pleading for a treat.
Looking back, it’s plain to see where our families love for animals emerged. My grandmother spent hours with those little creatures, and they really did sit there and listen to her. Joey’s inquisitive head tilted as he tried to learn a new word or phrase. “Joey’s a pretty boy” was his favorite – and he certainly was.
I remember how Joey would perch himself on grandma’s glasses; I remember her whispering in my ear that there were candies in the dish on the coffee table, after my mom had just told me I couldn’t have any more sweets; and I remember the squirrels coming in the back door and eating peanuts right out of our hands.
In my mind, I can still walk through and around that old Bayfield Avenue.
I remember my grandfather’s old Chev taking up two spots on the street, my grandmother’s blue Peugeot 5-speed parked in the driveway, the cracked sidewalks, the big maple that kept the front of their tiny house and part of the neighbor’s house in shade. I remember the soft yellow of the exterior siding, the brown trimmings, the green turf carpet that covered their front porch, and the way the moon cast its shadows on the living room floor through the three little windows at the top of the front door.
You were welcomed into my grandparent’s house with wide-open arms, and a kiss and a hug that expressed a true happiness to see you. Their house was always alive with chatter and play as you stepped in through the front doors into the living room. Their place seemed so big to me as a child, but standing in front of it now, at thirty-five, I find it hard to fathom that everything I envision going on within those walls all those years ago, could actually all happen at once in that blue-collared castle.
It’s been 26 years since my grandparents left us, and yet these images, right down to the vintage Flintstone magnets that covered the fridge door, are almost as vivid today, as the days when I lived these memories.
Having been so young when they passed on, this is, for the most part, really all I remember. I can’t recollect details of conversations, the sound of their voices, or many memories outside what I have just expressed.
For me, other than a handful of photos in our fading family albums, a few material things, and the stories other’s share with me, this is all that is left of them.
There was a time I could lie quietly in my bed at night, and hear their voices as they once were, but slowly, those sounds became harder and harder to reproduce in my mind until one day, they were gone.
It took me many years to get over losing my grandparents, and in such a short period of time. Knowing that I would never see the ones I loved so deeply again, and that the memories I had of them, were all I would ever have, was at times unbearable. Death, as a child, was painful and lonely beyond understanding. All I knew was that the world was so empty without my grandparents in my life.
For so many years I missed them. Many nights, I prayed I might wake up and realize that it had all been just a horrible dream. I spent so much time re-living those childhood moments – desperate to keep their memory alive.
I remember the day I obtained my license, 7 years later. The first thing I did was drive down to my grandparent’s old house, to see how much the neighborhood had changed. I was pleasantly surprised, when I found it almost untouched from the way I remembered it.
I dreamt of what it might be like, to be able to enjoy my grandmother’s company at 16. She would have a new dickie-bird, a new mongrel for the bird to tease. We would sit on her front porch over coffee. Granpa’s old Chevy would no longer stretch the width of their property, and grandma would probably have a new, used little 5-speed, but I would do the driving. We would venture about town running errands, or go for lunch at the Sears diner at the mall and look out into the parking lot as people rushed through their day. Most of all, I would tell her the things I never had the chance to say, before she was suddenly taken from me all those years ago.
The night she passed, I would have gone to visit her instead of my cousins. I would have told her I loved her and that I needed her. She wouldn’t have died from a broken heart. She would have lived knowing how much we all needed her here with us.
I still miss my grandparents to this day. Even time cannot erase the way someone
