This old lady writes books of essays. They are not written to be published. In fact, she has forbidden anyone to even try to publish them. They are too personal for one thing, she says, and are just the memories of an old woman. But she recovers texts from her old journals, types new ones, saves and prints these reminiscences (having mastered computers at the age of eighty), and I am to be counted among the lucky few to be given copies.
The past is an ever increasing weight and I think this is her way of rendering her burden lighter.
Through those pages, fading images come to life, and the reader gets to know the gallery of her uncles and aunts, cousins, relatives, friends and acquaintances in colorful passages that took place during her long and fruitful life. She introduced the woman she was when she was young, naive and hopeful and she has shown her husband in a light no one else could ever have seen him. She captures snapshots of daily life with a keen eye for what is essentially human in people. She tells of how, in the course of almost half a century, the steps leading to the front door of her old house were worn out by the coming and going of many people and one gets to know small pieces of the lives of those who passed by that threshold.
She is a peculiar sort this old lady of mine. Through the many difficult and troubled times life has presented her with, she never lost the joy of living and has never ceased to thank the Lord for the many blessings she saw in everything that came her way. A sense of purpose permeates everything she does and writes. It is as if all that happens is meant to improve her spirit and she sees every little event in her path as being pregnant with meaning, as an opportunity to improve her knowledge of people and things. For she sees life as sacred.
Through her eyes one learns not only the stories of her life and of the lives of those who surrounded her and imagine we can feel the rain as it fell when her eyes were young and picture the faces of people as she describes them, but we also learn about the city and its streets, the much simpler ways of the past, the scarcity of the war years and the rapid changes the world underwent after that. We go with her for a walk in time and it is possible to see underneath the present, the pale presence of the layers of the past becoming vivid again.
She is an old lady full of stories to tell.
Some of her stories are about commonplace events and some overflow with sadness and human tragedy. Some are about happy instances and others are just plain funny. All are interesting. She has very personal turns of phrases and unusual points of view from which to show things. And, after reading her texts, one can’t help being grateful for the privilege of being alive in such a time and being able to share in it with her.
We talk on the phone two, maybe three times a week. In those long conversations she tells me many other stories that never make into her books.
This old lady is my mother, but this is another story.
