The Shape of Memories

LifeLife RamblingsA Memory
Written By Beth Kalet, Guest Contributor

Some time after my Grandpa Abe retired from Queens, NY, to Miami, he took a job in the complaints department of the three-building high rise to which he and my Grandma Anna had moved.

He had the temperament to hear out people’s kvetches, legitimate and otherwise, and to find solutions. The office was in the lower level of the main building of this newly built hotel-like complex for many hundreds of elders, who I imagined were all like my grandparents – stout, loving, practiced in the art of life.

I envisioned my grandpa behind a desk in a small room, listening thoughtfully to his fellow tenants’ troubles, now and then adjusting his metal-rimmed glasses, chomping his cigar, nodding at the right moment. And offering up simple, earnest and helpful insights.

This was in the early 1960s. He was in his early 60s; I was about 8.

I took it on faith that this work was bestowed upon my grandpa because he was a sympathetic person, possibly the only person at Forte Towers or even in Miami who could patiently hear out the mundane problems of his fellow retirees and find the right answer to whatever the situation.

It occurs to me now – now that I am older than my grandpa was then - that none of this may be true.

Or some of it may not be accurate.

Did my grandpa miss his working life when he left New York for the Biscayne Bay?

Or did he need money?

Like his stories to me about the gangs of rival M&M’s who’d enlisted his help to fight off the other bad actors in the candy store, could this have been a fabrication? Was his role in the complaints department even real? Did my grandmother’s newly acquired diamond ring really come from a satisfied tenant?

I don’t think I worried too much about eating those delicious M&M candies after Grandpa had personified them. Not any more than I worried over Grandpa’s financial health or his status in the community. I think now how my beliefs were based on nothing more than faith in a reality presented to me. A sort of wishful confidence that all was right; something offered up to a child by her elders.

I wish all children could have the sense of peace I had then. The cloak of a loving family and the comfort of assurance that comes along with that.

Beth Kalet, Guest Contributor

Beth Kalet is a writer and editor who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. She spent her formative years as a newspaper reporter covering communities in the Delaware Valley of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, reporting on everything from bar fights to economic trends. With this opportunity to listen and to learn, to report and write about life's ups and downs, she was able, as well, to hear the heartbeat of life.

In her fiction, she focuses on relationships between lovers, friends, spouses, antagonists—and in one story, between a manicurist and her customer—the places where the heart beats quietly but mightily, where aspirations and secrets, wild moments and small triumphs dwell.

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