My grandfather's name was Samuel. When I was four, I started calling him Percy.

 Every Saturday, I sat on his lap in a lawn chair in the back yard. My mother and I picked him up from The Home around noon, and drove him back after dinner. As soon as we arrived, my mother made a beeline to the TV  to turn off midget wrestling. Percy watched it every Saturday morning.  She'd turn to me and give me the look.  I looked back.  It wasn't like I was watching it. 

Percy came from Somewhere Around Lithuania. My family's origins were ambiguous. Nobody in our family came from France or Italy or Lithuania. It was Somewhere Around There. My mother said it was because they were Jews, and Jews moved around so much, people forgot where they came from. I'm not sure I bought that story since her oldest sister was born in Lithuania. My mother just didn't like telling stories.

This is what I did find out about Percy:  He loved my grandmother's sister and wanted to marry her. Her parents said no, the oldest sister had to be married first. So, he married my grandmother.

When Percy came to America, he settled somewhere in South Carolina. A few years later, he sent for his wife and daughter.  My uncle, and then my mother were born.  Percy moved his family up north and opened the Quality Bakery, which until I could read, I thought it was called the Kvality Bakery. My mother and her sister worked in the bakery as teenagers after school, until my aunt married and moved away. It was up to my seventeen year old mother to work in the bakery alongside my grandfather. He needed her help in the kitchen, but also for taking customer's orders with her perfect English. Her dreams of college and a career faded as she sold fresh rye bread and kichel to the steady stream of customers. The Quality bakery thrived for many years until it burned during the riots of 1968. 

Now Saturday didn't mean baking bread or rolling out dough for pastries anymore.  Saturday meant sitting in a lawn chair with a chatterbox on his lap. Percy didn't always understand my stories, but it didn't seem to deter me. My brother said he probably turned his hearing aid off when he saw me coming, but I don't think so. I think I made Percy happy. I know I made him laugh. I rode my tricycle around him in circles while he sat on the green and white lawn chair reading the Yiddish newspaper. I showed him the five ballet positions I knew. I did cartwheels for him. I think I amused him like some sort of trained chimp. 

He was the only grown-up who let me sit on his lap. I took his hearing aid out of his front pocket and examined it. I touched his bristly mustache while he pretended to bite my finger. He never seemed to grow tired of my antics. Even when I startled him with the beetle shells I'd collected from the old pine tree, he never seemed to grow tired of me.

After dinner we drove him back across the city to "The Home."  I didn't see anything about it that looked like a home. My mother did her best to make his room comfortable, but there was nothing homey about it. The old people there were sick and grumpy and scowled at me. Unlike Percy, who smiled every time he saw me.  I wanted him to stay with us in our house for always, but my father said no.

 After school, I collected beetle shells from the old pine tree.  I practiced my ballet positions and my cartwheels. I put a new basket on my tricycle. 

And I waited for another Saturday with Percy.