Stories and Grandparents

Stories have a special charm and mistery anyway. But when told by your Grandparents they're unequalled. It's just the way things are.

Something that happened today brought to my mind one fairytale my Grandmother used to tell us (me and my brother). And made me realize I still remember it, after all these years... We still know whole phrases of it.
I remember we made her tell it so many times that we already knew when she's "improvising" or sticking to the subject.

The very idea of hearing the old ones telling us something that happened in some unreal world (or in their past, which to us was pretty unreal too) was making every word so sweet and the whole experience as cool as any nowadays computer game.
We would gather around them and feeding on every bit of that fantasy material as on candy.

Now I find it quite sensational to have heard world-war-stories first hand, and I also regret not remembering all of them. But back then they were just simple (though amazing) stories...


What impressed me the most probably was the tale of the beautiful horses taken away by the army (don't remember what army though, could have been the Romanian, although Grandma would also tell of enemy German and Russian soldiers who would pass through villages, robbing them of any food supply they could find - Germans would always be polite and even say thank you for the livestock and crops they would steal, leaving desperate and hungry people behind; but Russians were much worse, they would also devastate, burn, rape and destroy everything they could get their hands on).

I could almost feel the grief my Grandma as a young girl felt when their beloved horses were taken away, fighting against and neighing loudly. I could see those tall proud animals in their every detail, as she described them, in their full color and height, with their special birth marks on their foreheads or feet, and I could feel dearly cared-for family members taken away.

And my eyes were full of tears. Then, at the end, when, after almost 6 years, one of them, the strongest and most beautiful of them finds its way home all by itself, skinny and sick, a shaddow of the fine creature it used to be, I used to cry for good (was kind of ashamed of it, but it was too beautiful and impressive a story to not shake up my already artistic imagination).


Then it was the story of the terrible heat wave on the Hiroshima day, when my Dad was only a few months old. It has been booked down, carved by my Granddad in the wooden beam of the bedroom ceiling and, man, was it exciting to descipher it when we grew up a bit and could read.

My Granddad was a learnt man. Not only was he one of the few in the village who could read and write, but he was informed on many other things (it's from him I've learned mathematical fractions way before getting to that in school, as a matter of fact).
He was a trained bridge engineer and during the war he would put together those heavy temporary bridges made of massive floating iron surfaces tightened together with heavy metal cables, on which tanks could cross a river. In times of peace his knowledge served as to fix roads and protect crops and roads by stopping massive snow storms with special fences put op on the fields.

So now coming back to the Hiroshima event, he knew what was going on on that horrible day when the sky got purple red and animals would instantly die with heat. He ran to the field to fetch Grandma and the baby in a white light cotton dress (we kids used to giggle at the thought of Daddy wearing a dress) and got into the darkest corner of the house, baby swaddled in wet sheets to keep it cool.

Reading this we would find ourselves transposed on that "Today, the 6th of August 1945, when the skies got red with heat..."., almost touching a young Granddad in front of us, reaching up and using his army knife to carve this story in wood while hiding from the nature gone mad outside.


...Those little traces in the timeline who would bring you to realize things about yourself and the world...

Like seeing that Dad's foot was once so small as the tiny footprint in the cement doorway showed it.
When we were very young, one could still distinctly see each one of its little toes. They faded away in time till all that was left of that footstep was a small cavity in the stone...


(read here the next episode, about Grandpa)