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| My grandmother in her teens |
My grandmother fascinated me.
She was the very picture of life. She embraced life and followed it wholeheartedly to everywhere. She had this youthful air that made her seem so girlish despite her abundant journeys around the Sun.
As a child, I adored her. I loved the way she pampered me by carefully polishing my nails and offering me sweets. I loved how she'd flutter her eyelashes at me as a way of complimenting me. I loved how she'd show me her vanity table, dozens of perfumes, and especially hundreds of photographs from her own childhood.
She delighted in telling me how much alike I was to her side of the family.
"Here's your great-aunt. She has red hair just like you!" My grandmother would say, pointing at a photograph of her sister, "Oh, look at this. Why, you are exactly like your great-grandmother."
I like to think I am a lot like my grandmother.
Like my grandmother, I like to talk. A lot. Quite a lot.
About anything and everything. So many ideas are whirling about inside my head, and I have to let them out to cool off a bit.
I love to see how my ideas are considered by others. Sometimes someone would help me polishing my idea, engendering a whole new inception of small ideas descending from this idea. Sometimes someone would offer an idea that makes me understand how my ideas are created.
Like my grandmother, I also like to tell stories. Any story.
It does not have to be an important story. A little amusing anecdote, maybe. Perhaps an enchanting fantasy I make up. Or a story retold from someone else.
I tell stories because I enjoy reliving the experience of every story and re-examining the purpose of this story in my life. Sometimes someone would make a comment that makes me discover a new gem long contained in my story. Sometimes someone would offer a story that makes me understand my story better.
It amazes me how a story can sometimes catch up with me years later and startles me with a lesson that has been hiding within the story. This lesson profoundly touches me, shaking up my view of the world that I just have to pause to marvel at this lesson, the gem I somehow managed to discover within the story.
I am now telling you a story that my grandmother told me years ago, when I was a little girl. Whether this story is absolutely true, I will never know. In fact, I do not think it will make a difference for me because she presented me a gem through this story . . .
When my grandmother was a young woman during the Great Depression, she fell blithely in love with a Jewish man and was going to marry him.
My grandmother's parents said no. He's a Jew, my great-grandmother tried to reason with her youngest daughter, our family do not marry Jews.
My grandmother's first love, who had been pining for her after their break-up, stopped paying visits to the family. He did not want to be around to watch my grandmother loving a different man.
Still, my grandmother was young, lively, and passionate. She knew what she felt. She was madly in love with her beloved Edward. She refused to break off their engagement. She was going to marry him.
The man my grandmother loved, Edward, was a soldier. He had to leave Illinois and his fiancée to serve in Hawaii.
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to be exact.
On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese came and bombed Pearl Harbor, killing many. Among them my grandmother's lover, Edward. He was killed on the day that shall live in infamy.
Out of sorrow, my young grandmother destroyed everything that reminded her of him. No photographs. No letters. Nothing that bore a trace of my grandmother's romance with the man she was going to marry. What alone lived on was my grandmother's own memories.
My grandmother returned to her first love and fell in love again. They married after the end of a war precipitated by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. My grandmother had a baby boy who grew up and married my mother. I was born two weeks before the forty-seventh anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing that ended my grandmother's romance with her Jewish fiancé.
After listening to this incredible tale, I immediately asked my grandmother to imagine a life without Pearl Harbor.
"What if Pearl Harbor never happened? You would have married Edward and you would not have Dad and me," I said to my grandmother.
I was amazed. I was born because the Japanese came to destroy Pearl Harbor. If somebody did not die, I will not come along. A fragile twist of fate that pushed my grandmother back to her first lover and brought my father and me forth into life. What an extraordinary chain of events that led to my birth.
My grandmother's answer surprised me.
She shook her head. Vehemently. She absolutely did not accept my imagination of a life without Pearl Harbor.
She shook her head. Vehemently. She absolutely did not accept my imagination of a life without Pearl Harbor.
"It already happened," my grandmother said. "You are here. My son is here. I am happy. That's it."
Back then, I did not understand why my grandmother refused to even contemplate a life with Edward.
Why did she bother to tell me this story if she did not want to remember Edward?
I shrugged and moved on, wondering once in a while about my grandmother's story.
Years later, long after my grandmother faded away from my life, I discovered the lesson within her story.
I was having a deep conversation with a friend about how life could turn out better if only you do things a bit differently when I suddenly saw the gem behind her story.
I was having a deep conversation with a friend about how life could turn out better if only you do things a bit differently when I suddenly saw the gem behind her story.
My grandmother had left behind all her what ifs to the past. No meaning in dreaming up a life that never came to pass. She was content in having a son and having a granddaughter. It happened. We came just because something happened. Life is full of happenings.
What ifs. They belong solely to our wild imagination of possibilities. Life happens regardless of what ifs.
This lesson, this gem, is going to stay with me everywhere I go and to every country that life brings me to. I am hoping I will remember this gem every time I ask life, "What if I do this . . . what if I do that instead . . . "
It just happens. Life happens. Let what is be what it is and move on.
As my grandmother told me when I was a little girl, life goes on.
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| In Mirthful Memory of Olga Jeane Steyer 26 January 1920 - 16 September 2010 |
