Reading Coffee Grounds

Few of us are graced with overlapping life with our great-grandparents.
Fewer still have memories of them.

I met my great-grandmother once.
I have a very vague memory of her—
not enough to actually share.

This is the story of her funeral.

I don’t recall precisely how old I was.
Young—somewhere between seven and eight, I think.
I know this, because it was right before we moved to Virginia.

We were already living together with Granny and Boompa.
It was a family road trip.
The funeral was in Cleveland.

That’s where Boompa grew up, Cleveland.
He used to tell me stories about it.
He made it sound like growing up in New York.
I think he secretly wanted to have grown up in New York.

His mother, my great-grandmother, had immigrated to the U.S. from Sicily.
He told me stories about that too.
He was born shortly after they arrived.

He was one of the younger children in the family.
I think he had just one brother and seven sisters.
They all had similar names.
His name was Joseph, and he had a sister named Josephine.
A Catholic thing, or so I was told.

He had a brother, Sammy, too.
I don’t remember Sammy, apparently he gave me my first haircut.
He was a barber.

Sammy died before I can remember.
Boompa told me he was shot to death in the street for his wallet.

“Never let anyone know how much money is in your wallet,”
Boompa warned me.
“They might try to shoot you too.”

I don’t know if it was before or after my great-grandmother’s funeral,
but it was during that trip to Cleveland
that one of the older women in the family—
maybe a cousin, maybe one of Boompa’s sisters—
did readings of espresso grounds for everyone.

I was technically too young to drink espresso.
Every now and then, I would steal a sip of coffee.
That would usually get me yelled at—sometimes spanked.

“But it puts me right to sleep,” I argued.
“Every time I have coffee, I feel tired—not full of energy.”

Tell me you have ADHD without telling me you have ADHD.

Eventually, I wore them down.
They gave in.

I drank my little cup of espresso.
It was small, even for my child hands.

I handed the empty cup to the woman,
in a dimly lit kitchen,
with the thick grounds settled at the bottom.

She stared into the cup for several moments,
then raised her gaze to meet mine.

What she said to me that day is etched into my memory.
I was young—
and she was promising to tell me about my future.
I was paying attention.

“You have three loves,” she told me.
“And your life will be painful.”

I don’t know if she could see the future.
I don’t know if it was all just hocus pocus.

My life has certainly been painful—at least at times.
And I’ve had many loves.

Maybe she saw that I would grow up to be polyamorous…