Someone gave me a pair of silver earrings once called storytellers....a grandmotherly type, holding small children in her lap. They remind me of my own grandmothers. Vastly different women; both grand storytellers. My mother swears one was fibbing big time, with one of her stories in particular, but I loved it. After all, isn’t that what stories are, full of imagination and dreams?

I can still remember the light in Grandma Nunziata’s eyes when she told me about her “palace” in Bari, Italy. She insisted she was brought up in the lap of luxury and the floors were marble and she was the princess. “And was your mother the queen then?”  I asked, very excited to have royal blood. She took a fit of laughing and said, “Yes, queen of the backhouse!” (she pronounced it bakhouse.) That meant bathroom. Most likely, outhouse. I suspected then, that the rest of her story had holes. But I let her go on. “We had the finest china and beautiful fruit (fruit is important in Italy), and gold that is much better than what you have here.” I learned at a young age, that my Italian grandmother felt all things made in Italy were of higher quality. Yet, she was a US citizen, and proud of it. I realized what she meant when she said “You can’t get that here..”  She was waxing nostalgic, that’s all. She loved America, she just missed home.

The truth of the matter was that she grew up in a fishing village off the Adriatic Sea and she had chickens in her yard. She was well into her eighties, when she still insisted on washing her delicates in her big old porcelain kitchen sink in Brooklyn, with a washboard. She told me stories of Italy, while she rolled out dough on a big board on her kitchen table in her small apartment, down the block from our house. She let me form twists for the plain hard cookies she made for years, but she never would give me her recipe. “I write nothing down,” she would say in her broken English. “I could write it down, if you tell me, Gram,” I said. “You keep twisting, that’s all.” So I did. Even though I knew she wrote plenty down, when she had a mind to do so. Like letters to her sister in Bari, asking her to send the fig juice for those Christmas wreath delicacies she made every year. She read the Italian paper every day and kept up with the news.

Grandma Nunziata was ahead of her time as well. My mother tells me how she told her the story of how when Grandma moved to St. Mark’s Avenue, in Brooklyn, and did not want to keep having babies after a third son, her Jewish neighbor explained to her about condoms. When my mother told me this, I was quite shocked. Grandma? Back in those days? But then I remembered how she was always saying “Don’t buy no more babies.” She meant have them, of course, but don’t. I do remember the story about her younger sister, back in Italy, who had so many children, one day she stopped talking and sat in a rocker and basically went out of her mind. She played with a rag doll and someone else raised her children. “She had the face of an angel, sitting there in a white dress with ruffles, a grown woman, but like a child herself.” Gram said, and then she cried.
Grandma Lee, my Irish grandmother, was always a softie. She saw the good in everyone, even the toughest case. At times, that was my other grandma. Nunziata liked to be the boss. Millie (grandma Lee) didn’t mind, she had nothing to prove, and was so easy to love. She had stories of her own. Her mother and all her aunts read tea leaves. There were problems solved and fortunes told in the remains of a good strong cuppa. Aunt Pillie read them and Bess (Bridget) Teelon, my great grandmother too. Could they predict that great Uncle Henry would be murdered in a taxi in NYC? A mugging gone awry. I wonder. Did they know Grandpa Lee would move his family to Brooklyn, wanting a bit more culture for his girls, than a small town in Vermont had to offer in those days? Only to be very wary when my mother brought my father home. A sensitive, beautiful country girl, dating a big city streetwise cop. Did the tea leaves predict another outcome? My sisters and I always wondered how different our lives would have been then.

I loved (still do) the story grandma Lee told about her mother and her long red hair that my mother would comb for her at night. A tiny woman married to a big Swede with a great thirst. Can’t have been easy. “Bless her heart,” Gram would say. “Poor Bess (great grandma), didn’t have the luck of the Irish, babydoll.” That was what she called me. My sisters were each “dollbaby.”  She was funny. That impish smile and she would wink, her blue eyes sparkling, and say ,“Excuse me girls, while I go drop a tear.” Use the ladies, she meant.
And there was always singing. “Heart of my Heart,” was her favorite. “Toora loora loora” was our bedtime lullaby. And there were hugs. Gram loved hugs. I wish she were around now, I would give her a good old squeeze. She left way too early. She didn’t get the longevity that Nunziata had, living until 101 years old. I figure they are telling each other stories, the pair of them, wherever they are. Nunziata would go first of course, being the princess, raised in a palace. And Millie wouldn’t mind. She could see in her teacup how the story ended anyway.