"You are Like the Dew"
I want to listen to my grandmother's voice, I really do, but I just can't.
The tape recorder scares me. I unboxed it a couple of year ago, well into the pandemic. Like many things during the pandemic, it was an impulse buy off Amazon. I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to search for a tape recorder on Amazon before. In my mind, I decided that the technology no longer existed, a vanished product reduced to a mere pop cultural reference in old episodes of The Simpsons.
But a quick search and there it was, like a ghost from a past life. I had spent too many days indoor mulling the inevitable apocalypse that I didn’t trust what I was seeing. It seemed like a mind-trick, like watching a futuristic sci-fi film only to have the protagonist look at his watch. Were we going back in time? Was I?
I tried not to think about it too much before my finger clicked on buy. But then it arrived and has been sitting on my desk ever since, taunting me, just like the tapes have for all these years.
My Bubbe tapes. These six cassette tapes have kept me company for the last 25 years. For years, I moved them delicately from one desk to the next. Sometimes they sat on my bedside table, in a neat pile. For a few years, I kept them in the small safe in my closet. The tapes were the only thing in the safe, other than my family’s passports — it was proof of the past and my documents to escape in the future, if and when necessary.
For the last 25 years, I’ve taken these tapes with me everywhere. Every time I move, they are with me, on my body or in my purse. I don’t trust them to a box. When I run the mental gymnastics of what I would save in my home case of a fire, I don’t think of photo albums, or the kids’ yellowing art work. I think only of the tapes.
About 15 years ago, certain I would never own another tape recorder, I left the tapes for a few days with a company that copied them onto a CD-ROM, another technology I can no longer use.
I never played the CD. It joined the tapes as a twisted homage to those few hours I spent with my grandmother in her kitchen all those years ago.
A friend of mine, who was a journalist during the siege in Sarajevo knew about the tapes and understood my relationship to them. She offered to get her son to transcribe them, thinking it would help me out but a generation later, I have never looked at his pages.
But now I have this tape recorder, which Amazon delivered as promised in 24 hours. Still, it took me months to insert one of my precious Bubbe tapes. That’s what I call them, or “Bubby Tapes” as I wrote on the side label, 25 years ago.
At first, I tried to convince myself there was a logical reason for this. I haven’t used this ancient technology in years. What if the tape gets tangled, like it did when I was a teenager recording songs off the radio, and I needed to use a pencil to rewind it until it was whole? Worse, what if I accidentally hit record instead of play? My Bubbe Tapes are my most valuable possession. What would I do if I destroyed them myself?
Stop with the excuses, the cassette player tells me. Play the goddamn tapes. Sometimes I’ll touch the button and exhale with relief when nothing happens, only to realize that this relic of technology needs to be plugged in to work. No Bluetooth. No WIFI.
It only accepts the standard tape size. It’s exactly like the tape recorder I would have used in the late 90s, at my grandmother’s table, to interview her.
Then one day, I close my eyes, lie down on the sofa, and hit play. There’s static. I hear snippets of conversation in Hungarian between my grandmother and my mother. I’m transported back to her kitchen table.
It is 1998. I hear my own voice but it sounds foreign to me, like a 12-year old pretending to be an adult. I ask my grandmother to sit. “You promised me I could interview you,” I remember telling her before I hit record. The chairs move around. My grandmother finally sits down. I can still see her focusing on me, speaking to me before I have the chance to ask a single question.
You are like the dew, she says, her voice travelling through time.
I hit stop. It’s too much. I was preparing for her story, for the bad parts of her story that I forgot about the good parts. I forgot about the love.
There’s an intimacy between my Bubbe and I that I’ve often struggled to explain. She was otherworldly, a magical mix of old superstition and new ideas. Things came to life around her. I believed as a child, that the flowers on her balcony bent towards her touch rather than towards the sun.
When I had a fever, somehow her pillowcases were always cool. Attached to her fridge was a magnetic pen that could not be refilled yet in the decades I knew her never ran out of ink.
We existed in a very particular universe, the two of us, speaking a language we made up of English and Hungarian words, along with gestures. I slept in her bed into my teens. I told her everything and she understood, with and without the right language. I confided in her that my grandfather, her husband, visited me in a dream the day he died and it was so crystal clear that I cried in my sleep. She shared with me, that sometimes, at night, she still feels his hand on her leg as she sleeps.
The truth is, I still hear her voice all the time. Only it’s different. She talks to me from the Olam Habah, the next world. When I light her candles, I can hear her voice saying the name only she had for me. Sometimes when I’m alone in the kitchen, a waft of her Chanel No. 5 perfume will hit my nose. But hearing her live voice. Well, that’s different. That pokes a bruise that after all these years, still feels too tender.
I force myself to hit play once more.
“You are like the dew on the grass, that first thing in the morning. It’s like the new world being born again. It’s a beautiful act of God.”
She is telling me I am a beautiful act of God. No one has ever spoken to me like that since. Likely no one ever will.
It’s all I can manage for now. Good job, I tell the tape recorder. You did good, too, I imagine it tells me. When can we do this again?
I don’t know, I say, gingerly returning the tapes and tape recorder to their special spot on my desk. I don’t know.
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Leah, this piece is beautiful. I love how it captures the relationship between you and your grandmother, the way she speaks to you in a way no one ever will.
Your worry about ruining the tape, having to use a pencil to thread it back in, is such a great metaphor for the fragility of the physical remnants we keep attaching us to our past and people we love. And it works so well alongside the metaphor of morning dew—which will forever reappear alongside the memory of your memory of the relationship in your heart.
Oh my god that photo!