memories – Old Lady Writing

My childhood was spent on a quaint little street (which merits its own story) of post-war apartment buildings. My grandparents moved there in the 50s, but by the time I was growing up, it transitioned from being a new construction on the outskirts of town to being the last street of the old town before the bridge to the Motorbuilders plant and the wave of new developments. This location and timing were significant for two reasons. First, as the original settlers grew older and their children, those the age of my parents, starting to move away, our street started losing its children. I lived with my grandparents, so most of my friends moved away. And second, I was sent to attend school at the “exemplary” #37 (where I, rebel and delinquent https://oldladywriting.com/2023/11/11/scrap-metal-fiasco/, never lived up to the teachers’ memories of my mother, socially conscious gold medal recipient) while the few kids remaining in the neighborhood went to the local #57. As the result of these events, by the time I was of school age, I had no friends in the neighborhood or, as we say, “in the yard”. My great good fortune was that my best friend from the yard would continue to visit her grandparents every weekend, and she was more than enough.

The most magical street in any childhood.

My first conscious memory of Tanya was when I was five years old, and my grandmother and I were returning from my first summer in Crimea https://oldladywriting.com/2024/09/15/on-the-train-to-crimea/. Tanya and her mother were also returning from a summer somewhere, I want to say Gelendzhik, which back then was just a Black Sea resort with no palaces in sight. We all converged on the “sausage train” from Moscow, where Tanya and I pooled our toy resources in the aisle. She was two years older than me, but only a year ahead in school because of her December birthday, so she was just about to start first grade.

From then on, most of the memories of my childhood are connected with her. There was the routine of the Sunday mornings (we went to school six days a week, Sunday was our only day off) when I would knock on her grandparents’ apartment door to see if her mom brought her over on Saturday night. She was a late sleeper, so I would hang outside, dribbling a ball or jumping rope, until she came out of the building. There were also all the winter vacations, when we would split our time between skiing around the yard and sliding down various hills on a big metal plate, or watching TV and drawing at her grandparents’. We were never at my house—my grandmother hovered, my grandfather was seeing patients—but Tanya’s grandparents’ apartment was the most warm and welcoming place. Her grandfather, Sergei Ivanovich, was mostly silent and absent, but her grandmother, Anna Stepanovna, was the kindest, gentlest woman I have ever known. God gave her a long life with unimaginable tragedies along the way. It was my privilege to have known her.

Tanya, being older or most likely just being more talented and creative than me in every way, always took the lead, and I happily followed. She did not just draw—she came up with the idea of making a little magazine and we “published” an issue every day during one winter break. In the summer, she taught me various tricks and games to play with a bouncy ball and how to make dolls out of matchsticks and flowers. She came up with catchy poems, made up words, fun nicknames (her son still knows me by the enduring childhood nickname we called each other), and games that transferred our neighborhood into islands of adventure. She turned every outdoor game into a showcase, whether sliding on ice patches or jumping off milk crates. She called the back door to the nearby household goods and services building “mysterious”, and we would spend hours observing to see if anyone goes in or out (no one ever did). With her, the mundane became extraordinary.

Mysterious door; in our childhood, it did not have any signage.

She also instigated most, if not all, of our shenanigans, some more questionable than others: jumping on a mattress on someone’s patio until we got caught and chased away by the owners, sneaking into the training session of the folk circus until we got caught and chased away, running across our tiny street in front of infrequent vehicles until some truck driver stopped and yelled at us, throwing pebbles through the open window of the sewing shop of the household services building… Actually, that one ended badly: the manager (who probably exited through the “mysterious door”) chased us all the way to Tanya’s grandparents’ house, where we ran for safety. My grandmother was over at the time, dragged me home, and grounded me, even though we cried, apologized, and were forgiven by the manager lady. Anna Stepanovna came to our house to beg my grandmother to let us continue playing, but you can guess how that ended. Our piece de resistance was sporadically sending bizarre, occasionally rhyming, always pompous letters from “secret admirers” to Tanya’s great-uncle, an unassuming man whose appearance we found comical (although, to be fair, we never mocked it in our letters). We thoroughly enjoyed composing our outlandish missives whenever the spirit moved us, but the joke ended up being on us—the man taught at a technical school, and assumed that he did indeed have admirers among his female students.

Of course I kept the magazine, all 13 issues.

Because my grandmother liked and trusted Anna Stepanovna, Tanya was the only friend to whose house I was allowed to go unaccompanied. Sleepovers were not common in our world, largely because of lack of space, but one time, when there was a family wedding that my grandparents were attending, I begged and pleaded and was allowed to stay at my friend’s—which was a surprise to her! I was watching a children’s movie on TV when she arrived on a Saturday night, and hilarity ensued. I was preparing for this, she was not, so I take full responsibility for coming up with what seemed like such a good idea at the time, setting an alarm clock for the middle of the night and putting it under her grandfather’s pillow. It was the only time in my life I was swatted by a belt, which I richly deserved. It was also the only sleepover and probably the most fun and memorable night of my childhood.

I envied Tanya to some extent, but it was more of an admiration. She was a beauty, blond and blue eyed, tall and willowy. She was a ballet dancer in childhood, and I’ve hobbled on her pointed shoes. As a teenager, she no longer danced, but took up piano. She loved animals; she called her kitten “member of the family” and it was always used as part of his name. She desperately wanted a dog, a dream that was realized in her adult life so much so that her son became a dog trainer. Because of her early childhood in Bulgaria https://oldladywriting.com/2025/05/20/thank-you-for-the-alphabet/, Tanya had real Bulgarian friends who would visit with their exotic foods like lokum (Turkish delight) and gum. Her uncle had an Army friend who was stationed in East Germany and sent exotic toys. In the apartment where she lived with her mother, she had her own room. She was so cool in every way, but she also had an open, sunshiny personality. She was the never a “mean girl”.

I was, by every measure, a very late bloomer, so by the time Tanya became a teenager, our two years’ age gap became more marked. She no longer came to her grandparents’ every weekend, and the time I used to spend in the yard I started spending with my school friends. But she came to say a wrenching and tearful good bye on my last night at home…

There was only one visit after that, when I was 19. It was as if no time has passed. We retraced the steps of our childhood adventures; we had a lot of laughs. Her grandmother was alive and as warm and vibrant as ever. Our lives diverged quite a bit after that, as lives do, regardless of town and country, but we kept in touch. She got a lot less than she deserved, which is unfair and unjust. I will not write about that, for I was not a witness, and it is not my story to tell. Her last text to me was, “I remember the taste [of lokum]!” I always thought there would be more time, as one does…

Memory eternal. December 2, 1966 – June 16, 2026, 10:30 p.m.

“It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.”

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

My grandmother departed this life about a month short of her 102^nd birthday. Whenever anyone says that I have “good genes” and can expect a similarly lengthy tenure this side of paradise, I immediately rush to correct them. First, she was an outlier; we do not have longevity in my family, and my father did not make it to 75. Second, her long, long, LONG life was nowhere near a blessing that people imagine it to be, not to herself and not to her immediate family.

Grandmother lived life with an unshakeable belief that her way was always right. She tolerated no challenges to her authority, even in little things[1]. I would maybe concede that there might be something to this, being myself a person prone to doubts, regrets, and second-guessing, had any of it given her any joy. She often repeated her life’s philosophy: you have to hate yourself, and that will inspire you to be a better person. But even as a child, I suspected that deriving inspiration from self-hatred is not going to be my path in life. Years later, I came to the conclusion that her inflexibility was simply the result of lack of introspection, fear of the unknown and the unknowable, and an absence of curiosity.

She had a hard life, but that is neither an excuse nor an explanation. A lot of people have had hard lives. She lost her father as a teenager—but as far as losing fathers, I can certainly do her better. She lived through the wars—yes, plural, because she would always mention the Russo-Finnish War of 1939 in the same breath as The Great Patriotic War. I once read a book on history’s dumbest wars[2], and was delighted to recognize the Winter War as “Grandma’s War”. But again, the number of people who were affected by wars in their lifetime does not necessarily equal the number of people who permanently lose their joie de vivre. While I suspect that the privations and fear of the dark decade of the 1930s in the Soviet Union were not helped by one of history’s most stupid wars, our family did not lose anyone to it, or even to the massive devastation that followed, and did not live in a territory that was occupied by anyone since the Tatars-Mongols came to town in the 13^th century. And even my grandmother was not old enough to remember that. All of my friends had grandparents (and some even parents) who lived through The War, yet most of them were not forced to wage their private battle for independence against their own families.

A nephew drowned in the 1950s, which seemed to affect grandmother more than the young man’s own mother, my grandfather’s older sister. Grandmother drew the following conclusions from his accidental death: (1) water must be feared, and learning to swim can only lead to trouble (which made my growing up on a river and spending all the summers of my childhood at the seaside that much less pleasurable), (2) a tragedy is sure to befall your children as soon as you look away (despite the fact that the beloved nephew was an adult when he died—it truly was just an accident, a tragic accident that can happen to anyone who is living a life and doing things in the world), and (3) daring to enjoy life after bad things happen to loved ones makes you a bad person. The strongest condemnation that grandmother voiced about her sister in law who survived the death of a son was that “she must have loved herself too much”—too much for what? For going on living? Yes, that was indeed the implication, for loving oneself was the greatest character flaw she could imagine.

To be fair—though fairness has never entered into our relationship—the world has changed quite a bit from the time she was taking life lessons from her own mother in the 1920s to the time she was attempting to impart these instructions to me half a century later, and more drastically still to the present day. Looking back, I have trouble recalling any words of wisdom from her which I have stored away or applied to any situation in my life. There was always a lot about decorum, much of it so embarrassing that my hand does not rise to share it here. There was quite a bit about appearances, equally outdated and, not surprisingly, heavy on body shaming. But nowhere did she stand out quite like she did in teaching me basic homemaking skills: plucking chickens[3], scrubbing floors (on hands and knees—never make it easy by using a mop), darning socks, etc. Maybe the last one is not entirely useless—but that is mostly because I enjoy the needle and thread crafts. Still, her point was that no one will marry a girl who could not do these things. Despite my reasonable and consistent academic success, she labeled me quite early on as a potential failure in life due to my lack of enthusiasm for cleaning supplies over books, and for my unswerving commitment to learn how to enjoy life rather than endure it.

Food was the biggest and, in retrospect, the only language of love that she spoke. Talking about anything beyond the basic needs was simply not done. Are you hungry? If yes, have some bread with either salt or sugar. If not, go play outside. God, she was so tough when she was raising me, and in the era when it was no longer really necessary! She was always wearing an apron, always stirring a pot—no, literally, an apron was a part of her “uniform”. In her later years, when she would come to my house, she would bring an apron to wear around. Later still, she would bring a change of work clothes, an old dress that was no longer fit to be seen in public. My house was never clean enough for her.

She always made sure that I was well fed and clothed, and my physical needs were always met. She never said I looked nice without adding that something was off in my appearance. She never told me I did something well without mentioning that someone else did it better. She often lamented that I was not living the life that she felt I should be living in order to make her proud. I never tried hard enough, and I never measured up. I lived with her until I was almost 13, and it was possibly the greatest disappointment of her life that there came a day when she lost control of mine.

To many, she was a good friend, loyal, present, and generous. She never forgot a birthday and never refused a request for help. She kept in touch with several generations of acquaintances, neighbors, and distant relatives. Her tirelessness, which did not flag until her 90s, was remarkable, and I continue to hope that I inherited a sufficient fraction of it.

She outlived all her friends and most relatives, including some who were much younger. Only a handful of people remain who really knew her. There were some good times; I am deeply sad that there were not more.

[1] There was one thing—she did not monitor what I read, either among the books we had at home or the books I would pick up from the various libraries I frequented. Her loss of vigilance on this front was my saving grace, although she did think that I spent too much time reading and not enough outdoors.

[2] Stupid Wars: A Citizen’s Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions, by Ed Strosser and Michael Prince

[3] Did my aversion to poultry start in childhood? Over the past few decades, I worked my way from observing grandma burning feathers off chickens with a blowtorch to experiencing mild nausea at so much as a sight of a cooked chicken breast. It seems to be socially acceptable to be teased about this; I am happy to provide this cheap laugh.