Great Grand Mother

I’ve never met my great grandmother. I know so little about her. But I want to remember what I know. So, I thought I would write about her. She was apparently ‘ahead of her time’. My mother loved running down the streets to visit her at her coffee shop. My great grandmother owned a coffee shop–in Japan in 1940’s. she served coffee. Whenever My mother visited her, she would give her some Eropean treats from her shop and gave her a nickel so my mom could go and buy herself a bottle of ‘ramune’. Ramune is a bottle of soda pop, tastes just like 7Up or Sprite. Nothing too special. Except it comes in this pale blue glass bottle which is sealed with a glass marble. You open the bottle by pushing the marble down into the bottle and the the marble would just stay half way down where it narrows inside. With every sip, you hear the pleasant tinkling of the marble rolling inside the glass bottle. And after you are done, every child tries to get the marble out in vain, of course. We all know we can’t get it. But we try it anyways. I remember getting ramune as a kid. Once a few years back I saw it in an asian grocer. I thought about my great grandmother. I know so little about her, I don’t even know her name or what she looked like, and yet I felt such an intimate connection at that moment.