His jokes turned out to be stupid and racist. Moreover, some of them weren’t even jokes but long pointless stories that ended with my grandfather saying things like “And then I said, ‘Oh yeah?’ ” She realized he bitched endlessly about his lot in life, and when he wasn’t being nasty, he was merely banal; when not paranoid, he was boring. Soon his conversation made his handsome face grow ugly; his expression took on a cruel quality; his mouth, half open, became an expression of his stupidity. From then on every day was worsened by the new language barrier that had grown up between them- the barrier of speaking the same language.

Dad put the photographs back in the box with a dark expression, as if he had wanted a trip down memory lane but when he got there he remembered it was his least favorite street.

“OK, that’s your grandparents. All you have to know about grandparents is that they were young once too. You have to know they didn’t mean to be the embodiment of decay or even want especially to hold on to their ideas until their final day. You have to know they didn’t want to run out of days. You have to know they are dead and that the dead have bad dreams. They dream of us.”

He stared at me for a while, waiting for me to say something. Now, of course, I know that everything he told me was merely an introduction. I didn’t understand back then that after a good, cleansing monologue, Dad wanted nothing more than for me to prod him into another one. I just pointed to the swings and asked him to push me.

“You know what?” he said. “Maybe I’ll throw you back into the ring for another round.”

He was returning me to school. Maybe he knew it was there I would learn the second part to that story, that I would inevitably discover another, crucial ingredient to my own distinctive identity soup.

A month into my new school I was still trying to adjust to being among other children again, and I decided I’d never comprehend why Dad went from ordering me to despise these people to ordering me to blend in with them.