She didn’t want to talk about it, so we didn’t know. Later, I took down her story. By her account, she waited in the lines, clutching paperwork, proof. Her husband, my grandfather, insisted on life and waited in the second concentration camp. She found sponsors in the US. She waved her finger at the Nazis at the front of the line, scolding, “Give me my husband.” Her infant son made it to his first birthday, his teeth blackened from malnutrition. Her husband came back to her. They left Vienna. In London they separated again, another camp, another country that made him wait. And so they waited. The long boat ride to the States, by all accounts, nearly finished them. They didn’t eat.  They arrived in New York where relatives offered to take them in. But my grandparents chose Atlanta, where a Jewish refugee community built synagogues and recovered in the quiet warm woods.

She smoked. The grandchildren – five of us – couldn’t bear it. We drew pictures of her holding long cigarettes to her mouth. We wrote bubbles over her head, reminders that smoking killed. That’s what they told us in school. She said she only smoked when she had guests, but finally she stopped. We sighed.

When she died, every one of us, sitting shiva at home, swore confidently to be her favorite. I knew I was her favorite. She sent me care packages all through college, and even after, when I moved to Portland. She called me all the time, and when the senility crept in, she called repeatedly, insistently, forgetting she had just called. She told me to call her. I promised. Later I knew I didn’t call enough. My mom sat in the hospital with her when she needed a feeding tube. She could hardly talk, so I talked and told her about my life, my new job, my first real job. She was proud, in the way that grandmothers are.

When the family celebrated her 90^th birthday, I didn’t fly home. I picked my new job. The morning of the celebration I dreamt of my family, my cousins. I could see them in the big room where everyone gathered. I felt like I was flying.

She survived the Nazis. She survived moving to a strange country. She survived learning an alien language. She survived losing her husband early, after they had two more children in Atlanta. She survived her middle son killing himself the summer after his sophomore year in college. She survived finding him, and his gun. Then she survived multiple gunshots to her chest, when two men robbed her jewelry store in downtown Atlanta, her husband’s jewelry store, the one she ran after he died so she could put her children through college at Yale, Northwestern, Emory, and American University. She survived living in the house where everything happened.

She would never have told us these things. We pulled the stories from her for the camera and the transcripts. She hid her history, stayed silent until the end. Until she unleashed her anger and steadied herself on my arm as we walked through the Holocaust museum.

Here’s what I know. She drove me to music lessons, embarrassed me with her thick accent, gave me the gifts my parents refused. One afternoon after school she opened the trunk of her car and handed me a long cardboard box. My first electric keyboard, the one I desperately wanted. The one my mom had refused. And my grandma gave it to me anyway.

She took her grandchildren to the farmers market and bought us obscure cookies and nuts and dried fruits. And Nutella. She met us after school when our parents divorced. When I passed my learners license exam, she said I was a good driver and let me drive every day.  She mailed me letters. She set aside bracelets and earrings, my name handwritten on the small white tags.

This is the story my family tells now.

When my grandmother became a widow at the age of twenty-three, she had three kids under the age of six. My mom was the eldest of these, and her father’s death so traumatized her that it became the defining event of her life. She had no memory of the accident, her father or any part of her life prior to middle school, and yet this was the story she told over and over.

I didn’t verify the circumstances of his death until after I had finished the assignment. It was more gruesome than I had remembered.

The photo is of the pearls that my grandfather gave my grandmother when she was 17. They were a wedding present. To me, their extreme youth has always been the defining element of the story.

There’s been an accident is how it starts
in my mind, a cliche is never a good way
to open, but how else
to begin a conversation that ends

your husband is dead. It was the log truck’s fault
faulty manufacturing, that is why
you are a widow at twenty-three. Was he crushed,
were his insides on the asphalt?
These are questions you can’t ask

so far after the fact. I think it was sudden
I think there were guts or his spine
snapped and it was over like that, faster
even than old, old pine trees

slip loose from their winched chains
tumbling slowly, bouncing gently
coming to rest, silent, naked
splayed across two lanes of highway in 1958.

My family is full of lies. That’s not some bold, angsty statement. It’s a simple fact. For various reason — pride, exile, faulty memory, simple exaggeration, and maybe a penchant for telling tall tales — my family history has been muddled and mutated to the point where the facts I find in the record books are so fully disconnected with what I know and have always known to be “truth” that even the simple question of my earliest family memory is taboo and fraught with faulty narratives that I can no longer trust.

So I will recount a story — a myth retold to me a hundred times of an event that took place on a car ride I was in. I was there and can at least halfway vouch that it actually happened. But whether or not it’s fact wholehearted, I still can’t say, because, in reality it’s an event I don’t remember and some of its significance is lost on me. I can only guess at the whys and this is the story of my guesswork.The impact its had on my father has been so monumental that he’s been a spinning record stuck in a rut ever since.

The Owl in the Headlights

We were driving back from Tulsa late at night and if I remember anything it’s the ink black sky with pinpricks of light escaping like moths from a sweater. There are many things you can say about Oklahoma and most are disparaging, but the night sky is one of the greatest wonders of the world. Especially as seen by a four year old girl half in and out of sleep, leaning her forehead against the cool rear window of a 1984 Jeep Wagoneer.

The stop was jarring. I remember hitting my head on the back of the passenger seat. My brother James had wedged himself in the crevasse between the back seat and the front and he teetered back and forth, the divot cushioning him like a womb. He was snoring again within three breaths.

There was an owl in the road. A great big brown barn owl. My father stepped out of his seat and walked outside. The owl stared back at him, into the headlights, like an alien being investigated by local police, unable to discern it’s surroundings, but unafraid of what lay beneath the light. My dad continued walking towards the bird as my mother slept silently in the front seat. The fighting hadn’t quite started between them, but it was only a matter of time. Sometimes I think whatever truth he found this day contributed to what eventually happened between them, like the wings of a butterfly in China. But with that logic, everything led to their inevitable demise. It was written since birth.

I watched my father approach from the backseat. Sole witness to a shifting soul. He came within a foot of the apparition and leaned down to it. Crouched down and stared into its black pearls. A full moment passed. Then the owl simply spread it’s wings and lifted itself up, defying gravity as it had defied nature and fear. It’s wings were like the cupped hands of a swimmer, pulling itself higher and higher, breaking through a surface we can’t see, just as fish can’t see past a the underbelly of a boat.

My father came back into the car, out of breath with tears in his eyes. He had been touched. Later he would tell me that this moment, July 25th, 1986 at 11:15 pm, was the moment he discovered his life’s mission.

Years later, and many times, he’s told me that the owl told him to open an institute. A place where the great leaders of the world would come to him and heal the world. Solve hunger, and greed and fear. And he would be the hero. That love would be restored and understanding prevail. That good would prevail. That he would be the savior.

I don’t think this is what the owl meant, dad. I think you have misinterpreted his statement. Or maybe the moment has been muddled with words and pride and mortal ambition. I think the owl was simply saying that if you let go of fear you can grab hold of the air and have it pull you up up up, above greed and hunger and fear. I don’t think it was telling you how to solve the great problems of the world. It was showing you how to solve the great problems of your heart.