January 5, 2009

• red hat

  i love going to visit my grandma m.  even though she never fails to mention how frail and weak she is, she’s always spry and lively when i go to visit her.  she’s still living on her own on the upper west side, though she only ventures out when the sidewalks are absolutely pristine. 

  she’s not actually my grandma, but we’ve just come to adopt her as our own.  she used to freelance with my mom a long time ago when scarf designers still painted with brushes.  she’s a quarter scandinavian, and three quarters russian, but her family moved to argentina during the russian revolution, so her family lives in buenos aires when they’re not taking care of their ranch near the border with brazil.  she’s also a classically trained opera singer so, get your fingers out, she can speak, russian, french, italian, spanish and english fluently, not to mention the other languages she “dabbles” in.  when i go to visit her, she and i always chat in french, though she’s intent on me learning spanish.  when my mom comes, she readily flips between english and french.  and since i’ve started bringing r, she speaks french, english, and a bit of spanish and german.  yes, i love visiting her.

  one thing i love are her stories.  she’s never once repeated a story to me.  every time we visit her, there is a completely new repetoire she reels through as she, in true grandmotherly fashion, manages to feed us a full lunch, homemade cakes, cookies, tea, ice cream and coca-cola. 

  yesterday, we were talking about brazil, and she shuddered a bit. 

  “it’s just that i do not like rio de janeiro!  they do not speak spanish there!”

  when we asked her why, she began to tell us the story of a trip she took with her parents over 80 years ago!  she says she remembers very little of this period in her life, but she remembers every exact detail of this trip.  her family took a cruise to rio from buenos aires.  while the boat was docked, there were able to walk ashore and enjoy a bit of shopping and site-seeing.  towards the end of their day, they found themselves in the sea-front stalls examining various knick-knacks for sale.  she was with her father, while her sister was with her mother.  she remembers looking at one toy, and then reaching up to grab her father’s attention, except, he wasn’t there.  when she swiveled around, she could find no one in her family.  she ran out of the store and began frantically looking from store to store, but no family was to be seen.

  at this point, she grew frantic and began to cry.  not too long afterwards, a brazilian woman came and talked to her…in portuguese.  she could not understand one word and her tears grew even more severe.  when it was clear that the woman could not be understood, she grabbed her hand and began dragging m away.  though she was young, she knew that the boat was to the left, but this woman was pulling her to the right.  she grew even more frantic when they walked right past a policeman, and onto the main avenue into town.  people were everywhere and m was hysterical.

  later, she found out that her father had slipped over to the other store to see how his wife and older daughter were doing, and when his wife asked him where m was, he replied, “i thought she was with you.”  when he ran back to the store, m was already gone, and he began to run frantically from store to store.  to add more drama to the story, this was a time when many young blond headed children were disappearing from the streets because they could be sold for a fair sum.  the fact that the lady leading m walked right past a police officer led credence to this practice.

  m’s father frantically ran towards the main avenue, and saw a swarm of people…dressed in black, as was the fashion in those days, and from a distance, he could barely make out a distinct red hat.  m was the only person wearing a red hat and a red cape.  he quickly ran to her, and scooped her into his arms as she cried, “daddy!  daddy!”  the woman disappeared into the crowd.

  as if this story weren’t interesting enough, everything about this incident dissolved into a haze until it came back into clear focus decades later when m’s father passed away.  she was nearly forty when he passed away, and when sifting through his possessions, she found…the red hat she had not seen since she was a little girl.  her father had secretly kept it among his things to remember both the worst and best day of his life…and amazingly, four score later, a little korean girl and a boy from iowa were privy to this amazing story.

  just wanted to share a slice with you…

  • 4:47 pm
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