I liked to listen to my mother when she told us where she had met my father and how he had courted her until he won her heart, at a time when there were many restrictions for couples to see each other alone, without the presence or authorization of their parents. Those were other times, in the Caracas of the forties. My mother was 17 years old and was the only child. Her parents divorced when she was a child, and my mother was left in the custody of her father and in the care of her grandmother.
She was a young girl spoiled and protected by a very respected and well-known family in the parish of The Valley, an old colonial area of Caracas, where the houses were the typical red-roofed mansions, with a central patio and in the living room, balconies with seats where young people used to chat through the window. The streets had old names I lived in: royal street, back street and Cajigal street, still remain in my childhood memories. And I have not lost that taste for the traditional, for the villages and their houses of yesteryear.
My father was the son of a German, who emigrated to Venezuela with his family,and my grandmother was a brunette criolla as we say here, of short stature that contrasted with the physical characteristics of my grandfather, a very tall man of more than 1.80 m, with gray eyes and sunken, with tanned skin by the sun. I remember when he would visit us, he would have to duck through the door of the house to get through. He was very jovial and adventurous, he liked to tell us stories of his travels in the south of our country, an area of jungle and populated by native groups at that time isolated from the rest of the country. He liked the contact with those cultures: the Piaroas and Yanomamiand their way of life in balance with nature.
I learned that admiration for nature that I feel today from my grandfather. His stories for me and my sisters were very funny and exciting. On one occasion I remember he told us that he had arrived at a place deep in the jungle and there he had shared with an indigenous community, but he had met something unusual. Some of the people had clear eyes, blue and green, something atypical in the genetic characteristics of that population group. At some point in history, a mixture of different cultures had occurred.
My father worked with him in a mechanical workshop and fell in love with my mother one day when he saw her in the square talking with her friends. According to my mother, she was not attracted to him at first sight and was annoyed by his attentions. One day he invited her to the movies, she said yes, but she had a surprise for him. She invited several of her friends, and they asked for lots of chocolates, soft drinks and corn pops to eat during the show, which my father, like a gentleman, had to toast.
"Mommy, how naughty and naughty you were with my dad, making him spend that money", we would say to her, to which she would reply.
"It was, so he wouldn't invite me anymore, but that didn't do any good, and he conquered me with his flattery and patience until I fell in love with him and said yes".
And from this union six daughters were born.
Genetics was here playing with all the characteristics of a miscegenation that became even more complex when in addition to the indigenous, the African, and the Spanish, in my family there are French and Italian ancestors in addition to German. But it is not only the genes, it is also the culture, we are a cultural mix.
The inheritance of our ancestors can be seen in our physical features, but there are other characteristics that define us as a family and that is the union and the way we live, our customs.
My father taught us important values such as responsibility, honesty, love for the family and my mother gave us care, tenderness, always being there listening to us and telling us about the past, the one we did not live, but from which we learned. She was in charge of transmitting orally the family history from long ago, that of our great-great-grandparents.
These stories told by my mother allowed me to learn about the origins of my family and to understand the changes that have occurred from generation to generation. And today, when I get together with my sisters and my mom, we begin to remember past events. She and we have forgotten some, they have been lost with time, but there are others that still remain. I have told them to my children, and they love to hear them. I hope that when they have their children, this knowledge will be transmitted to them through the stories they tell them, which can help them understand the reason for certain learning and habits and change those with which they do not agree. .
It would have been very nice to collect part of these family experiences in order to preserve them. My older sister, who loved writing and loved everything that had to do with family history and was very curious to find out facts about my grandfather family, began to write a kind of bulletin where she collected some anecdotes of the family and the rest of the sisters contributed with what we remembered. My sister could not continue doing it, she died four years ago and nowadays, when we get together as a family, and we are remembering some anecdotes, we need her excellent memory to tell us how things happened. She was the chronicler of the family.
This is my participation in Creative Nonfiction in The Ink Well: Prompt #13. Thank you for reading
