Moirai

Dinosaurs. Neanderthals. The Roman Empire. Abraham Lincoln. The USSR. The United States of America. The President. Dance halls. Football. Record stores. Game shows. My whole family. Every one of them: My brother Ben. My sister-in-law Fernanda. My niece Betty. My nephews, Phillip, Benito. My mother, who taught me English. Opa and Oma, who taught me German. My father, who taught me Spanish. Gone. Gone. Now I'm the only one who knows their names. I have to remember the others. As many people as possible. There's no one else alive who can. Teresa, who taught me Polish behind the bleachers after football practice. My high school French teacher, who called my parents to ask them how I was confusing Polish with French. All those boys in basic. All those boys on the base. Frankie, Enzo, Michal, and Walter. All those folks we flew over. All the ones Frankie missed. Master Sgt. Grant, who gave me a new life. Moscow's finest inadvertent Russian tutors, who should have checked their phone lines more carefully. Mrs. Rodriguez on the third floor, who always brought tamales for Christmas. Fellini. Watson. Ginger. …Hypatia. The victims at Les Diablerets. The neighbor kid who gave me that great Cambodian psychedelic record in exchange for helping his parents with their taxes. The woman in yellow who gave me her number dancing at Latin Night at the Mirador. (It's still in my pants pocket. Her name was Rosario… Cosas así, sólo me pasan a mí…) Hundreds of cities. Thousands of languages. Millions of species. Billions upon billions of human lives.

Ben. Ben.