When He Can'T Sleep

He remembers his grandmother sitting next to him on the couch during naptime; his two-year-old body restless and jumpy. She would yawn a tremendous open, lion’s mouth yawn and shake her mane of hair that fell around her shoulders . . . and he would wait for the roar that never came. Instead, her measured breath would flow out into the sigh of the breeze through the trees or the swell of the ocean - the earth’s inhalations, it seemed. Years later in Iraq and Iran, as missiles whistled overhead, the roar of tankers and hard-scrabble footsteps loud in the night, he puts himself to sleep with the memory of her breathing.