a story my grandfather told me
1968, My grandfather was 18.
He’d always wanted to move. In cars, bikes, trains or motorcycles. It didn’t matter to him. His mother told him no. Just take the metro, she said.
1953, My grandfather was 3.
His father, my great grandfather, had a Harley at that time. He’d take my young grandfather and put him right in front of him, under his arms and close to his heart, and drive around Kyiv. Oh, how my grandfather cried, he was 3 after all. His father started building houses and needed money, so he sold the thing. But that love in my grandad’s heart never went away.
1961, My grandad was 11.
“When you finish 5th Grade,” my his father said, “I’ll get you a bike!”. He wasn’t the best student, my grandfather, but if there was one thing he wanted more than anything in the world. And so, with that pure want in his heart, he plowed through the 5th grade and, just like he promised, his father bought him a bike. It was a beautiful thing, he says, a piece of art from Kharkiv off in the east. He loved that bike.
And then someone stole it.
That day, his dad’s relatives came over and they needed groceries. And so my grandad rode his bike off to the store, in the seedy part of the city. He parked his bike by a wall and waited in line for the line to get to him. By the time he had gotten there, though, someone stole it.
For the next year and half he’d wake up at the crack of dawn, rush off to the shed where he kept the bike and wish that it would show back up. It never did.
The years came in and out with the flowing of the river, and he never got a new bike. He went to college, got a job working IT, met my Grandmother when she was working as a nurse, the two got hitched, had my mom, raised her, saw her go through college, get hitched with my dad, fly off across the sea and came with her years later when my sister and I were born.
2026, My grandfather is 76.\ He’s driving me to an appointment with a doctor of a practice my mother never told him of, fearing he would never understand what was happening in my head. He’s telling me this story and we’re both looking down the snaking road and greyed out sky. I’m not wearing my headphones and I’m looking at him with love in my eyes. I never want to forget what he tells me.
Дідусь, я знаю я не багато тобі говорю, ну я хочу щоб ти знав: я тебе люблю.