(re)naming and (re)collecting

My Dad went by Walt, Wally, Vwadje, and earlier in his life, Tippy. It seems that everyone that is my father’s childhood friend had an alternate name - Jimmy Pickles is my favorite. We called my mother’s brother Uncle Buck although his name was Paul. (I was told he was in a gang in his youth – they called him Buck Rogers and part of it stuck.) We called our godparents and family friends ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ although they were technically neither: Aunt Peggy, Aunt Pattie, Aunt Louise, Uncle Charlie and Uncle Richie. We called my Mom’s mother Mammam Dando; she was rarely in our company so we referred to her in a manner that mostly served to differentiate her from my Dad’s mother - we just called her Mammam. We called Dad's father Dzjajie. ('jȯ-jē )

I have only one recollection of Dzjajie. He shifted on the burgundy naugahyde of what I understood to be ‘his’ chair to give me space, not on his lap but next to it. I squeezed between him and the chair’s arm and my feet dangled far from the floor. He smelled of work – burned flux and freshly welded metal. It was a smell that became very familiar years later – the smell of my father just coming home from work. He would kiss my head as he went to the basement – ‘the cellar,’ we called it – to take a “quick shower” before dinner. (My father always says he is taking a “quick shower” and my mother always says she is going to “hop in the tub.” I’m not certain why their bathing always seems to have time constraints.)

I made a linoleum-block print with an image of Dzjajie’s chair on it; below it was text describing the single memory I maintain of my grandfather. My mother saw the print in a local exhibition that she and Dad came to Rochester to see. “You can’t remember Dzjajie! You’re remembering a picture,” she said – “its at home in the box with all the old photographs.” A heavy cardboard “Clark’s Poultry” box stamped with a red silhouette of a rooster holds the collection of old photographs. On my next several visits home I methodically mined through decades of images but I could not find it.