Bronx Nonagenarians | Bronx, Family, Love, Death

Bronx Nonagenarians

By Gerard Sarnat,

Voyeuring him bit by bit slip her soiled white undies
up, then little by little lift her dead-weight body
down off the elevated handicapped john; now
I recall a once freckled red-haired, smiling
young woman: the only mother who tidied my bottom,
later taught me how to toss baseballs and hit tennis
backhands -- while Dad was too busy in the hospital or lab.

Today, maybe eighty years since he vowed NEVER
to drop his guard like my grandfather did;
perhaps thirty years after his older brother went
missing on retirement day -- found in his Buick sedan
off the Cross Bronx Expressway when snows finally thawed --
he tends to his wife with so much love and compassion
that it makes me cry, not totally sadly.

Gerard Sarnat has intermittently worked and played and visited his children living throughout New York City for over forty years. He is a father of three, seeker and Jewbu, physician to the disenfranchised, past CEO and Stanford professor, and virginal writer 'til the tender age of sixty. He now splits time between his Northern California forest home and Southern California's beaches, where he and his wife care for their first grandson.

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