Paternal Grandparents & Cousin When G'Ma Could Still Walk

THE FIRST STORY TELLERS IN MY LIFE

     They are all long gone now, my parents, my sister, brother and of course, my grandparents. I am the survivor.  I have become the keeper of memories and the story weaver for new generations, friends and clients.  I have reshaped and shifted my own stories multiple times.  I know that life is delicate and fragile, but simultaneously strong, with potential for ravaging our emotional terrain with a terrible swiftness.  With that same ferocity, the storms of life can wash new seeds to our barren soil and new possibilities will spring up in the least expected places. 

       They are long gone, but I still see their faces and hear their voices every day. It doesn’t take much for me to conjure up their images.  Once I was afraid that the passage of time would make that impossible, but I know now that they will always be with me, incorporated into who I am and making the fabric of my being stronger as I age with the wisdom, truths and tales they all taught me as a child.  They were my very first story weavers.  They were the masons who built the foundation on which I rest my life and which supports many of my choices and actions even today. 

       The yarns my grandparents unraveled stretched all the way from the villages of their childhoods in Eastern Europe, to days of struggle in New York tenements, to picket lines of early union organizing days and heated debates of park bench politics in New York’s Union Square. My paternal grandparents lived with us for a time and weekend mornings would find me happily snuggling in the bed between them, safely resting in the hollow made by my grandmother’s substantial body. I would listen to story after story, begging for more, until my mother would intervene with disapproval and remind us all, in her ever practical way, of chores and obligations that awaited us. My grandfather recounted family events, told me gossip about relatives I had never met, about his studies in Europe and his revolutionary passions and political philosophies.  He had  many quirky ideas, such as believing that people should be born old and get younger and he had this idea long before F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the story on which the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was based. My grandmother, Jenny, told me stories from the Old Testament and dramatized them with enthusiastic sound effects and exaggerated facial expressions. She had been crippled in an accident on the BMT West End Subway line  years before when she broke her hip, but gave up on life after the accident because her eldest son had just died at 42 of a massive coronary. She never walked unaided again. She mostly sat in a chair all day, but seemed to compensate for her lack of physical mobility with her animated dramatic (or melodramatic) style.

       Saturdays were spent with my maternal grandparents, who had emigrated from Romania.  My grandfather was a quiet, kind and gentle man, whose religion was not just in theory but guided his life in every way.  My grandmother was about 4 foot 8 inches tall but had a strong personality in spite of her very sweet face that never seemed to age, and looked to me almost the same as in the pictures of her on the walls when she was a beautiful young girl with flowers in her hair. She was born in Romania and came here as a girl, with her father and her siblings after her mother died in childbirth. One of my favorite stories of hers was a true tale of how she was kidnapped for a brief time by a band of roving gypsies, while she, a very pretty child, played with a ball on the front lawn of her wealthy uncle’s home in Bucharest. When they discovered her missing, her uncle, father and several others set out in a horse and buggy and combed the countryside till they found her, unharmed, around a campfire with the gypsies, who had treated her well, but who demanded a ransom. Her uncle gladly paid it but my grandmother, unlike the rest of her family, always had a fond feeling for the Romany people.  She also learned to heal with herbal preparations and incantations when she was a child and though she, like my mother, was for the most part a pragmatic woman, she would frequently suggest her remedies and impart her fascinating theories about causes for illnesses or psychological disturbances.

       One of my other favorite stories of hers, I think helped reinforce a belief in me that somehow things work out no matter how dark they may seem at the moment.  My grandfather had been out of work. It was some time in 1911 because my mother was an infant and her brother was about two years old. They were almost out of food and when my grandfather left one morning she told him he needed to go and pray that he would find a job immediately because they had exhausted all possibilities. My grandfather went to his synagogue to pray three times a day most days. That morning, my grandmother, feeling desperate, decided to resort to something she did not want to do.  In those days infants wore a quarter in a little pocket in a belly band to keep their belly buttons flat. My Bubby took the quarter and the children and went to the market. She returned with some guilt about what she had done, but with meat, bread, milk, eggs and even sweets. She knew that this could be their last decent food for some time.  That evening, my grandfather returned with a huge smile and informed her that he had a new job and that everything would turn out fine. 

       Finally, there was my sister, Carol, who died just four years ago. She was more than ten years older than me and was in many ways, like my second mother.  As a pre-schooler,  I was often transported from our tiny apartment on our shabby Brooklyn street, to the islands and countries of her imagination.  She lovingly beguiled me with stories of family adventures that happened long before my own birth.  Her interpretation of things was very different than that of my parents and I hung on every word. She told me convoluted stories of the secrets in our family, some of which were comedic and some tragic. She assumed voices of different characters, who would come into our pretend restaurant and she would fabricate amazing life stories for each one, just to amuse me and to entice me to eat the little bits of food she cooked on her working miniature stove. She would create elaborate Halloween costumes for me and for my neighborhood friends, and often there was a story created to go with the costumes. When my nephew, her first child, was born, and I was still a child myself, she continued her storytelling for us both. Ironically, in her own life, she was fearful of using her imagination in ways that would take her outside of the roles she felt were expected of her, but she encouraged imagination and yarn spinning in me and in my nephew, who was a talented young writer until his death at age 24.

        So, it seems fitting now, that I have an interest in how we create stories for our lives, how we can change those stories and can learn from stories created by others. I am most interested in how we can use stories in our coaching practices to help others gain insight and shift their perspectives.  I feel grateful and blessed for having had these first storytellers in my childhood.

Me With Brother Ray & Sister Carol

 

Mama & Her Parents