Long ago in foggy beginning of 2008, it were two unforgetable eternal xmas weeks under one roof with my 80 years old grandmother. She is a mutant, a space-brain owner. She is between sanctity and crazyness. She is the Queen of time traveling, forgetting, illusions and conversation. She is the most bright example for the quantum theory and spell casting. She is nothing and everything, never and forever, green and red, cold and warm, hungry and full, static and dinamic, fool and wise, blind and sharp-sighted, young and old, fast and slow. No beginning and no end.
Ivan
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You can’t choose when you get the chance to know someone.
When I knew my gran, my cousins and I were amazed by the way she could blow cigarette smoke out of her ears. We were fascinated by how she could remember the names of all the plants in the world and even remember the names of all the weeds. She was magical!
We used to sit on her living room couch, all of the pillow covers she had knitted, and the house smelled of hokey-pokey cookies and settled like only a gran’s house can.
She’d print out a sheet from the computer with rows of dots on it and we would connect one dot to another with really sharp pencils, trying not to draw a box. She looked after us just liked she looked after my dad and my uncle I suppose.
She slowly lost her memory and could no longer remember what happened the day before. Partly because of her practical approach to things and partly because she was afraid of losing her mind, she would write everything down. Her scientific training served her well.
As my brother and I stood at each side of her bed, about 12 hours before she died, not knowing what to say or do, my Gran reached out and took in each of her hands one of ours. She remembered that she loved us and we knew that we loved her.
It doesn’t matter when I had the chance to know my gran or even what I remember in the end. All that matters is that once, I did.
Nicole
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I’ve just read a post by Dalarius about has first memory. Actually it’s a great idea to learn first memories of many people…Want to see more on this site. So here is my addition to this little collection:
I don’t know which one comes first.
Either it’s a memory of a passage through an arch under a building: I remember watching up and seeing yellow paint, rotten by time and falling apart, so another, faint layer of a mustardish color paint seen under. I have a feeling I also remember the smell, a smell which I would identify now as a smell of see. I’m not walking, rather I’m carried away in hands or in pram, as the movement is smooth, and after the passage I catch a glimpse of a dark blue sky, full on without anything else in view.
Another one can be pinpointed easily, as it’s my 3 years old birthday party; as a kid I used to spend every summer in my grandmother’s house in Ukraine. So this memory is set in her garden just outside the house, and we (or most of our big family: aunts, uncle, cousins etc.) sit behind birthday table in the shadows of blackcherry and apple trees. My grandma made my favorite apple pie, and from the rest of flour she made a little bird and baked it in oven. She gives it to me. I don’t want it. I’m busy with my present: a set of Aurora’s battleship revolutionary sailors: they run on the table towards the immanent death from indians, my cousin teamed them up with a set of cowboys (what an unexpected alliance!) and hid them behind the barricade of fruits, cutlery and dominoes. To assault his defense, my sailors have to cross the open space of the table to another side. The half of my unit is already lost. I move my teacup over the table, so my sailors can advance behind it, hidden from enemy’s fire and tomahawks. We are close. I still have 4 or 5 left, and one sailor is pulling a machine gun Maxim; surely Indians armed mainly with lances and knives and cowboys with lassos are not a match for it. Suddenly a bird sitting on the tree above defecates, it’s shit falls precisely in the cup followed by splash.
- It’s for luck! That’s a very good sign!- exclaims my grandmother, my cup being immediately removed.
A bird shit in my tea is good? I don’t think so; everybody around laughs, I start to cry. I’m upset about my tea, and about my lost campaign, and about that silly bird cookie I have to eat.
abraxus
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