What Really Happened

Life is God’s Novel

Isaac Bashevis Singer

My mother’s mother, my favorite grandmother, was an immigrant who

as a girl lived in a middle-sized town in Roumania,  called Bacau, and then moved, a

married teenager, to Grand Forks, North Dakota with her husband, older than she

was, a Rumanian man named Shmuel Markovitz.  He died when she was still in her

thirties, leaving her with a house,four children, and a meat market.   What I know

about her life is just a sparse outline.  I’ve always wished I knew more. And a

thousand times I’ve had the thought that I wished she’d written it all down.

In a path that was not so rational and not so clear, she moved to New Haven,

Connecticut, and then to Beverly Hills, where she lived in a small apartment with her

only son Alex, next door to Rosemary Clooney’s mother (and George Clooney’s

grandmother!).  Eventually Alex married Bea, a widow from Los Angeles

and my grandmother continued living California  for nearly twenty

years. Although she was a letter writer – she wrote to her children every single week

always on thin sheets of onionskin paper, always with a blue ballpoint pen,

her letters were more or less identical:  she’d begin with weather.  Because she lived in

Los Angeles the weather was always fine.  She didn’t tell us much about the inside of

her life, about what she felt and what she feared. She loved us all, but we didn’t know

much more than that. What she’d recount were social details:  cards with her

girlfriends, different flavors of ice cream she tried at Baskin Robbins on her block.

My grandmother never learned to drive. She’d walk wherever she had to go, or take

a bus. She did tell us about Baskin Robbins though. Because she loved their ice

cream.

Baskin-Robbins was founded in 1945 in Glendale, California by Burton Baskin and

Irvine Robbins, ice cream enthusiasts and brothers-in-law, whose passion inspired

what is now the world's largest chain of ice cream specialty shops.

(What was once a selection of 31 flavors a different ice

cream flavor for each day of the month—has grown to more than 1,400 in its flavor

library NOW.)

In a funny way I feel I know as much about Baskin Robbins as my grandmother.

I loved her completely, and have wished a thousand times that I knew much more

about her life, and especially, about how she felt.  I wish I’d asked her many more

questions, and I wish she’d given me many more answers.  I loved her, the way

grandchildren often love their grandparents.  Without question.  Now all these years

later, I wish I’d asked more.

What did she think of the path she’d chosen?  What were her parents like?  And her

siblings, people I never got to know?  What is it she would have liked to tell us about

her life?

English wasn’t her first language.  But still.  I wish she’d written it all down.

So many of us feel that way.  We want to leave our families with the stories of our lives.

But how?  How do we write them down?

The incredibly prolific writer Nora Roberts, she’s published two books a year forever,

gave the best writer’s advice I’ve ever heard in a New Yorker profile a few years ago: 

just put your ass in the chair. 

Beginnings are absolutely everywhere.  Even the great story tellers tell us that where

we begin doesn’t matter at all.

Start with your own childhood.  Your mother’s or father’s or a relative you once knew.

We all have stories to tell, especially now that we’re not young anymore, and

we’ve actually lived rich real lives, full of problems, and memories, of

relatives, of happiness and of stories, so many stories.

Of what we did right, and what we did wrong.  Of what we learned, and what

we know, and what we know and who we lived and What Happened. 

What Really Happened.

We at ALTE would be very happy to hear your stories.  Write them down and send

them to us.

And meanwhile, here’s a poem about how to begin.

A question people often ask:

where does a story begin.

Anywhere is the answer

We all know that.

A story can begin on a park bench

in a city familiar or unfamiliar 

deep in the woods

or with the description

of a relative or someone entirely

fictitious, someone very tall.

A story can begin with 

a stranger I think he is a dogwalker

ageless man wearing bright red glasses.

who said yesterday to me:

Would you mind

telling me what it is you do?

Or with these words, always good:

This is a story I want to tell to you.

Love to everyone from a cold cold New York

Esther

PS  Here’s some music for this week