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I have this tiny red digital voice recorder that I rarely travel without. Blame it on the journalist in me (and also the fact that I work freelance). You just never know when a moment worth recording is going to pop up, or a random, can’t-turn-it-down assignment will fall into your inbox.

So while I spent three weeks in Miami over the holidays, my recorder came with me almost everywhere. I’ve never really had to use it; most of the time I forget it’s there. But on one of the last days of my visit I sat down with my grandmother (my Nonna, as we call her, which is Italian for grandmother) and we got to talking.

It was a spontaneous talk that traveled to the past, to the days when she was a teenager and met my grandfather, to the details of what bus she rode that day, which girlfriends she was with as they went to the beach, what she whispered to them the first time she locked eyes with him. She told me about the first time they finally spoke, days later, and I remember thinking how romantic it must’ve been, to live in a time when even teenagers saying hello at a beach used their first and last names for introductions.

I’d never heard this story before, so I sat there and soaked it in. I asked questions, hoping she’d get into more detail, and by the middle of the conversation Nonna pretty much took the reins. We weren’t just talking anymore; she was telling me the story of her life.

For a moment, as this dawned on me, I thought about running to my purse real quick to get my recorder. I wanted to capture every word, the way her voice changed pitch and became more youthful at times, how it slowed down to follow her gaze in other moments when history became difficult to recall. I wanted to, years from now, replay her giggles (there were so many) and picture how she smiled so wide that her eyes closed up and her shoulders shook.

I kept wanting to get my recorder, but I never did. The moment never felt right. You can’t just push a pause button on life and expect it to go on interrupted. Disrupting the natural flow of the conversation for the sake of capturing it wasn’t nearly worth it. I told myself that I would write everything down later in as much detail as possible.

But we had plans that evening, and the next day was a rush of getting our luggage together and saying our goodbyes as we prepared to go back home. Once in Austin, with more time on my hands, I was shocked to realize I wasn’t ready to write it all down yet. It took me two more days. When I finally opened my journal to record my memories of our conversation, eight pages came out, cramping my hands.

I started how she started. I still remembered her exact words. But the more I wrote the more I realized I wasn’t just writing her history; I was writing about the experience of having it passed down to me. Her story became intertwined with mine, in the way family histories often do; her expressions became filtered through my perception of them.

My retelling wasn’t perfect, but in its own way it was. It occurred to me that the reason I waited so long to write it down was that I had to process it. A tape recorder or a camera might have captured the moment more accurately, but I wanted to write about it truthfully. That’s the job of the writer, isn’t it? Of fiction. We observe life but we do it a disservice by simply regurgitating the cold facts. Bringing something to life on the page is a craft, a careful process that pulls from every little piece of us. In sharing stories we share parts of ourselves, even if the story is about someone else entirely.

It’s like the quote in one of my favorite books, The Book of Embraces, says:

Recordar: To remember, from the Latin re-cordis, to pass back through the heart.

 photo credit: Denzil~