Sticks and Bones
I had a big nose when I was a kid. That’s what people told me, at least. Even my dad once told me I could get a nose job if I wanted to. I thought that was strange because I had his nose. When you are little, getting called “Big Nose” hurts. You don’t even know why. It’s just a nose. I can’t imagine that my nose was that much bigger than my friends’ noses. I think they really wanted to call me a Jew.
My mom had bone cancer. After she told me she was definitely going to die over lunch in Bridgehampton, she winced and craned to get into the car. This was more of a reality check than her telling me something I always knew was coming. Watching her writhe in pain from doing a mundane task stabbed me in the heart. I pressed my chest out for the knife.
I could overhear her whisper-yelling at my dad and then ramping up the volume for my benefit while I huddled in the basement room playing Bubble Bobble on Nintendo. Pop, pop - it was a fun game. “You do everything for the little Jew boy.” I couldn’t argue with her. I was technically a Jew boy, and my dad did do everything for me. She never called him a Jew man.
Both of my parents were cremated. We laid my dad’s ashes into the ground inside a coffin, which seemed like a bit of an overstretch. But I guess the ceremonial part of a funeral would feel oblong if they only lowered a tiny jar of ashes into the ground in Sag Harbor. My mom’s ashes were in a bag in the back of my red Saab 900 for a year before I released them into the wind on the beach in front of the White Sands motel in Amagansett. Dust in the ground. Dust in the wind.
I always had big pores. It’s not something I noted in my high school yearbook as a skill or trait, but it was a thing. Not all black dots were blackheads, and no number of pads could clean them. They weren’t pimples, but sometimes you could mini-pop them. To be honest, it was pretty fun to squeeze a blackhead pore on my nose, and then another. A friend of my ex-wife’s once told her that I still had pimples all over my face as an adult. Little did she know I just had big pores.
My dad’s mother, my grandmother, always had jowls. She liked to raise her voice in humor and strife, and you never really knew which was which. She talked about sex until she was senile, and then still talked about it. She used to pee in her seat at Thanksgiving because she didn’t want to wear adult diapers. It’s understandable to me now. You don’t want to be a baby again. She never got sick, I don’t think. I didn’t go to the funeral. I wonder what my relatives said about me that day.
You don’t know how little sticks and stones matter when your life becomes sticks and bones.
© Jonathan Greene, August 24, 2026
