Grandma Rosa’s Gift
I met my father’s mother only once in my entire life. Despite the fact that she renounced him for what she considered blasphemy against her religion, when she learned through a relative that Dad had married and had children, she contacted him and persuaded him to let her spend a week with her grandchildren.
I still remember the somewhat astonishing sight of her standing in our doorway, calling loudly to my brother and me to come and give Grand-ma-ma a kiss. The fact that she spoke no English wasn’t a problem for us. My father had always spoken French to us, and my mother always spoke to us in English. You could say they were ahead of their time in their determination to raise bilingual kids.
The problem for me and my brother was that we didn’t know her and she was loud. The only time anyone got loud in our house was if there was an argument starting, and my brother and I had learned that the best place for us to be during any parental argument was under the bed, so that’s where we headed.
Unfortunately for us, my father was pretty agile, so he crawled under and dragged us out to meet our Grandma Rosa. He also made it clear that there would be no more ‘duck and cover’ for us throughout her visit.
We tried to be polite, but she was so different from anyone we knew that the closer she tried to get to us, the harder we tried to steer clear of her. I have read that men often choose wives like their mothers, but there could never be any comparison between my mother and my father’s mother. While both of them were beautiful women, my mother’s looks were all soft and delicate. Grandma Rosa’s beauty was exotic and flamboyant, but her features were carved in granite.
By the third day of her visit it was pretty obvious that its purpose had failed. My brother and I were terrified of her and nothing she did seemed to be able to change that fact, – until she asked my mother if she could try to give us our bedtime story and sing us our lullaby that evening. I’m certain my mother would have liked to say no, but she couldn’t come up with a polite way to inform her mother-in-law that the idea of the bedtime story and lullaby was to prevent nightmares, not to encourage them.
With no choice in the matter, that evening my brother and I sat stiffly on the blanket spread over her knees, and she told us the bedtime story that had been her favorite, when she was a little girl growing up in a small Basque village. As she spoke, her features softened and her tone became dulcet, and by the end of the story, my brother and I had our little arms as far as they could reach around her shoulders. The lullaby she sang had a sweetly haunting melody that sounded like wind rustling through flowers, but the words were Basque. Still, that night we were happy to be tucked into bed by Grandma Rosa, and for the duration of her visit, we asked her every night to tell us the special story, and to sing us the special song.
I have often wished that I knew what the words to the song were, because there was something about the story and the song that made both my brother and I dream each night that we were playing in the skies among the stars. Needless to say, the rest of Grandma Rosa’s visit was a resounding success, and I was pleased to learn that in her later years, my father took care of her despite the way she treated him when he was young. I cannot sing the song, but I would like to share with you the bedtime story Grandma Rosa told us, so very long ago.
Here it is:
The Birth of the Universe
A long, long time ago, so long ago that time itself did not exist, there was only darkness and emptiness. Within this void were two spirits. One was Spirit Song, whose sounds could not be heard because there was nothing solid for sound to bounce off of. The other was Spirit Light, who could not be seen because there was nothing to reflect her colors. Somehow, throughout this vast emptiness, these two spirits finally met and fell in love. And as they joined together in their act of love, a crystal prism formed all around them.
Suddenly, because of the crystal facets of the prism, the full spectrum of Spirit Light’s colors could be seen, – and the pure crystal boundaries formed by those same facets meant that Spirit Sound’s myriad notes could be heard.
And this is the story of the birth of the OneSong, the Uni-Versa.
– Bea Magnan is a writer and columnist who is currently working on a series of fictional short stories. See her other very popular article on this Web site: Schizophrenia, And My Father’s Nightmare Life, a riveting story of Ms. Magnan’s life with her difficult, yet loved, father.