Cure for a rusty drawer
When we were little, my mom would do this thing.
When asked something she didn’t know the answer to, she would respond with these declarative statements about my grandmother that she assumed would satisfy all of our naive inquisitions.
“You should ask Mamita that. Mamita knows everything.”
Are you kidding me? What do you mean she knows everything?
“Guys, she just does.”
Although my current instinct is to challenge everything that comes out of my mother’s mouth, at the time I was more of a pacifist. What Dolo said simply was. So, at the ripe age of seven, I began genuinely believing that my grandma knew everything there was to know about the world. I pictured her brain like a hallway of filing cabinets that held in them big, bold, convoluted secrets.
And just like Mamita kept the world tightly packed in miles of files, I kept — in my significantly smaller, largely unoccupied mind — a drawer of my own, covered in gold and packed to the rim with memories of the things she said and did.
She would pick us up from school in her Honda Civic and buy us Cheetos at 7-Eleven. We’d stop at Don Pan for tequeños and empanadas when the Cheetos didn’t quite do the job. She’d let us tear off the cushions of her couch and spread them across the living room floor. My sister, cousin, and I would jump all over them, then spread ourselves out on them like starfish when we were done. She’d talk to us constantly about her past life in Cuba in big, Cuban words I didn’t fully understand yet gave immense meaning to. Call it confirmation bias, but I took all of these little things and put them in that glorified drawer. Then I put my grandma on a pedestal as high as her twelve-story building. She sat atop her throne and I marveled up at her, always a few stories down.
But, we grew up and (much to my mother’s dismay) became a bit more defiant. The gullibility we once wore audaciously on our sleeves was suddenly rolled up and tucked away. We were big kids, which suddenly meant (among other things) that we knew Mamita didn’t actually know everything.
Yet, despite the cat being let out of the bag, my mom continued insisting that my grandma bore the weight of the entire world’s wisdom on her shoulders. She continued claiming that “Mamita knew everything” with a wave of certainty that infuriated me.
“I know she doesn’t know eeeeeeverythingggg mom. You can stop saying that.”
By this point, I had developed an attitude that manifested itself in overemphasizing words and dressing them nicely with excessive eye rolls. Hence the eeeeeeverythingggg.
She laughed.
“She does. Don’t forget it.”
With age, the skepticism only grew more fervent and I began seeing the cracks and crevices in the memories I held of her. My grandmother aged too, and that required patience, a patience I didn’t feel any responsibility to sustain. We moved away and my visits became less frequent. Distance made it easier to grow less and less attached to those memories we once shared. The golden drawer I held her in grew rustier and rustier.
I am older now and in many ways more naive than I was at the ripe age of seven. Yet, despite my awareness of the many things my grandma never mastered, I’ve developed a deep appreciation for the many things she has.
Yes, you grow up and realize that many of the files preserved in one’s mind are empty, outdated, and often written in scribbles so incoherent, not even the person who filed them can begin deciphering them. But you also grow up and become less and less curious of cabinets that once were, of shuffling through them from time to time to see what can be salvaged from the past.
Last week I visited Mamita and we spent hours (literally) shuffling through her cabinets for old photo albums. As we flipped through pages that cracked and tore with each turn, I couldn’t believe the pieces of her life I had never heard about.
“We never really left the country after Cuba, so we saw what we could near our house.”
She flips through an album filled with play tickets, post cards, and pamphlets from tourist attractions across Virginia. They moved to Falls Church shortly after fleeing Cuba in the 1960s and lived there for ten years.
She lived in a time where moving and doing and acting quickly were the expectation. Dreaming was not really on the agenda. But the scrapbooks were a scapegoat for my grandma to pause and preserve pieces of this unfamiliar, American reality that unraveled itself before her. In the same way that I document to make sense of the world, she resorted to photos and albums to piece together her family’s complicated, and often chaotic, immigrant experience.
“I was pretty good, wasn’t I?” She says, smiling at the font she scribbled in between the photos, admiring her craft.
There are still hundreds of photos to be glued into their rightful albums, but her hands are too fragile to keep putting the pieces together. A part of me wants to finish the job for her, but a bigger part of me feels like it’s the kind of thing better left as is, unfinished yet somehow more complete.
It was only after this that I truly understood what my mother meant when she says that Mamita knows everything. My grandma bears the weight of a wisdom that comes from things that can’t be taught. They can only be lived.
The albums are her attempts to grapple with this weight, to turn the fleeting into something that transcends time.
I’m glad I got to help her relive it.
Photos taken on a Canon AE-1.
