My grandfather used to go to the thrift store and buy my brother and me gifts.
They weren’t toys in the traditional sense. More often, they were things with insides.
A broken clock so we could take it apart and see how it worked. Gears, springs, tiny screws rolling across the floor. He was an engineer, and this was his love language: curiosity, mechanics, understanding how something functioned by touching it.
One day, he brought me a suitcase.
It was brown faux leather with plastic compartments inside, designed to hold cassette tapes. Simple. Unassuming. And yet, it felt like I had been handed an entire world.
I filled it slowly. Stevie Nicks. The Pirates of Penzance. Opera. A few classical tapes. Bach, Beethoven. Others I can’t name anymore, but I remember how they made me feel. Music became something more than sound. It became a language.
My grandfather wasn’t very expressive. He wasn’t someone who talked about feelings or shared emotions in obvious ways. But we would sit together and listen to music, especially opera, which he loved. Big, dramatic emotion without explanation.
We didn’t talk while it played. We didn’t need to.
Looking back, I realize that was a form of connection. A soft one. A quiet one. Being in the same room, listening to the same thing, feeling something together without naming it. A shared presence that didn’t ask for articulation.
Their house was small and dark, but cozy, with shaggy orange carpet that seemed permanently lodged in the 1970s. I remember sitting on that carpet as a very small child, wearing a top hat and holding a tiny cane, playing dress-up. There was laughter. There was joy. I don’t even know if the music was playing in that moment, or if I’ve woven these memories together over time.
But they belong together in my mind.
The suitcase.
The music.
The carpet.
The quiet.
Music became the bridge between us. A way to feel something together without either of us needing to explain what we were feeling. I don’t remember my grandfather crying or sharing vulnerability in words, but I remember the swell of opera filling the room, and the way it seemed to say everything anyway.
I think I was always holding my breath, waiting for more.
It didn’t come.
Not because it wasn’t there, but because neither of us knew how to ask for it. Or how to offer it differently. So I took what I was given.
And now, with the perspective of time, I see it for what it was.
A beautiful exchange.
Incomplete, maybe. Quiet. Subtle. But real.
And enough.
