Every day I remember you

My grandmother’s hair always had the brilliant radiance of hair Vaseline. I’m not sure if it was hair Vaseline or some other hair oil, but she kept her tight black and grey hair, which hung lazily to her shoulders, so slick the smell of pomade always makes me think of her.

She had very kind hands that had endured all sorts of dangers. Hands that were simultaneously rough due to hard work and soft due to old age.

I think every grandson thinks themselves their grandmother’s favourite, specially when young. All of my cousins would not forgive me for saying that I might have been, so I won’t - I will just think it.

Due to forced migration and tectonic shifts, my life and therefore my memories of Mama Tencha are not linear, but they are constant.

Every Sunday, after the classic Salvadoran kid’s TV show: Jardin Infantil we would bundle in to the old VW and make the 20 minute trip to visit my grandmother.

Her house, when I was a boy, felt palatial. The Queen of England had nothing on my grandmother’s palace. However, visiting as an adult many decades later the house felt smaller than it did in memory.

Either it had shrunk, or more likely, I was taller and no longer confined to a body that was only five years old.

My grandmother was a butcher and her shop was part of the house, the slaughter would happen downstairs in a basement and the butchering would happen all over the house it would seem.

There were always meat hooks and scales and lassoes and pails and weights and counterweights and oh how many lassoes all over - hardly children’s toys but I was not interested in playing with anything else but the tools of her trade.

I used to play this game called nudos - knots in Spanish - which involved nothing more than tying lassoes all over the courtyard. From one thing to the other, then back the other way. Then one lasso to another and then back the other way, until I had run out of things to tie them to or lassoes to use. Then my Tia Lilian would take me to have a nap so that when I woke up I had enough energy to play the game again but in reverse.

Knots was my favourite pastime, one of the many adventurous things to do in the theme park that was Mama Tencha’s home, my other amusement was her record player.

As a sign of the times, Mama Tencha had a big sound system unit, the ones that are so of their era that most of the unit was just shelving space. When I say it was a unit I mean that it was a unit in every sense of the word. There was a little inbuilt seat, an inbuilt table for the phone (including a shelf for the phone books), of course the amplifier was there and so were the speakers but the main object of my desire was that record turntable and stereo system.

We also had a record player at my home, but this one was different - this one had all these dials and buttons and of course a whole unit built around it.

This is where memory starts to play it’s dirty tricks with the facts. I’m not sure if the unit worked or not, or I was told it didn’t work so I wouldn’t keep pestering my parents to put on a record for me or at the very least let me play with the dials. I don’t particularly remember actually listening to a record, it’s entirely possible but the memory is foggy. My young brain was so young that it, like every other, wouldn’t stop developing and forming its memory systems for another twenty more years.

I do remember however that Mama Tencha had at least one Ike and Tina Turner album and whether I did listen to it or not has been lost to the ages, but the fact that I lusted for it as a five year old is still so vivid in my mind some 31 years later.

So, yesterday I bought a record player. It has a lot less dials and knobs and buttons than my grandmother’s one did but that’s because it’s a lot more modern than hers ever was and not the opposite being true.

I also made it my mission, my duty, that the very first record that was going to be amplified from my own turntable would be something, anything, by Ike and Tina Turner - and so it was.

The very first sound to come from my record player were the timeless, unique, crisp, warm and oh-so-sexy tones of Ms Anna-Mae Bullock, aka Tina Turner singing “Daily Bread”.

I paused and I dedicated this small moment to the memory of that beautiful and kind lady whose hair smelt of Vaseline hair oil and whose hands were soft due to hard work and hardened due to age.

A woman who has made me the man I am today.

Her memory lives with me because I am a part of her and all of my gains, we do together because decades later, you still shape me, abuelita.

And how I wish you could make me chicken noodle soup with potatoes and give me milk with a tiny bit of coffee while I listen to -or pretend to listen to - your records on that record player I loved so, so much.

Life is linear it seems, but it also loops around.

***

Some months ago I was having breakfast with my second set of parents, Tia Lilian and Tio Chamba in Santo Tomas where we all are from. Tio asked me if I wanted to see something. He told me that I probably wouldn’t know what it was and if I did I may not remember at all.

Tio moved slowly from the table, but with great purpose, and went to the cabinet on the opposite side of the room, the cabinet that had been on the other side of the room for years. The same cabinet that had watched me have breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack after snack before it so many times.

He slid a panel and there she was - my grandmother’s record player. It had been there all along not even a full metre away. this object that connects my broken memories to my past lives, this objects that I have never stopped thinking about since I saw it. It had been there all along, hiding in front of me - all along.

I yelped.

I thought it, like the solidity of my memories about it, had been lost to time. But it had been there all along. All this time.

Her record player is one of my most favourite possessions that I do not own. Even though now I have one of my own that plays Ike and Tina whenever I want, it’s that old beat up turntable that is the one that has a special, unchangeable, place in my heart.

I miss you daily abuelita, I wish you could see how similar we are. How could we not be? I’m part of you.