, round clip-on earring, she refused. "Sometimes you have to look away a little bit," she replied, pronouncing the "w" like a "v." Apparently she left her w's in Warsaw when she came to the United States.

"What do you mean?"

"You can't have things the way you want them all the time."

That lesson I was learning fast. So far that day my grandmother wouldn't brush my hair hard enough or pull my ponytail tight. Then she put sugar into my coffee milk, which was milk added to instant coffee mixed with water. The only cold cereal she had was puffed wheat. And now I was being dragged all over her neighborhood in search of more food. Her refrigerator was full; it was always full, and yet she always bought more.

A heavyset woman whose upper arms carried drapes of flesh that could knock you over, Granny Fanny was possessed of an impressive physical stamina. For decades she walked miles over Fort Hamilton Parkway to play out the genetic code that impelled her to gather the brightest, freshest...

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