“It’s not so easy!”
My granddaughter cried.
I looked down at the wrinkles on my knuckles and stretched a leathery fold on one of them. I waited until the skin slowly retracted to its place; I lingered momentarily at the shape it made, that of a half-moon or a lopsided grin.
Then I looked at her and said, “Or, it is perhaps too easy! Almost too easy to comprehend. Sort of like you blinding yourself from life’s magic because of the saying: if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is.”
She looked up to me with flustered cheeks streaked with crimson red. She seemed to have grasped what I said for a fleeting moment, but then shook the idea off her shoulders before it lodged in between their blades to release her tension.
How do I explain this to her when I didn’t understand it myself? When I lost my father and sister within a span of six months, I had bouts of feeling that life is both unbearable, and extremely likeable.
The breaking of soft bread together, whenever we could lay our hands on a loaf, made me squeal with joy for a moment, and gag from nausea the next. It’s something hard to explain. It’s a warmth and a chill that creeps up on you like a fever, shivering from feeling cold while you simultaneously sweat.
I would have to try my best.
So I said, “To know that things are not simple is one thing. But to persist on only seeing them as such, is another.”
She slapped her lap with both hands, “Oma, please! I can’t stand going through a positive-thinking drill right now. It asks too much of people!”
She was right; it does ask a lot of people. I shifted on my armchair carefully so that she couldn’t hear the crinkle of my adult diapers. Even now that I am wiser and older and know better than to complain about wearing diapers to deal with my incontinence, I still feel that people con each other in this business of thinking positively.
I stared at the vase of flowers on my coffee table and wondered if she’d consider me heartless if I changed the subject and asked her to get me a soft Berliner from the bakery downstairs. We were well into the hour of teatime and her visit had, for an entire week, thrown me off schedule. I thought better than to interrupt her sulking.
To quicken matters and to avoid skipping my afternoon coffee and treat, yet again, I grabbed a yellow chrysanthemum from the bouquet she bought me last week and stared at it, trying to think of an analogy or idiom that she’d like enough to write down on her phone under the title ‘lessons of grandma’ in some app she had. That would be the best transition to a lighter afternoon.
“Look at this flower,” I started to explain, twirling it before her eyes as she shifted her legs in my direction to take in her lesson. “You can see this flower in many ways. And depending on who you are and what you know, you can choose how much information about it you’d like to relay. It can be just that, a flower. Or, it can be a yellow flower.
It can be a yellow flower with many petals protruding from it. It can be a chrysanthemum. Or, it can be one of 40 species of chrysanthemums, if you know them all.”
I noticed that her sniffles slowed down and so I continued,
“Now, if, say, you’re a florist, you’d probably know which species it is. But you will also be spending a lot of unnecessary time explaining to your customer which species this chrysanthemum belongs to and how to best care for it. The customer could lose interest and feel bombarded with your talking.
“So you take your multi-faceted knowledge and bury it under the simple selling point that a chrysanthemum lasts the longest in a vase than any other flower. Around two whole weeks longer. (Don’t ask me how I know that).”
She smiled, not in the least interested in how I knew that. I leveled the flower to her face and pressed on, “You choose to put it in the simpler way you describe it to a person who doesn’t know as much.
“You see a smile drawn on the eyes of the buyer, the exchange of money occurs and you sold yourself a bouquet by not only making things simpler, but by making someone happy.
“In a different setting, on a different day, with a different person who’d like to know more – maybe you’ll dig deeper into the world of chrysanthemums. But not everyday. Certainly, not today.”
I put the flower back in its’ vase as she grabbed a tissue to blow her nose, as if on cue. As much as my very strong craving for Berliners prompted this whole speech, watching the transition of the crimson red color drain from her cheeks to be replaced with her more pleasant pink, like a soothing sunset, was my biggest comfort. Oh how much I would love to protect her from the wastage of time, but I can’t. I can’t.
I softened my voice from a teacher’s tone to my usual grandma croak and said, “My girl, to make things simpler is not a choice, no. You don’t have the choice to erase the details of heartbreak. It’s a perspective.
“You know there are many angles to everything. But from where you stand, you can only do so much as to respect the capacity of your eyes and know that you can only really look at everything, or something, from this angle. Now if you stand there, you may look at things from that angle, and so on. So, stop ogling your eyes at everything as if all circumstances are predatory, like a chameleon that has a 360-degree vision. You’re only human. So flawed, with such limited vision. That’s all you are. It’s teatime. Get us some jam-filled Berliners and let’s have some tea.”
by Beisan AlShafei
Written in April, 2021
Beisan's Burble 