Day 69 of 100

“And then the dirt speck turned into a prince.”

My grandmother was an amazing story teller. She wrote eleven books and spoke nine languages. And she was fluent in bullshit.

When I was little my grandmother would take books and retell the stories in new and fantastical ways. Dirt specks became princes; frogs became wizards; and happy endings were had everywhere.

I used to drive to her house and listen to her stories, over and over, for hours. I often played the nudnik forcing her to expand her stories ever larger and more expansive.

She once told me that while on assignment as a simultaneous translator, she worked for the Mossad passing papers between the Israelis and the Koreans. Every young man in her school had a crush on her, and even after not seeing them for 50 years, she was certain their unrequited love had stayed alive.

My grandmother would tell me stories of what it was like to grow up in Shanghai China as a Jewish girl with a father that was the editor of the local Jewish paper and a mother that was the ever thriving entrepreneur who ran a store in Israel in her later life and whose stories rivaled my grandmother’s.

I guess you could say that I come from a long line of story tellers. Although I never learned the art of exaggeration quite as well. My grandmother wrote children’s books, relaying Filipino folklore to new generations of children. She wrote about being in the Second World War, and watching her family lose most everything as she escaped China to Israel in the late 1940s.

But mostly, she just made everything seem a little bit more fantastical and a world I was much happier to live in, and if that came with believing in fairies and dust that turns into princes, well then I am pretty lucky to live in her world.