A Titan's Stories

I nearly never was.

My mother became pregnant with me at sixteen with an alcoholic musician. Her mother pushed to terminate. My father’s mother assisted in illegal abortions in exchange for painkillers. My existence in this world was tied only by a gossamer thread of my mother’s stubbornness - the means and opportunity to end my existence plentiful.

Swaddled in my mother’s rebellion, my birth song the long sighs of disappointed family members, I made my entrance into the world.

Before I was old enough to wonder at the strange reactions to my being, I learned the magic of Grandpa.

He was a Titan of a man, tall and dark. I was a tiny thing, platinum blond, pale skinned and freckled. But for our eyes, large and deep brown with full lashes, we were nearly complete opposites.

“Roma”, he told me. We had the Romani eyes of our ancestors.

I spent time with him at my grandparents’ rural home when I was young, climbing trees, eating fruit fresh from vine or tree, hearing his stories. To my heart, there was no storyteller his equal.

On our days together, I would curl into his side, head on his belly, listening to the fish he’d swallowed while cliff-diving in Spain, and other stories.

He rode motorcycles in the mountains with no helmet.

He swam across a river to Canada just to see if he could.

He accidently fell asleep in the women’s barracks while stationed in Egypt during WWII.

“In the girls’ room!” I exclaimed. My seven-year-old self not capable of divining the dangers of swimming across a river, riding a motorcycle helmetless, or cliff-diving, but I understood keenly the ick factor of a boy in the girls’ room.

He laughed and conspiratorially whispered “I was trying to hide something”.

Eyes wide, I whispered back, “Why?”.

“I had a stolen treasure from the Dom,” he told me.

“Dom?! Who are they?!” I whisper-shouted, as excited children do.

“Shhhhh!” he admonished, not harshly. “I’ll tell you later.”

Grandpa loved teasing me. It took nearly a year to hear it all. He would spill a little and then say he heard Grandma coming - our killjoy. She wasn’t, not really, but this story wasn’t for Grandmas. It was for adventurers like me and Grandpa.

While stationed in Egypt, Grandpa and a few fellow soldiers spent an evening at a Dom settlement close to the base. Behrens, a soldier in his Company, wanted to see a woman he’d met. So, Grandpa, and two others, joined him.

The Dom there were great artists, dancers, and musicians. During the war, they sold colorful scarves, trinkets, jewelry, exotic foods, and entertainment to the soldiers, capitalizing on their mysterious reputation.

Some sold information.

“Like spies?” I breathed.

“Sometimes,” he said, “if they had information to sell. The women were very beautiful, and men like to tell beautiful women stories.”

I was nervous I wouldn’t get more of the story if I asked too many questions, so I scrunched my face and nodded as if I knew. Grandpa’s lips twitched upward.

“Behrens brought whiskey to share and we sat in front of her aunt’s tent.”

I wrinkled my nose at that, knowing too well the sour smell of whiskey on my father’s breath. I resisted tumbling into those thoughts and refocused.

The woman never had whiskey and Grandpa said it “loosened her tongue”. She told them about the riches they had hidden and how they sold stories to the dinlo.

“What is a dinlo?” I asked.

“It means foolish,” he told me.

“That’s mean,” I said, sticking out my lower lip.

“The whiskey made her too talkative and she bragged about tricking soldiers into giving her jewelry. She even told us some of it was hidden between her aunt’s tapestry chest and the wall of her tent!

“She was also keen on coming to America. Behrens had a bit to drink, was insulted by her talk of trickery and muttered not with him. She was roaring mad. She called us names and vowed to find her own way. She said she would find him and curse him!

“The guys were scared. Soldiers at the base told stories about Dom curses, building on untrue stereotypes, but he was convinced they’d need to steal her treasure so she could never find him.

“He felt along the oilskin walls of her aunt’s tent until he felt the outline of a chest. Behrens dropped to his knees and dug at the ground with his bare hands until he pulled it up.”

“Pulled up what?” I whispered.

“The treasure.”

“Did you get caught?”

“Almost.”

I held my breath. If he hadn’t continued, I might have burst.

“As we were sneaking out, we were blocked by an old woman holding a long stick. She saw the dirt on Behrens’ hands. I was behind him, he shoved the treasure at me before she saw, and I hid it beneath my shirt. She circled us several times, grumbling and tapping us with her stick. She didn’t find anything and finally said – if anything is taken from here by anyone but a Dom, they will be cursed!”

The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

“Did you leave with the treasure?” I asked.

“Yes. We made it back to the base, but the guys wouldn’t touch it. They wanted me to get rid of it. I wandered around the base, looking for a place to hide it, but I got turned around. It was dark, I was so tired, and I accidentally stumbled into the woman’s barracks. I fell asleep there!” he laughed.

“But the curse!” I screeched.

“No curse,” he told me. “Do you know why?”

I shook my tangled blond head.

“The Dom are Romani!” he whispered.

Relief flooded me. Not because curses didn’t exist, not to an imaginative almost eight-year-old, but because we were Romani, too.

“Where is it now?” I asked.

“Buried. Safe,” he told me. And with that, he patted my knee and walked away.

I thought there would be more, but I stopped seeing my grandparents as often. My mother married and more children came into the picture.

Those stories were everything to me. I turned them over, unearthed my imagination and grafted new stories onto their gnarled roots. I wove those stories into an impenetrable shield that I used to protect myself from the crushing pain of abandonment by my father or, worse, his empty alcohol-fueled promises, and the bitter regret of my mother. I wrapped myself in the magic of those tales and felt as protected as a child in a blanket fort.

My magical shield couldn’t save me from the devastating blade sheathed in a single word – Alzheimer’s.

It took years for him to succumb to the awful disease. He became a shadow of his former self. Grandpa forgot who I was. He forgot himself. My grandparents spent those years in their Florida home, and I saw him infrequently.

I learned at his funeral that he journaled every day of his adult life. I asked for them. My uncles wanted to read them first, and then I could have them, but not while Grandma lived.

I was 25 when my grandmother passed. Knowing it would be months, at least, before my time with the journals, I made arrangements to go to their Florida home under the guise of a vacation and an offer to check on things.

When I arrived, I barely registered the rest of the house. I beelined for the bedroom and the large plastic under-bed storage boxes where the journals were kept. I dragged the closest out. The plastic top opened with an audible crack after having been untouched for years. Inside were at least two dozen six-inch brown leather journals. I was hit with the scents of old paper, binding glue, and the metallic ink of the pens he favored.

Curiously, there was a separate, smaller, black leather notebook. On each page, exactly the same series of letters and numbers were written - R 2 3 F 2 3 B 2 L 2, over and over. He must have written in the notebook even as the tremors took over his body, the last pages nearly indecipherable had I not known what I was looking at. Having no idea what they meant, I set the little book aside and focused on the first journal.

I was not prepared for what I found or, rather, what I didn’t find. I checked journal after journal, ripping off box tops and frantically flipping through the pages.

These journals held no stories. Each entry read like an almanac with barely an editorial outside a particularly bad dish or the weather. Even pleasant things were only satisfactory.

September 8, 1986. Sunny, clear skies, 78 degrees. E and I golfed. She made lasagna for dinner. It was satisfactory. We took a walk in the evening.

Had I imagined it? Was the magic never real?

My throat tightened. I hadn’t cried in years. It did nothing, solved nothing and I denied myself that relief. I swallowed the emotion, pushed away the sea of books around me, and went out to the sunroom for fresh air.

I leaned my head against the metal back of the patio chair. The room smelled of warmed metal and citrus with an undercurrent of salty ocean. The shield of my childhood was as penetrable as smoke, a fairytale. I closed my eyes and sifted through memories, trying to discern truth from fantasy.

I gave up control and let my mind drift. I let my mental fingers trail in a river of thoughts, touching upon memory after memory. I remembered eating at the breakfast table while Grandpa read the paper. Riding on his back like he was an elephant. Dancing on his feet in the area between the vegetable garden and the grapes - always the same dance and same place - Grandpa reciting steps– Right 2, 3, Front 2, 3, Back 2, Left 2, me telling him “But Grandpa, that’s your right, not mine!” when I had learned my left from right.

I sat bolt upright and ran back to the bedroom. That little book with its letters and numbers… it was the dance! But why write it over and over again even as the disease tore his mind apart?

Always the same space. Always the same dance.

The treasure was buried and safe, he’d told me.

Was this another fantasy? I tucked the little black book into my suitcase and boxed up a few trinkets to bring to my Aunt and Uncle. An excuse to visit. They lived on that same property.

I headed home.

I dropped off the box when no one was there.

I went straight to the area between the garden and the grapes. No fruit now, but the area was still marked. Well outside the view of any neighbors, I began to dance my Grandfather’s steps.

I ended next to a rock.

I repeated the dance three times to be sure.

I retrieved a spade from the barn and moved the rock. After a few inches, I sank to my knees, and in homage to the soldier Behrens, began to claw at the earth with my hands. I’d nearly given up when my hand brushed against stiff plastic. My heart racing, I dug deeper, ignoring the protests of my body until the bag was freed.

Inside the plastic was a tied-up, faded, but still intact, patterned scarf. With shaking, dirty hands I untied the scarf and into my lap a collection of jewelry fell.

Tears as foreign to me as the scarf in my hands fell down my face.

I’d found out later the jewelry was worth $20,000 and I shared the story and the money with my family - I had had no real interest in the cash.

My treasure was knowing my Titan’s stories were real.