Visiting My Twenty-Something Grandson

in NYC

by Karen Luke Jackson

His fascination with ink I don’t grasp, but when he asks Do you want to see my newest tattoo? I quickly say yes. He rolls up his sleeve, grins when I startle at a bullfrog-covered bicep. The amphibian, robed and mitered, grasps not a staff knobbed with a cross, but a honeysuckle limb. A summer working in the Hamptons will do that to a guy, he says. As he rolls his sleeve down, I recall the tree frogs, neon green, at my parents’ home, their webbed feet suctioned to the kitchen windows on summer nights, their translucent throats ballooning in and out as they cried for rain. A child then, my grandson toted a flashlight outside, set it in the grass, and caught one in his palms. Can I keep him for a pet, he begged above the frog’s croaks. No, I said. You have to let him go.