Written for my grandmother on her 75th birthday, "In My Grandmother's Gait" pays tribute to the energy and vitality of this, my only living grandparent. But it also deals with a number of other complex issues: the ephemeral nature of emotions and psychological states-of-mind; the non-deliberate fusing of memories; identity via familial roots; the relationship between art and human experience; coping with existential angst; the veneration of ordinary objects and experience; and the individual's dilemma of trying to maintain a coherent sense of self against a fragmentary reality. This and "Tree Lights" were dual first prize winners for poetry at the 1997 Sinclair Community College Contest, in Dayton, Ohio.