I wrote this a few years ago. Maybe 4 or 5 or 6 years ago. I am going to post the parts of my diary that deal with Mama; my best friend. It is an homage to her, and to all the people that loved her and that she loved, like Melisa, for whom Mama was even more than a best friend.
Diary Entry
I dreamt about my grandmother as a young woman and she was beautiful. Even as an old woman there is something of the girl in her, of the coquette. Sometimes she is sweetly shy. Always she is wise.
Mama
My grandmother grew up without a mother. Ida Maria Craig was her mother’s name. Ida Maria was of Irish parentage but had grown up in an orphanage. Ida Maria had died when my grandmother was about two years old. She died five weeks after giving birth to her last child, a boy. My grandmother and her two sisters and brother grew up with an aunt while her father remarried and had another family. First three girls and a boy and then four boys and a girl. They grew up on Pembroke Street in the capital of Port of Spain near my old highschool St. Joseph’s Convent.
My grandmother had servants to wash and clean. A van delivered bread from the jail where her uncle worked. She was about ten years old when her aunt died and they went to live with their father and stepmother in the south of Trinidad. As a young adult she moved back to the capital and worked in a department store called Fogartys until she married my grandfather.
She met Jose Serapio Ramirez at an “ole year’s night” , that is, a new year’s eve party. Leonora (Ned) was her older sister. Jose liked Ned first. Ned was slim, pale like her Irish mother, with gray green eyes and straight light brown hair. Later, he liked my grandmother and at Ned’s engagement party it was discovered that Ned’s fiance and Jose were cousins, and they didn’t know until they met at the engagement.
My grandmother married Jose and had three girls and two boys. She stayed home with the children and raised them while he worked offshore for an oil company, Shell.
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