My Cousin and I Leading My Dead Grandfather Through a Park in Berlin (A Dream)

Somehow we found ourselves in a park with grass and trees and flowers and the sky was even blue– Michael, me, and our grandfather Walter. Walter the butcher. The bowler. The Chicago cubs fan. Walter was ninety and had the untrustable, falling apart body of a ninety year old. I guided him by the arm as Mike strode ahead and Walter pushed his body forward slowly with a cane. He was being washed in nostalgia and trauma from when he grew up in Darmstadt, eventually being forced to escape to the States and leave his mother there, with a faint promise to send for her, a promise unfulfilled as she perished in the camps soon after he left. Michael had three children back in Chicago and I had none. Instead I chose to leave the US and return to Deutschland to live, with maybe even some slight percentage of the decision restitution for what happened to my family. “How is it to be here, grandpa?” I asked as we walked, as the pigeons flew out of the way along the path. “What?” Walter answered, as he was hard of hearing, as he had been for years, a thing he sometimes used as an excuse to tune out his wife, but perhaps, I thought, a lot of his attention was on his experience returning to Deutschland, and he just wasn’t listening to me. “How is it being back here, grandpa?” I repeated, this time leaning closer to his ear as we walked. “You and MIchael have grown plump,” he said, a twisting, gravel of a German accent still lacing his voice. I smiled and watched MIchael bound ahead like a young deer, excited to be adventuring outside of his homeland.