One of my earliest memories is a room swathed in white. An unmade bed next to an open window, white drapes billowing in a breeze and sheets and blankets covering the mattress in disarray.
A rumbling laugh, my own bubbling giggles, a sense of safety and awe.
I used to wonder if that memory was just a dream, but after talking to my father I learned that it must have been from when I spent time in France as a toddler. My mother is French and during those visits we would stay with her father and siblings. I was very young at the time, and the only memory I have is the one of the white room, unmade bed, and my grandfather’s laugh.
My grandfather was a rotund man, short and stocky, with a gummy smile and round cheeks like mine. He wore dentures. A puff of pure white hair hung over his head like a halo. His voice was thick and gravelly, like sandpaper scraped over asphalt, and he was an avid smoker for years. I don’t remember the smell of cigarettes hanging around him, but I do remember his voice.
However, I think the most important thing I remember about him is how he made me feel like I mattered.
He visited us when I was nine or ten; it wasn’t long after my parents divorced. My mother did her best to keep him all to herself. She didn’t want him to spend much time with my sister and me, always calling him over if he so much as tried to speak to us. Sometimes I felt like she didn’t think we were important enough for him to spend time with. As things turned out, I haven’t spoken to her for eight years, but that’s another story.
She wanted all his attention on her. They spoke to each other in rapid French, laughter and jokes falling over me in a waterfall of language and tone. I could understand why she wanted to be near him; he radiated a sense of comfort. He was like a tortoise; he moved a bit slowly and drew out his words, but it was due to his intelligence. He took his time thinking about what to say, thoughts whirring around in his mind, and when he looked at me I felt like I was finally being seen.
My most vivid and precious memory of him is of one evening when he was able to steal away from her for a few moments and he sought me out. He carefully sat down on the edge of my bed and watched me while I practiced clarinet at my desk.
He perched there, like a gentle old owl, and listened as I haltingly played my instrument. I wasn’t very good, but I tried extra hard for him. He gazed at me thoughtfully, head cocked a bit to the side as he listened. In that moment, I had all his attention. I felt warm inside.
After I finished, he clapped and smiled. “Ma cherie,” he said in his gravelly voice, “C’était tres bien, it was very good.”
He told me he wanted to buy me a CD of a classical clarinet piece, Mozart perhaps.
I felt shy but also touched. My mother didn’t care much for my clarinet playing; she never encouraged me or listened to me play. Sometimes she made disparaging remarks or jokes about it, so I never felt like she took me seriously. Her children’s wants and needs were just burdens to her, things that took away from what she truly cared about in life, which was her horse and herself.
But that evening, I felt like I was being taken seriously. I felt heard and appreciated, like I mattered to someone.
The next day, my grandfather bought me a book and a CD of a clarinet concerto. My mother scoffed and said I didn’t need those things. But he didn’t listen to her, insisting that I get them.
All the way home, I clutched my gifts closely.
As the years went on, he would send us gifts, usually French comic books. He would write a note inside, dedicating the book to one of us. My mother always grabbed those gifts and said he actually meant to send them to her. After a while, she wouldn’t even let us look at them. I never got to read one of them and even now, the only book I have left from him is the first one he bought me all those years ago.
I think about him a lot and wish I could have spoken to him as an adult; he passed away when I was 15. He had been 74 and he died in his bed, hand clutching his heart and a peaceful expression on his face.
I try to remember him as I last saw him and piece together things my father told me about him.
He suffered during World War II; his family went hungry. Afterwards, he never wasted food and was very careful with money.
My father said that when he lived with my mother and her family in Paris before I was born, my grandfather would bring out a special tin after meals. Inside there were squares of milk and dark chocolate, and he would hand them out. Then, he took his time deciding which one he was going to have, if it was a milk or dark chocolate sort of moment. An important decision, I think.
He loved art from China and Japan. Japanese woodblock prints peppered the walls of his home. He was an avid reader, even reading books by Communists and philosophers.
He worked for the French government collecting taxes and he and his family were stationed in Martinique for years before moving back to Paris when my mother was nine. They lived in an apartment above his office, all seven of them. When my grandmother left him, taking their youngest with her, he was left with four children to raise on his own. My father told me that one night, my mother crept down into his office and found him with a gun pointed at his head. He had lost all hope. She eventually took it from him and coaxed him back upstairs. But I think about that a lot; the hopelessness he must have felt, the despair, the sadness.
He was never very tall, but he was dapper. His mother was even shorter than he was, not even five feet, and from a small village on the French and Italian border.
If he could see me now, I think he would be proud. I am a single parent of four myself and I work hard every day to take good care of my kids. I think he would have loved to have known them.
He went through a lot of hardships, but I think in the end he made peace with life. I believe that he found happiness and pleasure in everyday things: a fresh baguette, chocolate, art, books, his family, the French countryside.
No matter what my mother thought or said, my sister and I were precious to him, just as he was precious to us.
