So it turns out that my grandfather is back in the hospital. Dad and I went to see him on Sunday. Strange day all around -- the room itself with its unstabbed fruit cups and craning, inquisitive flatscreen TV was the least unearthly passage. We drove to Washington Heights through a thick haze of fog; the hospital is ten blocks from the bridge, but we could see no trace of it from the visitors' area. It's been a while since I was in the city, and I felt it as soon as we parked on Riverside: this is really where I belong. Baltimore is great, but it's no place to stay. Things come from the earth here, wet and yellow, new and receptive to the air. It is a city where things begin. We humped it up the hill, past the Marta Velasquez memorial playground, slicked over with wet leaves that in any other year would have been snow. Dad was muttering things about the Dominicans the whole time, but I think that was just to keep his mind and his mouth moving.
We found Abuelo on the sixth floor. That hospital is really inescapably a box; you can't stand anywhere without being aware of your own small size in the greater spatial arrangement. From the window of his room you could see a jackstraw ruin of a construction site, collapsed or halfway to ascent. He was not in bad spirits but seemed incredibly enervated. I spent last summer with him up in Maine, where he and Herminia now spend most of their time. He's been undergoing rounds of this experimental chemo treatment, and I guess it hasn't been kind to him. Dad's sister showed up with my cousin Jaime, who is an advertising major at Boston University. Herminia was also there, completely responding to Abuelo before he spoke, anticipating what the rest of us could not really guess at. He was exhausted and dehydrated. Herminia had brought him in after he'd lain there in bed for thirty-six hours, barely moving or talking to anyone. Dad told him what the Steelers had been up to and Abuelo told us about when he'd overseen the law students in their offices on 136th Street, how in the spring they would fill paper bags with water and drop them from the windows in an early-May courtship ritual.
On the way back we listened to Steely Dan, Dad fast-forwarding through the tracks that didn't have Fagen singing. Later that night we went out to dinner with a couple my parents are friends with and they asked if I was still taking pictures. Cally and I screwed around for most of the meal and I taught her how to send text messages. I'm not sure what an advertising major does -- it seems that most advertising is designed to strike at the lonely and the vulnerable. I wonder what my cousin is learning up there.
Thick, sandy fog, as I mentioned, so this weekend was pretty much a wash for outdoor shots. I did get a nice piece of someone's fence over which the vines had completely crept in a pubic snarl, at once immaculately arranged and unmistakably wild. There was a moment when I was heading up Cassidy Street to buy some fruit and had my camera out to get a shot of the asphalt slicked with rain, and realized that I am completely sick of taking shots of streets and sidewalks. It's actually sort of nice to access that disgust all at once. My father and I passed by the ruined construction site on our way out. It was an awesome tumbledown catastrophe, impressively mountainous from the mouth at the bottom, through a broken and stained fence tagged with the calligraphy of the local lords -- MOOKIE RAM, SKONK, STELLA 95 -- but man, I am tired of shots that put you into a small feeling. I am ready to get some height. The gray dishcloth light was draining away as we left. My grandfather did not have the light on in his room and as we swept over the wet January leaves back to the car, I knew what it was to be in that bed, alone, a dent in the gathering dark, the hall beeping in a symphony of interrogation.
