I’ve been thinking about Luca a lot lately. Angelo and I are lucky because we get to spend so much time with him. I pick him up from school on Wednesdays and hang out with him for the afternoon before bringing him home and having a sleepover at his house each week. We can drive to his soccer games, his school concerts or have Sunday dinner together. During the summer, if I’m not picking him up from camp, I have hosted actual “Gramma Camps” and we have him for a whole week.
One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about him is because I feel like my memory of our times together is starting to get hazy. Now, when someone says, “Oh, remember when we . . . ?” I often don’t. All the memories of being Luca’s gramma are slipping from my brain. And there are tons of them. A few weeks after Luca was born, Annie, Tony and Luca moved in with us and stayed for about a year. They eventually found a place of their own, but when it went on the market a couple of years later, back they came. When they moved again, about another year or so later, it was only to the next town over—about 7 miles away. We were almost literally on top of each other for years at a time. There are so many memories of those times that I just can’t recall anymore. There’s one though…when Luca started calling us by name, he made one up for me: Baba. I’ll always remember the day I walked into the kitchen and he looked up from the floor where he was playing and said, “Gramma.” I almost cried. To this day, when he wants to be especially loving or if he wants a treat or a trip to the store, he calls me Baba. I melt.
Conversely, I think I’ve spent so much time with Luca that he is comfortable getting angry with me. I don’t think I ever got angry with any of my grandparents. I didn’t have the same kind of relationship with my grandparents that Luca has with me. Annie and Christopher had more of that kind of relationship with my parents because we always lived close by. When my parents got the cottage in Maine, we spent most of our summers visiting them and Christopher even lived there for two summers while he worked at the island café. He might have felt angry at Grandma or Papa from time to time, but I don’t know if he ever expressed it—to them. I certainly heard about it. I believe Luca’s ability to express his anger or frustration or crankiness with me is a mark of a deeper relationship than is typically experienced by a grandparent and grandchild. And I feel fortunate that he can truly express himself with me.
As I write this, we are wrapping up our Father’s Day weekend in Maine. I got up early to get some writing done. I sat by the windows looking out on the lake (and the squirrel raiding our birdfeeder) and thought about the several topics I’d been wanting to address. I realized that I hadn’t seen Luca yet—he typically gets up pretty early—and I figured he was occupying his time in his room with some electronic device or another. But then he came in and plunked himself down across the table from me. I told him I was working so he kept playing on his device, all the while narrating his play with singing and expressions of victory or defeat. And then he declared he was hungry. And could I make him some toasted doughnuts.
I could find another place to work while I’m here, but this is a memory in the making. The only way I can retain it is to be present for it; but maybe Luca will come here one day with his kids and remember the morning he got up early and joined Gramma at the dining room table while she wrote her blog. I’m pretty sure he’ll remember that I made him toasted doughnuts, but he might not remember the fog slowly lifting from the opposite shore as the sun appeared. He might remember Gramma making him put down his Nintendo and come down to the water when she heard the loons calling from the cove. And I hope he remembers how Gramma finally put her computer away so he could go swim in the lake before he had to leave to go home.
This is special - thank you for sharing a piece of your heart, and memory xxx
This was so beautiful! Yes, I think Luca will remember.