In hindsight, the whole event could have been resolved with a search engine
but even if they existed, I probably wouldn’t have had the skills to have mastered them.
If there was an encyclopedia lying around, I wouldn’t have known how to use it
to prove my point, so how would Google have gotten me through?
It was just me against my Grandmother, and I didn’t have the tools yet
for that kind of bullshit.

When I arrived down in North Carolina to visit my mother’s parents, I was proud
of having taken the plane by myself. I was a big boy! The flight attendants
had told me so. I was calm and cool without my parents as we drove to Chapel Hill
where my grandparents bunked.

I peered out the window.
“These trees are awesome! They’re all so… straight!”
“All trees are straight,” My Grandma observed.
“Mm,” I thought, recalling Central Park, and the gnarled monsters
branching in all directions
reaching upwards, yes
but also crawling through roots everywhere
with branches torturously twisting toward anything it could imagine.
“Not in New York.”

Grandma looked at me. “Trees reach toward the sun. The sun is up. Trees are straight.”
“I don’t know about that, Grandma. I’ve seen straight trees before, sometimes. But not always.
There are lots of bent trees back at home.”
She would not give this up.
How could the old woman be so intransigent?
We argued the whole way to Chapel Hill.
I don’t think we ever resolved the issue.
I’ve kept my eye out for crooked trees, ever since,
though Grandma’s been in the grave for thirty years.

Only now, in research, did I put the question to Google
but
I won’t dignify this poem
with the answer.