ONE TUESDAY IN 1916, MY POPPA DAVE WAS BORN.
I have a huge picture of Poppa Dave as a baby on my living room wall. The frame is egg-shaped, brass and leafy, evoking some repurposed royal bedframe, some garland, someone else’s crown of thorns. He looks surprised in the picture—big and surprised. Surely some unusual and unusually bright lights had invaded his space, rendered it unfamiliar. He is caught in their brightness. With a well-combed head of hair, he is sitting caught, life-sized and blue-eyed on a furry blanket on a couch, or on the pelt of a wolverine on the floor of that decrepit Brooklyn tenement where his mother, Dorothy—my great-grandmother— barely kept him alive with breast milk, and then later, those orange blobs of chicken fat. I didn’t initially intend to write about Poppa Dave in this book, but he kept asserting himself on the text—in memory, of course— when I went in search of personal narrative—my personal connections to my own obsession with the squid. He, too, was larger than life, and still is—as a giant baby hanging on my wall. Do you have particular memories of a departed loved one that occur to you often, and in the most seemingly random of moments? How do these memories, do you think, affect your own interests and obsessions?
