Lembrança

Anthony Barcellos

The implantation was without intention. As a farmer, my grandfather had decades of experience deliberately fostering growth and fruition, but the seed he slipped deep into my brain involved not a particle of planning. Yet it is the reason that he remains with me nearly every day, half a century after our last conversation together. If, somehow, I could tell him about this, no doubt Avô would smile and give his head a small shake, racking up one more exhibit in the gallery of his grandson’s quirkiness.

I grew up next door to my grandparents, whose open-door policy made their home an extension of our own. We could drop in without ceremony, certain to receive a cheerful greeting from our grandmother and a tolerant nod from our grandfather. I often popped in late in the morning, after Avô’s trip to the post office. It was an opportunity to page through his English-language publications while he had lunch, Avó hovering over him to ensure her husband’s satisfaction with his meal. I recall the occasion when she tried something new and asked him how he liked it. “It was very good,” said Avô, “but don’t make it again.” His appetite for novelty was apparently entirely sated by the great adventure of uprooting the family from the Azores and bringing them to California nearly forty years earlier.

While I paged through Newsweek (I took Time at home) and the Tulare AdvanceRegister (we received the Porterville Recorder next door), feeding my voracious appetite for reading material, Avô would spoon quietly away at whatever Avó had placed before him. It was often a simple açorda, an authentic Azorean soup of eggs, bread, and greens. (I found it repulsive, and averted my eyes.) But whatever the meal entailed, Avô never left a completely empty plate. Whenever he pushed himself away from the dinner table, my grandfather habitually left a lembrança — a souvenir — on his plate.

Growing up in the Azores, Avô had received most of his education from the military academy on the island of Terceira. I have an ancient sepia photograph of my grandfather in his cadet uniform, posing with a brother and cousin, when he was (perhaps) barely a teenager. It was at the academy where they put a sock over his left hand to force him to learn to write with his right, thereby breaking him of the habit of favoring the hand sinister, well known to be the Devil’s preferred hand. It may also have been at the academy where he learned never to lick a plate clean. As best I could tell, since it was never explicitly explained to me, leaving a plate completely clean was a sign of gluttony, with the implication that one had been served a stingy helping. In other words, it was an implied insult to the server. Avó was fully accustomed to her husband’s quirk, which had been adopted by no one else in the family (which was replete with plate-cleaners).

Since I was too deferential (timid?) to inquire about the details, I was left to spin my own thoughts.

Every time my grandfather left a dab of egg yolk or a kale leaf on his plate, he was preventing it from becoming a part of him. Instead those items would embark on an entirely different journey, perhaps washed down the drain or scraped into a bin. This is the thought that has never left me, a meme for the ages.

Therefore, whenever a slice of olive from the pizza ends up in the trash, I think of my grandfather. When I cannot finish an entire serving of broccoli, I think of my grandfather. When a pinto bean is left behind, I think of my grandfather. It happens nearly every day. Everything in the world is connected, however tenuously, to everything else, and this notion resonates with my grandfather’s lembranças. When I brush a leaf from the hood of my car and realize it came from a tree in my mother’s front yard, over two hundred miles away, I think how it will contribute to the organics in my own front yard instead of its home of origin — and I oddly recall my avô.

I have a souvenir of my grandfather. It is oddly lodged in my brain, and I expect Avô will remain with me the rest of my life.

Anthony Barcelos