Nana

By Leo Racicot

Our beloved Nana. Her name was Adele but everybody called her Lena. My friend, David Bowles used to get a kick out of that. I still do. Nana was born in Alexandria, Egypt. As young girls, she and her twin sister, Mariam, emigrated to Paris where they both entered the convent. Mariam took her vows and Nana, realizing the religious life wasn’t for her, left Europe for America to Lowell where she met the man she would marry, Raef, a barber. They were to have four children, the youngest of whom was our mother, Edna (called Topsy). Even as a child, I found Nana so interesting, like no one else I knew in my young life; she spoke several languages which held her in good stead making her way in the melting pot that was Lowell in those days. (It’s still a melting pot but in different ways now). I credit my lifelong love of languages to her, sitting with her on our porch in summers, she, teaching me the foreign words she knew, having me repeat them, fine-tuning my pronunciation. I loved biking up to The Highlands, the section of the city she and our Aunt Marie, lived in, helping her in the kitchen, sitting beside her in the parlor, she, teaching me how to make carnations from pink tissue paper, telling me stories of “the old country”. I liked that she hailed from a place as exotic as Alexandria. I wanted so badly to know more about that ancient city and the life she’d led there. I used to seek out books about Alexandria, especially Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, a masterful piece of storytelling if ever there was one, much more satisfying than Proust, in my opinion. She talked less to me about Paris though one time, at her home, she asked me if I’d like to see a photo of her twin. She took me into her darkened bedroom, opened a bureau drawer, opened the lid of a box and took out a photo of a dead nun laid out in her casket! I had nightmares for a week. I honestly think had I not come of age in her kind, gentle light, I might have turned out to be a serial killer or some such, so frightening and twisted were the other aspects of my young life. In a poem, I once wrote were the lines: If I was a boat that might drift out to sea, Nana was the harbor that waited for me.

She died in the year of the Bicentennial a couple of days after her Patriots Day birthday at the age of 88. I wouldn’t attend her services; it was too painful seeing the lid close on her life, a life I saw as a testament to her accepting, uncomplaining grace.

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Nana on the porch

Nana and Leo (the author)