Ink And Reason

When I think about the people who have shaped my life, there is one person who stands out above all the rest: my grandfather. He was a man of great wisdom and kindness, and he taught me many valuable lessons that I still carry with me today.

The first years of my life were spent mostly with my maternal grandparents because my parents were still very young, and during communist Romania, they had to work and study at the same time. Apart from that, they were studying a very tough domain, aerospace engineering, and they were living in a much more polluted town and suffered more from the food and utilities shortages that were constant during the last decade of the Ceaușescu regime. So, my first memories from my life are closely intertwined with images of my grandparents’ house and them. They were amazing people, educated and kind, always positive, and with such a great relationship between them. Even though my grandmother was also very important in my life, I will focus this post on my grandfather.

He was born eight years before WW2 into a family of Aromanians who had a business in agriculture in the eastern part of Romania, very close to what would soon be the Romanian frontier with the Soviet Union, after the unlawful occupation by the Russians in 1940 of half of historical Moldova. Aromanians are a population of descendants from the Neolatin-speaking population that originated in the Balkans from ancient times when the region was under Roman control. These people live mainly in communities in the mountainous regions of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Macedonia, and their language is very similar to current Romanian, but has Slavic influences or from other languages. Also, it is a very archaic Romanian, because their language was isolated from the main area where Romanians lived and did not evolve like the official language. I am and was able to understand it when I heard it spoken by the family of my grandfather, it sounded funny to me, like full of regional words from the countryside in Moldova and with a funny accent.

Because his family had a successful business, he had access to a good education and resources that were, let’s say, more common to the above-average class in Romania of those days. But things changed for him dramatically after the war, when Romania was occupied by Soviet forces which enforced a violent communist takeover of power. He was considered to have ”unhealthy origins”, which meant he came from a family not agreed by the new regime. They were persecuted, their house and land confiscated and included in the new agricultural cooperatives of Stalinist inspiration. My grandfather was kicked out of the medical school because of his origin. He was studying to become a doctor, but he was all his life forced to be a registered nurse. He didn’t get his mind stuck into that and he took life as it was. He was happy to have had the chance to meet my grandmother, a beautiful slim girl with long black hair and brown eyes, who was exactly two months older than him and was also a registered nurse. They married and had a daughter, my mom. He liked to play chess with his friends, go hiking, and also to visit a lot of places (he was not allowed to go outside of the soviet block), he liked to write and read. He read a lot, his library was huge and he had a subscription to a national publisher that supplied him each month with new books. Most of the time he would keep only those books he really appreciated, and the rest he gave them away to friends and other people. He used to say that books are like currency, they need to circulate to have any value. He also loved photography and I still have at home a lot of his developed films and his former Kiev film camera. When I was around 7 yo, he started to take me to his developing chamber, actually a storage room, where he have had set up his utensils. I loved to stay with him in the red light and to dip the photographic paper in those smelly chemicals and watch them bringing shades to life.

My grandmother and grandfather around the time they met, 1951-52

When I was born, he was around 48 years old, a handsome guy, tall and imposing, with green eyes, and dark black hair slicked back in the style of American movie mobsters. When I watch photos of him from that period I think he looks a lot like a young Andy Garcia or Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco.

I remember going out with him to his friends, most of them real characters that were full of witty words and warm smiles. I especially remember a Jewish guy he used to play chess with, named Spitz, and their never-ending stories and cracked jokes. My grandfather was always elegant, I never saw him without a nice shirt or unshaven. He used to quote Cicero (I think) saying that ”only barbarians wore beards”. And I think he would have been capable of wearing a tie even while taking the garbage out. I’m exaggerating, of course, but that was a very important part of his image and a reminiscence of his education.

Storytelling was one of my grandfather’s gifts, and he made good use of it. I always went to sleep with him, he used to hold me in his arms and would tell me a story, usually a historical one, or inspired by events of his childhood during the war. I also remember him sitting in an armchair by the window and reading. I would go into his lap and he would read for me. It didn’t matter I couldn’t understand much of those complicated for my age books he was reading, for me, it was just the best time of the day. We also played chess a lot. When I say a lot, I mean like for 4-5 hours in a row, without interruption. I still wonder how he had the patience to beat me each time, 20-25 matches a day, but he did it in a way that made me crave to play and learn more. We also used to visit places together, like museums and art galleries, and when I was a teenager, we had long discussions about relationships, love, how to treat people, how to respond to different challenges, like bullying at school, how to talk with a girl, or what to look for when making friends. I didn’t always listen to or apply his teachings, but most of them remained with me. He shaped my character and my future in such a way that I can hardly express it. I became a history addict, a writer and an avid reader, a person with a sharp radar for bullshit and manipulation, a man with an acute drive for justice and fairness, a good chess player, and many more, because of him. Unfortunately, he died when I felt I needed him most, while I was still a teenager, but his legacy stayed with me and thanks to our close relationship I have the feeling that he talks in my head each time I need a piece of advice about something in life.

As I move forward in life, I will always remember the lessons my grandfather taught me and the memories we shared together. I will continue to honor his legacy by living my life with purpose, compassion, and gratitude. And hopefully, I will be able to pass this legacy to my son.

I hope you enjoyed this post and thank you for reading it. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and leave a comment below. I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.