When we were little and our (single) mother worked full time, we went to day care until we were old enough to start school. Then, after that we had to stay at home alone, after school and during the summer.

But I can remember one summer when Granny came out from Chicago to take care of us. Our apartment was small and dingy so we spent a lot of time at the park with her.

The park has a lot of space for kids to run around and play. But more than playing, we liked to just sit on the park bench listening to Granny tell us stories. (I have a particularly vivid memory of one of the early days of her visit when we were sitting on the bench and she gave us each some multi-colored hard candy that was twisted into the shape of ribbons. I remember the way she would fish the candy out of her big black purse, and break it into pieces to share with each of us.)

Granny liked to wear light-colored cotton print dresses, sometimes with a belt, and she wore thick stockings with some kind of fat old-lady shoes that you don’t see around anymore. She was short and plump and had rolls of fat underneath her chin that juggled when she talked. She had dyed her hair bright red with henna that summer. Her voice was rapier sharp with her strong accent, and she had a shrill pitch to her laugh.

She loved to shop at the old Woolworths; it always smelled of day-old popcorn, and there were wonderful things spilling over on the tables in the middle of the aisles. Granny was an expert at maneuvering her way around that store—maybe that was where she found the ribbon candy.

And she liked to talk a lot about her friends back home; she had a colorful assortment of people in her life. I remember she would tell us stories about Marcel, who was often featured prominently as a foil to her superior intellect. There were Gypsies and dark romantic men and people with foreign-sounding names dashing in and out of those stories, and there was always intrigue, told in breathy whispers.

But after a few weeks Granny decided to leave Oakland. I think it was because she and my mother could not get along. Or maybe it was that we were not very interesting to her, compared to her romantic life back home.

We never saw Granny again. We spent the rest of that summer, and all the other summers after that alone, fighting with each other in that small and dingy apartment near the park.