“I’ll love you forever he said to me, but that was a big lie,” she spat out with vitriol. “Okay, I’ll be charitable,” she continued, “it was a gross exaggeration and an unkept promise, by a habitual liar.”
She was standing in the tiny front yard, of a tiny house, in the Greek part of Toronto. The yard was filled with white gravel. In the centre was a couple of painted statues of children: a young boy fishing, a girl standing with flowers, and in front of them was a statue of a man and woman sitting together on a bench, arms around each other. They looked loving and hopeful. They looked the perfect family.
I had made the mistake of asking her if the statue was of her and her husband.
“We were happy together, raised a couple of kids,” she continued with bitterness. “But then he left me, for another woman. I never saw him again. I don’t know why he would do that. Why would he leave?”
She bent over, picking up some leaves that had blown in. It was well a tended yard, cared for like a religious shrine.
“That’s her, sitting on the bench. I feel like kicking her; but I’d kick him too if I did.” She paused picking up some debris. “It’s been a while now, but it’s funny, I really don’t remember his name. I don’t care though.”
If you took 30 years off her, she could have been the model for the woman in the statue, but now she was old and wrinkled, only a desiccated shadow of the loving woman in the statue.
As I was about to leave, a middle-aged man came out of the house and down the stairs, calling out, “Ok Grandma, I’ve called, they’ll be here in a few minutes to pick you up. You don’t want to miss your supper. They are making your favourite tonight, Moussaka.”
She ignored him, but I was fascinated because he looked just like the man in the statue, especially with his bushy hair and mustache.
My curiosity got the better of me, and I asked him, “These statues in the yard, who made them?”
“My dad did, just before he died of cancer,” He replied. “My mother died the following year. They were inseparable.”
“And this is your grandmother?”
“No, she is an Alzheimer’s patient from the Greek retirement home just a few blocks down the street. She escapes every once in a while and comes down here. For some reason, she thinks my father was her husband.”