By Grace Gilbert
I make an altar in my office. A low bench, perhaps
something a father made, a candlestick holder I
found on the street by my sister’s house, a candle
that smells like winter, a houseplant, a bowl of
scraps, a photograph of my grandmother. It is
unfair the symbols we make of history, the things
we say about it repeating. My father hated
repetition. If I asked him the same question twice,
he’d yell back I heard you the first time, but that
didn’t mean he was going to answer me, it meant
he had caught the question and had chosen to
crumple it on the floor beside him. As we got
older, he stopped snapping at me. In the car,
when I spoke, he would turn up the radio. Instead
of anger, he pretended I was not there. Some
people, if you push them too deep, they will never
come up from underwater. As a child in the
hometown lake, I would dive to feel the rocks at
the bottom, lining them up on the shore before
they became dull in the sun. This had always been
a “problem.” When a child needs differently than
a parent, they are called a “problem child.” Once,
in Lake Erie, I tried to outrun the waves, only to
get pulled under by the tide. When I thought I
might float away completely, I felt a rough tug on
my arm, it was my father, silently pulling me up.
There is always a function behind the behavior,
my professor tells me when I am learning how to
teach. When children are bad, she says, they act
the opposite of what they want. When adults are
bad, I imagine they are suspended underwater.
Originally published in The Journal.
grace (ge) gilbert is the author of Holly (YesYes Books 2025). they live, breathe, eat, and teach in the greatest city in the world– Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
