REALITY?: Bedtime Stories

I’m thinking of grandmothers today, mine both long gone, only one I knew as a child. She was my father’s mother, and they lived downstairs from us, her and my grandfather, and her daughter’s family all together. She babysat for us, of course, and I remember most some Sunday mornings playing at her metal topped kitchen table. It was a perfect town, mottled grey with white lines running through for streets that cut the town into blocks where different people lived. And where tin and plastic people walked or rode in little cars.

The only prose she told us was in her native language. We understood them only because my mother told these stories too sometimes. I almost still can repeat in staggered Polish, the tale of the three little kittens and their sadly missed mittens.

My sisters and I were brought up on Golden Books, often Santa leaving two or three apiece beneath our tree, before we started asking for Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys–I was into mystery even way back then. A rocking chair, a lap, a lilting and intrigueing voice that made each story more enthralling, even when retold many times. My mother read it one way, complete with building tension and surprise; my dad would read, and pause between each page, seemingly scanning the story first to get into the mood. I still hear their voices if I close my eyes and listen, and I still feel the ache of reaching that last page.

My husband also had the benefit of living close with and later, just a few doors down from his paternal grandparents when he was small. His grandfather was the type of man to take him everywhere, or for a ride at naptime, or for an ice cream soda. His grandmother was a softie only with her grandchildren, and even then, her choice of bedtime stories were, it would seem, a little odd. This then, that he still remembers:

One dark day, in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight.
Back to back, they faced each other
Pulled out knives and shot each other
A deaf policeman heard the noise
and clubbed to death the two dead boys.

I can happily report that this did nothing to warp him in later life.