Maria Encarnacao Pedrosa Rolo

It's funny I have just discovered that my friend has a blog and I didn't even know about it! She would like to remain nameless and so she shall, but she has a wonderful writing style and in her typical fashion it is very humorous too. Touchingly so at times. A particular post made me feel really sad and nostalgic all at the same time and so I thought I had better record my thoughts before they escaped from me.

I have very few memories of my grandparents, on my father's side I never met them and on my mother's side I have one vague memory of my grandfather very ill in hospital all strapped up to hospital paraphernalia and then very few memories of my grandmother (whose name is the title for this blog). I was thinking about her the other day as I cooked some food, I still remember the incredible meat stew we had in her house one day and I think some soups that she made too. I am told I am quite like her in some ways; I walk like her (eh?), I don't like melon (neither did she), I get all goose-pimply over peaches and some knives for some reason (don't ask) and my favourite flowers will always remind me of her as they were always in bloom at the entrance to her house. However she died when I was still very young - in fact shockingly and rather sadly I remember being with my darling Mum when she received the news over the telephone, it was a terribly sad moment - now I am not writing all this because I wish to bring anyone down, but rather because these are the moments, the memories that I hold dearly no matter how silly or bittersweet.

I come into contact with quite a few elderly people in my work and I always always feel wonderment at the knowledge and stories they have to offer. I always think that if my grandparents were alive I would pester and pester them for stories on their lives at my age. At a meeting the other day, three colleagues were talking about their experiences with the elderly and were laughing with joy about the things they get up to. It made me feel really quite silly and foolish as I had no experience of what they were talking about, I had never gone past the stage of childhood with my grandparents. Now I know I am not the only person to experience similar situations but I thought that maybe I should share my thoughts.

Just to shed some light on my grandparents, my mum's mum was an extremely devout Catholic, an incredibly selfless woman who loved to help all those that needed it, her husband - my grandfather - was an atheist (we suspect that his family could have been Jewish but never were able to be open about it) and he was also a Socialist, in fact every day he used to listen to Radio Moscow despite knowing the dangers of doing so under Salazar, the Portuguese President and Dictator and he also loved playing practical jokes on people, eating very smelly cheeses and spicy foods! It must seem like an odd pairing.... my grandparents immigrated to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century and passed through the immigration island, whose name frustratingly escapes me right now, in New York. You can visit the island and it is extremely worthwhile. In a twist to the story my grandmother never settled there and so they came back and oddly enough some years later my Uncle Armenio went to America and ended up living and working there for nearly forty years.