Words for Sunshine, Words for Snow

The first English word my grandfather learned was “sunshine.”

He was six-years-old and standing in an empty apartment with his mother. She was wearing black, because her husband had died the year before of stomach cancer. She would continue to wear black until she remarried, but that wouldn’t be for another eight years. My great-grandmother did not love her husband, but when he died, her life was upended. Marriage was meant to be your security and your comfort. Her name was Dasha, and she was from Lida, which is west of Minsk in Belarus.

My grandfather’s name was Fedor.

They were standing together in the empty apartment in Morristown, New Jersey, because my great-grandmother’s youngest brother, Yuryi, had moved there two years earlier. He was going to be an American. He was going to open a restaurant. He had plans and he had books to put the plans in and he was already speaking American and dating an American girl. The two of them lived together on the first floor of the house where my grandfather and his mother would now be living. They would have the second floor and the rent would be paid on the first of each month by my grandmother. She was expected to go to work at the same factory where my great-great uncle was working while he saved up for a restaurant he would never open. He would work at that factory until he died at the age of forty-seven of a heart attack right on the factory floor. They would move his body and tell everyone to keep working.

His name was Yuryi. Did I tell you that already? I might have told you. I apologize. There is so much story. There is a lot to tell.

Where was I?

Oh yes. The empty apartment. My grandfather. Sunshine.

My grandfather’s uncle’s girlfriend (I never learned her name, she would break up with my great-great uncle and end up marrying a motorcycle repairman) went to the library and took out children’s books to help my grandfather and his mother learn English. She was a nice young woman and this was her contribution. Her good deed.

She went upstairs with the stack of books, while my great-grandmother tried not to fall down weeping right there on the stained carpet of the little apartment that she couldn’t afford to furnish. Women from Lida are tough. Dasha was known to be tough. Unfortunately there is tough and there is stupid. Dasha was not stupid. How could she survive? How could she and her child survive in this place that lets widows move into homes without furniture? That sends them to work while they are still grieving a man they never loved, but who took care of them? That asks them to learn another language that has rules borrowed from all the other languages that have melted together in this horrible pot that boils but never simmers? Never gets cleaned. Never comes off the stove. Dasha wanted a chair. At least a chair to sit in. When the young woman handed her a book, she went looking for a photo of a chair so she could find the word next to it and try to pronounce that word. The book the young woman gave her was a book about opposites. A chair has no opposite. Maybe a table. She would not find a picture of a chair, but she would keep looking.

While she was looking, the young woman who was dating my great-great uncle would sit down on the stained carpet with my grandfather and open up a book for him. She would turn to the first page, which had a sun on it. She would show my grandfather the page, and point to the sun.

“Sun,” she would say, and then, pointing to the little yellow lines drawn around the circle that represents the sun, “Sunshine. Sun. Shine. Sunshine.”

My grandfather was six-years-old the first time he felt condescended to. Yes, it was true that he didn’t know the English word for “sunshine,” and yes, it was true, he could see that this young woman, who he had not been properly introduced to, meant well. Yes, he knew that hardships were coming soon and, along with them, indignities, but really? A yellow circle with lines around it and this woman he met an hour earlier downstairs sitting across from him smelling like patchouli mouthing the words “Sun. Shine. Sunshine” as though he were an alien who didn’t understand sound or illustration.

“Sunshine,” he repeated back to her, and she beamed with pride. Look at what she had accomplished. She was a good person who was doing a good thing. Across the room, my great-grandmother stood near a window and tried to find a picture of a chair as snow began to fall outside. The young woman stood up, helped my grandfather to his feet, and took him to the window to stand by his mother.

She pointed outside and said “Snow.”

My grandfather repeated it back to her. “Snow.” More beaming, more pride. More certainty that she, this one woman in her early 20’s, could assist this small family of refugees as they began to build a new life--one word at a time.

Meanwhile, my grandfather now knew the English words for “sunshine” and “snow” and he knew that, for the rest of his life, he would aspire to be someone who knew as many languages as his mind could hold. If this was what was important to people like the young woman and his uncle and his mother, he would absorb every word and every sound and every association until any person alive could come up to him and begin a conversation only to find that he was able to speak to them with the ease of someone who has only one mother tongue instead of hundreds. He did not only want the words for “sunshine” and “snow.” He wanted all the words for “sunshine” and “snow.”

This dream of his would diminish over time. He would always love language, but, once in school, he would begin to forget his native language. His accent would dwindle and then disappear. His mother would always speak with a foreign distinction, but she would blush whenever anyone asked where she was from or how long she had been in the country. Her assimilation was of the utmost importance to her, and when she saw her son excelling at it, she would praise him. He was not allowed to ask about Lida or Belarus or his father. The only sunshine that mattered was the American sunshine. The only snow that piled up outside during the strident winters was American snow.

My grandfather worked at a restaurant as a line cook. He showed promise. The owner of the restaurant encouraged him to go to culinary school. His uncle was bitter with jealousy. That was not meant to be my grandfather’s dream. That was his uncle’s dream. How dare he steal it. They got into a terrible fight. My grandfather and his mother did not speak to my great-great uncle again for the rest of his life. By then, they had moved out of the empty apartment that had only been partially filled at the time of my great-grandmother’s second marriage. My grandfather’s stepfather was a kind man. He paid the tuition for culinary school. When he asked my grandfather what kind of food he wanted to cook, my grandfather said--

“American food. I’m an American.”

He graduated culinary school with high marks. A year later, he was working in one of the best restaurants in New York--his new home. My great-grandmother and her husband came into the city for dinner. They were so proud of my grandfather. He had tackled a slippery dream and carried it into waking. He was living in a small apartment that was all his own and it had furniture. When he brought the chef out to meet his parents, he had forgotten that the chef only knew him as--

“We’re so happy to have Frank here. He’s got real talent.”

Frank. Not Fedor. My great-grandmother seemed confused. English had been her only language for years at that point, but whenever there was confusion, she assumed it was the kind of confusion that occurs when you arrive late to the party. Frank is a name. Frank was not her son’s name. Who was Frank?

Her son shuffled the chef back into the kitchen with thanks for his hospitality. Later on that night, as he was putting his mother and stepfather into a taxi to send them back to their hotel, his mother asked him about his name.

“It’s just something they call me,” he said, lying to his mother with the ease of someone who has first lied to himself, “People can go by different names. It’s nothing.”

His mother didn’t know how to feel or if she should feel at all. She gave her son, who she was very proud of in all ways, a kiss on the cheek, and then stepped into the backseat of the taxi. His stepfather embraced him, slipping two twenty dollar bills into his palm despite him not needing it, and then he was in the back of the taxi next to his wife. They drove away as the first bit of snow began coming down on a busy street in Manhattan.

Inside the restaurant, my grandfather needed to ask for something. Soon after this, he would ask for a loan to open his own restaurant. Shortly thereafter, he would ask a woman he had been seeing for a few months for her hand in marriage. He would ask for many things throughout his life, and he would always have the words, but they would always be in English. What little he learned in another language was usually borrowed from busboys or when helping his children with their Spanish and French homework.

That night back in the kitchen, my grandfather needed to ask for something--a utensil, a spice, something--and he couldn’t think of the word. He could see what he needed, but he couldn’t place letters around it. A sound. A phonetic sensation. Nothing was there. He stood stock still over a pot with a chicken in it and tried to catch his breath while the word escaped him. A second later, the chef handed him a knife.

“Were you looking for this,” he asked, a concerned look in his eyes.

My grandfather nodded and finished up the rest of his shift. In the dining room, customers drank wine from all over the world. They told stories about traveling and stories about coming home. Some told jokes about people from countries other than their own. They were paying a small fortune to eat chicken. They were paying for an American experience that was steeped in experiences that were in no way American.

But let’s not get too carried away, all right?

When I was a child, I would sleep over at the home of my grandparents. They had several bedrooms and all were furnished. One of the rooms was mine even though I was only there every other weekend. I would get in bed, and my grandfather would read to me before bed. He would read me stories. Some would have sunshine in them. Some would have snow. My grandfather’s voice was discreet. It betrayed nothing. He could inhabit anyone and anything as though he had lived a thousand lives. He could speak as though he had spoken every word at least once. Sometimes I would stop him and point to a word so that I could ask him what it meant. Sometimes I would ask him why a character did what they did or felt how they felt. Sometimes I asked him how they could make it to the end of the story after suffering so many trials and setbacks. And somehow he always knew.

He always knew exactly what to say.