Between A Kingdom and a Country by S. G. Sawaged (new reading txt) 📕

that from her father, an immigrant to America from somewhere in Europe that I can’t quite recall now, she acquired a love for reading, and her classroom was full of books of all shapes and sizes.
The first grade room at St. Stephen’s was always brightly lit because of the rows of windows on the north and west sides. There were dry erase boards with each week’s spelling list and a student showcase that displayed photos of kids who improved the most in spelling from the week before. I was a good speller then, and still am now; at least I would like to think so.
On her desk, she kept flashcards of math facts and the alphabet and the plant that Emily Neeson gave her for Teacher Appreciation Day. On the wall behind her desk, she hung thank you cards and sympathy cards and hand-made cards given to her by her students over the years. On top of the file cabinet was her family photo, her husband and two sons. The oldest son was in college then, the youngest died in a drowning accident off a bay in Wisconsin.
During D.E.A.R time, Drop Everything and Read, Mrs. Leahy encouraged us to read on our own, but many times she would read out loud to us. I liked to listen to her, watch her. She would outstretch her arms when she spoke of the horizon, look at us intently and raise her hand to the sky at the caroling of birds.
"Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn."
She would rap the page with her finger to alert us to the pictures and she smiled good- naturedly after each page. The entire class would hush, not a soul stirred, not Garrett Berg, or Frankie and Mindy, or even Tony Gibilisco who had a twitching problem. The Wind in the Willows is my favorite childhood story and I first heard it through the voice of Mrs. Leahy.
But the time I looked forward to most during the day was when Momma picked me up from school. It was then that we spent time alone, uninterrupted, before she got busy making dinner and picking up the house and I got busy with feeding Buddy and teaching Frankie and Mindy how to remove the Adam’s Apple in the Operation game without making the buzzer go off.
During these rides home from school, my mother would tell me of her childhood. These were much different conversations than I had with my Dad on the ride to school. Dad would tell me, “Son, you work for yourself when you grow up, you don’t work for anyone else. A man can’t get ahead unless he works for himself.” But I never understood if working for yourself got you ahead, then why were my parents arguing about money much of the time? Or why did I hear Momma plead with my Dad as we were headed to Boy Scouts one day to please sell the business, we are going broke.

“Thousands of miles away from here,” she would say, “there lies a kingdom of mountains and roads that wind through green hillsides lined with olive groves. Olive trees bend toward the sun and the vines are plump with grapes. Oh Samuel, you should see the grapes. Your great Uncle Ghassan has vines all around the perimeter of his house. You can stand beneath the vines and raise your arm up just a bit and pick off more than you could eat in a year’s time. And some of our relatives, like Aunt Houda, have entire orchards in their back yard. They grow olives and figs and...”
“What’s a fig?”
“Darling, it’s a fruit, a lovely fruit. Tata’s favorite actually, but they’re hard to get in the Midwest, only available in the fall. There’s a man in the neighborhood that would bring a basket of fresh figs and drop it off at the front door of our house every morning. The street vendors sold them too. And at Auntie Dhea’s house, she had rows and rows of cactus fruit, some grew to as large as the palm of your hand. But you have to be careful with those, they have small spines on the outer skin, so if you touch it with a bare hand, slivers get caught in the skin. In Arabic, we call the fruit sabar.”
The thought of the slivers made me look at my index finger and put the pad of it in my mouth.
As if the fruits themselves transported her into the recesses of her memory, she continued. “You know, I remember climbing to the roof of my grandfather’s house in Husn and feeding the chickens very early in the morning. I would throw the chicken feed and dozens of them would scurry to the middle. Then Jiddo and I would come back inside and take our breakfast, then go to the orchard to pick fruit until the mid day sun caused such as sweat, it stung our eyes. To this day, I still remember hearing the minarets at dawn.
“What’s a minaret?”
Through the rear view mirror I could see her smiling.
One day I will show you my love.


4.
On Saturday, when Garrett Berg was at the cinema seeing A Bug’s Life, I stayed home with Momma. Dad worked all day on Saturdays. He owned a pet store, had been in the family for twenty some years. The store was originally located in a small strip mall, in between a veterinary clinic and a bar and grill. It was in a prime location, on a busy street in the north central part of town. Then a development company came in to build a Fantasy gas station and car wash and because the bays were only leased, my paternal grandparents who owned the business at the time, had to move. They relocated the business to Iowa, just over the bridge, but still fifteen miles east of its original location and the patrons didn’t follow. Business was slow and grew slower every year. Then Pa died and my Dad took over the business and Nanny moved to Kentucky to live with her sister.
Sometimes Dad would let me go to work with him at the store. I would go in the morning and Momma would pick me up around lunchtime. I would give the parakeets fresh bird feed and water, or I’d shred lettuce leaves for the turtles. Sometimes Grandmas with full heads of white hair would come into the store with their snot nosed grandkids, peering at the animals. The grandkids would want ferrets but the Grandmas said they resembled big rats and would persuade them to look at love birds instead. And then sometimes when the Grandmas were in the bird section, I would ask Can I help you, and they looked down at me in surprise.
Oh sweetie, they would say, yes thank you. How much for these parakeets? Then I would go up to my Dad at the counter and return to her a moment later, “$10.99 each or two for $20 and she would smile and ask for a girl and a boy. That, Dad had to help her with.
Frankie and Mindy were surprised that I had only one pet when I had a father who owned an entire pet store. But Momma said pets were a big responsibility and one was enough. Buddy wasn’t my first pet. The year before, in kindergarten, Dad let me bring home a pet snake. He told me not to mention anything to my mother just yet. He snuck the cage downstairs into the family room, placed it in a corner and covered the front of the cage with stacks of old hunting magazines so you couldn’t see inside. I must have forgotten to put the rock back on top of the cage lid. The next morning my mother came downstairs to the washroom while I was brushing my teeth before school. I heard a scream and then an “Oh My Lord!”, and she raced back upstairs, shut the basement door and leaned against it with her hand over her heart. By the next morning, Ivan was back at the pet store for another kid to take home and surprise his mother.

On Saturdays like these, when I was home with Momma, she would make scrambled eggs and French toast for breakfast. Through the open windows in the kitchen, I would hear the flute-like melody of the meadowlarks and the early morning sun filtered through the blinds and bathed the kitchen in a warm glow. Squirrels would race up the maple tree, leaving behind them ribbons of bark.
The kitchen smelled like cinnamon which Momma loved. She told me once that whenever a baby is born into a family, the parents invite everyone to their home to celebrate. They reserve a special tea for this joyous occasion. It is made by taking cinnamon sticks and boiling them for several hours in a pan of water before pouring into a cup with some spoons of sugar. Then they add crushed walnuts at the top. She loved gerfa, this tea, so much that she made it many an evening, even without babies to celebrate. Momma served gerfa at my birth.
After breakfast, we would do a few chores in the house. Our house was much like others in the neighborhood. It was a raised ranch style home with a deck in the front and a fenced in side yard for me and Buddy to play and Frankie and Mindy when they came over. It had three bedrooms, one for Mom and Dad, one for me, and another room that my parents used for their office. It had a desk and filing cabinet for Dad, and bookshelves lined with books and completed journal notebooks for Mom. She told me she got into the habit of journaling in high school. She won a small scholarship to the Jesuit University for a paper she wrote on a social injustice happening at the time. She wrote about Haitian refugees attempting to flee their country to America, being deported and killed for attempting to flee. Out of all the area Catholic high schools, her entry was chosen as the first place winner and her English teacher encouraged her to continue writing. So every night after she helped me practice my math flash cards, she would write in her journal while I ate my evening snack and .tried to commit 2 + 2 to memory.

Momma would wash and iron my school uniform while I plucked the dying leaves from the houseplants. One time, I even helped her shampoo carpets. I would hold the hose so it was out of her way. Sometimes Momma would play nice music, but I loved it most when she sang, as if the wind rustled through the windows to keep in time.
Sometimes we would organize photos. Momma kept photos that were developed in a shoebox until she had time to organize them in albums.
I am looking at two particular photos now, the last two photographs taken of my mother before she came to America. Relatives always told me I looked so much like her in these photos. The first photo, she is in the arms of her Aunt Dhea, the aunt who raised her while her parents were in America, taken against a gray backdrop. Her aunt has thick shimmering black hair coiled into ringlets and pinned