Richard Levine

Each night, in a space he’d make between waking and purpose, my grandfather donned his one suit, in our still dark house, and drove through Brooklyn’s deserted streets following trolley tracks to the bakery. There he’d change into white linen work clothes and cap, and in the absence of women, his hands were both loving, well into dawn and throughout the day— kneading, rolling out, shaping each astonishing moment of yeasty predictability in that windowless world lit by slightly swaying naked bulbs, where the shadows staggered, woozy with the aromatic warmth of the work. Then, the suit and drive, again. At our table, graced by a loaf that steamed when we sliced it, softened the butter and leavened the very air we’d breathe, he’d count us blessed.

All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling work of turning a yard from the wild to a gardener’s will, I heard a bird singing from a hidden, though not distant, perch; a song of swift, syncopated syllables sounding like,Can you believe this, believe this, believe? Can you believe this, believe this, believe?