Heart.

Missing graciousness, missing someone, covered in blankets, eating pecans by the handful, breathing, headache, too warm, feverish, feeling in my stomach like the bottom dropped out (trying to hold my thoughts together as a cradle, a scaffold of wooden beams, of rough boards).

My father is a clockmaker. My grandfather was a woodworker and made small wooden jewelry boxes. He lined each of them with green felt. He turned them on the lathe, and sandwiched different colored woods together to make patterns.

I miss him so much today it is breaking my heart from the inside, stretching the scaffolding to its limit, heartbeats have become painful.

At the end of my time in Rome, years ago, I went to Naples for the weekend with my friend Christa. It was December and there were stalls everywhere selling tiny painted things. They were selling every imaginable miniaturized object for making your own nativity scene, your own personal creche--everything from tiny butchers with sides of beef and rib roasts, to bottle caps that had been filled with clay and painted to look like tubs of fish, tiny mangers, vegetables, tiny sheep, wise men, tiny platters of food. I have never been so charmed. I have never loved a culture more for taking a ritual to this most minute of extremes.

I have always had a fascination with small objects, souvenirs, religious objects of ritual, kitsch. In Palermo, I collected photos of shrines and small palm fronds from the botanic gardens. In Naples I collected glow-in-the-dark baby jesus crowns, tiny vials of Mary's tears, postcards of the splinter that was covered in blood, in the shrine under the church. In Rome I collected buttons and took photos of shop windows. In Rome I collected and made maps in my head, I walked, I learned the city as I walked it-- circuitous routes turned visual and matched the interior mapping of my own brain.

In Siracusa I felt wide open and couldn't carry anything with me. I absorbed impressions then that are still crystalline, still sensuous, still almost wordless: giant cement levee blocks along the shore, a white-grey stone city set on water, sides of churches like bones growing out of earth, trees full of loud invisible birds, black smudges of chestnut smoke fouling the air at dusk, shelves of bejeweled pastel pastries that seemed lit from within, and these things combining to be terrible and nostalgic at the same time, at that time of evening, of impending dark falling in a strange place.

In Naples I bought two tin saint objects-- two body parts pressed out of tin. These are the objects you pin to the walls inside of churches, either praying for help with ailments, or as a thanks for healing. They are bizarrely specific. The first object was a chest, it seemed strange, just a squarish torso, no arms, no head, cut off at the waist. I thought it was funny. The second object was an ornately latticed heart. I tucked this away in my luggage and gave it to my grandfather a month later as a gift.

His heart troubles had been worsening, I think this was the time they put a pacemaker in. When he went to see his doctor the next time, he had taped the tin heart to his chest, over his heart, under his shirt. The doctor laughed, my grandfather laughed, we laughed when he told us the story. But the act was also implicit and shot through with a shivering undercurrent of intensity. It connected him to me. Without having to explain, we both knew that my gift was protecting him, I was protecting him, we were connected, he understood, I was loved. Life could be strange and terrible and frail, his heart was limping along in the reediest of ways, in the most painful of fits and starts, but for that moment was resonant, shiny, sparkling.

For that moment, the thinnest of tin thickness protected him from the inevitable. He was the youngest of seven children, and had outlived all of his large family. By making two months shy of 90, he accomplished what he had set out to do-- raise a beautiful family, dote on a sweet and brown-eyed wife for 65 years, see things. I remember driving him through Seattle, and my college at the time, UW, and him saying "yep, it feels like college." He also constantly asked me if I really knew where I was going as women drivers made him nervous. His humor was epitomized by him taking photos of a fountain that someone had spilt red dye into, and sending this photo to his friends in Germany, telling them that "in America the rivers run with wine, and the streets are paved with gold."

I know he waited for me to return to Colorado before he died last year. When I walked into his hospital room the day he died he said "Well, your hair is still red." Yes.