WEBVTT

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I should read the poem
to my grandmother too.

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I didn't like my grandmother.

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[LAUGHTER]

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She was a wrestling fan.

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[LAUGHTER]

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She wanted to be an
American so badly.

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And she didn't know
they could tell.

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[LAUGHTER]

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No way you could miss it.

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Yeah.

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She became a
Christian Scientist.

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She moved to Los Angeles--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--took up wrestling.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I saw photographs of her as
a young-- my mother told me

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that she was very beautiful
when she was a young woman

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and that her family
was appalled that she

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married beneath her because
her father was a butcher.

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[LAUGHTER]

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A chicken butcher, to be exact.

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Now, how do you
marry beneath that?

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You marry my grandfather.

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That's how.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And she tried to be so proper.

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And the poem is called
"Grandmother in Heaven."

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And heaven is where we
live without us because we

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were what made it hell.

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[LAUGHTER]

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If we'd just all gone off one
day and left her there alone,

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she'd have been so happy.

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"Grandmother in Heaven," which
I do not think is where she is.

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Darkness gathering in
the branches of the elm,

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the car lights going
home, someone's

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beautiful Polish daughter with
a worn basket of spotted eggs,

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an elbow of cabbage,
carrots, leaves,

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chicken claws
scratching the air.

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She comes up the cracked walk
to the stairway of shadows

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and lost dolls and lost breath.

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Beautiful Polish daughter,
with hands as round

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and white as buns, daughter
of no lights in the kitchen.

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No one sits on the sofa.

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No one dreams in the tub.

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She, in her empty
room in heaven,

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unpacking the basket
piece by piece

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on the silent enamel table,
with a little word for each,

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a curse for the bad back
and the black radish

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and three quick
spits for the pot.

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