A visit to a magical toy store....

...and the hard truth I found myself sharing with its owner, a man I'd never met

I wrote the story I’m sharing this morning on a book tour in Europe a year ago this month. Partly, it’s about a little toyshop I visited, and its memorable owner. But it’s also about the experience I live with—as do many other women I know, and some men too—of finding myself distanced, for many years now, from one of my beloved adult children.

There was a time when I could never have dreamed this son and I would come to the place we are now, in which we communicate only on rare occasions, about superficial things. As a woman who has always felt happiest and most alive in the company of children, I find it a source of astonishment and sorrow that I barely know my grandchildren. They barely know me.

I have never taken one of them to pick out a book at a bookstore or gone for a walk with one of them or spent an afternoon, just the two of us, making paper dolls or baking cookies or reading.

There was a time when it seemed as if this situation would rob me of all joy. I don’t say that any more. I find joy in many places. I have even landed in a place of regretful acceptance. Once they’re grown, with children of their own, our children get to make their own choices for their lives, of course. Even if those choices separate us from them. Even if their assessments of who we are, and who we might be to our grandchildren, differ wildly from what we would have imagined.

These days, when some well-meaning person asks about my grandchildren, or offers the observation “Isn’t being a grandparent the best thing ever?” I say very little, but, knowing as I do how many others like me suffer this particular brand of grief, in isolation, I never lie.

“I love my grandchildren,” I say, and keep it at that, generally.

On those rare occasions when I volunteer more, the well-meaning person is likely to suggest that things are sure to change. “Baby steps”, they say. I nod.

I never give up hope that things will one day be different. But I don’t live in the land of yearning, either, or stake my happiness on breakthroughs that may or may not ever take place, releasing us from a form of bitterness and need for distance whose origins I never understood. I choose to celebrate the gifts and joys that surround me today, and there are many.

This is the story of one of those.

I was in France, on the third week of a book tour. That night I was scheduled to speak at a bookshop in the lovely city of Montpelier, but my train got in early . The afternoon stretched before me, with a whole new place to explore. And so I set out in my trusty yellow sneakers, with absolutely no plan except to discover something I’d never seen before.

Montpelier is a very old city filled with wide open plazas and tree-shaded green spaces , cafes all around, and fountains, and children on swings, and someone playing a guitar, or an accordion. That afternoon not a single American tourist was in sight. Except for me.

What I loved best about Montpelier were all the winding little alley-ways, too narrow for cars, with shops facing out onto them, whose windows displayed all sorts of lovely things you’d never find back home in the U.S: a whole window-full of beautiful shaving tools and brushes….fabulous stationery and pens and leather bound notebooks….old fashioned fedoras….and then…. the best store ever. Its name: Pommes de Renette.

In the window: A fabulous antique marionette, toy cars and dolls and wooden tops and yo-yos and tiny castles and soldiers and zoo animals and Tin Tin figures—the kinds of toys you’d picture emerging from Santa’s workshop, never Toys R Us.

I stepped inside. I could feel my heart racing. Where to begin?

There were music boxes playing, and tiny men seated in small tin airplanes hanging from the ceiling, and stuffed animals of every species. And kaleidoscopes, and a whole room dedicated to magic tricks, and another room dedicated to puppets and puppet theaters. Some of the items cost a lot of money of course—though the prices seemed fair, not exorbitant. But the store was also filled with the kind of small, wonderful things that cost a Euro or two (that’s a couple of dollars.)

I started filling my basket with these. A tiny music box that played an Edith Piaf song (on the wall, a list of thirty or so songs you could choose from). Alongside these: a monkey who hopped over a ladder. A windup swimmer for bathtub fun. Masks. Wooden tops. Marbles. Tiny felt mice wearing interesting outfits.

Now for the best part of the whole store: its proprietor, a man who looked, himself, a little like Gepetto in the Pinocchio movie of my childhood. He was around my age, I guessed (and later, when we spoke at length, it turned out I was right), with a shock of white hair and a pair of red suspenders that he wore not as some might, like a costume, but as a man would who actually puts on suspenders every day of his life.

Working alongside him: a man probably thirty years his junior, but bearing a strong resemblance to the older one. The son, no doubt. (Turns out I was right.) His name wasAlex. His father, Alain.

I asked Alain about the shop of course. He was just twenty years old when he opened it. That was fifty two years ago. “I have never gotten tired of the sound of children’s voices,” he told me, in French—and adults’ voices, as they rediscover the child in themselves—when they step into Pommes de Rennette.

Alain has kept a notebook—many, no doubt—in which he records the words of some of his shoppers over the years. One I loved, from a child, was a question she asked her mother, as she made her way through the store. “Maman, Is this paradise?”

By the time I was finished shopping, I probably had thirty or forty tiny items in my basket by this point. Each one carefully chosen, with a certain little girl in mind. Two of them actually. My two oldest granddaughters, age 7 and 5.

The gifts I’d chosen for them were not big items. I’d chosen small, quirky treasures—the kind of thing a grandmother sticks inside a padded mailer and sends off to a granddaughter.

“Do you want me to wrap them?” Alain asked me.

Considering the number of my purchases, and the low price of each, this seemed way too difficult a task. I shook my head.

“But these are gifts aren’t they?” Alain asked again. (He looked…not disapproving, exactly, but concerned.)

“It would be a lot of work,” I said.

“These are for children, aren’t they?”” he asked.

And so this is what my new friend, the storekeeper at Pommes de Renette, did with my forty-eight separate purchases. He placed each one in a separate little brightly-colored sack and sealed it with a sticker. Then he took out a special pen filled with glue, with which he wrote—in beautiful script—the name of the granddaughter who would be the recipient of that particular toy.

After he’d written her name in glue, he reached into a little wooden box containing purple glitter. This he sprinkled over the glue, shaking off the excess. This left just the name itself on the bag, in glittering purple script.

Alain repeated this task for each of my purchases, for each of the two little girls back home with their parents in Los Angeles. Every small gift in its own separate bag.

The process took a long time—close to an hour, because now and then Alain had to interrupt his work to tend to another customer. I didn’t mind. I could have spent longer than that wandering around this store.

As he was finishing up placing the very last of my purchases in their little sacs, writing out the now-familiar names for the very last time, something moved me to tell him something I would not generally share with a person I’d only met an hour before. But this man now felt like a friend to me, as did his father. And the care he’d demonstrated, in making sure every one of my gifts was packaged perfectly for the two little girls who would be receiving them, made me feel I wanted to give him something back. My truth. A painful one, actually.

“I want to tell you something about these presents,” I told Alain. Because I was speaking French, I sometimes had to search for a word. One thing I did not have to search for: the feeling behind them.

And so I told him the story. That almost a year has passed now since I have seen the two little girls to whom I will be sending these little packages—two at a time. I could not love my granddaughters more. But it’s been a very long time since I’ve heard their voices. Since the last time we spoke, they’ve welcomed a new baby brother, and of course I’d love to see him too, and hold him, and help his parents take care of him, and hear what the girls have to say about their new brother, and about school, and Halloween, and gymnastics classes and soccer, and absolutely anything else they wanted to talk about, but none of this has happened either.

I won’t go into the story concerning the distance that exists between my much-loved older son and his family, or the reasons behind it, which continue to grieve and baffle me, hard as I try to understand. Only to say that many efforts have been made—by me, and also by my older son, my grandchildren’s father, who is not here to tell his story but would no doubt have his reasons to recount, of why he and his wife have made the decisions they have, concerning their feelings about allowing me to be more than a distant presence in the lives of their children.

I used to say that the estrangement between the two of us “broke my heart” but I don’t say that any more. My heart is still beating, and there is so much in my life and world in which I find joy and gratitude. I am not a broken person. And I am forever hopeful that one day, those girls and their brother may come to know me and that I might be a part of their lives in a meaningful way.

In my far-from-perfect French, I said all of this to the shopkeeper with the red suspenders, Alain. I do not cry when I tell this story. As for Alain, despite the constant whirl of customers coming in and out of the shop, he listened carefully. He had the kindest face.

“I want the girls to always know I love and think about them,” I told him.

So every week or two, for nearly as many years as the girls have been alive on this planet, I’ve been sending them a postcard—of a painting, or a kitten, or a little story, or some funny story about their father when he was the age they are now. The kind that’s short enough to fit on the back of a postcard.

Now and then I send them a very small gift. Nothing extravagant, because I don’t want to be, for them, the absent grandmother who buys expensive presents. I want to be the grandmother they will someday remember as having always loved them, if only from afar.

When I got back to my hotel that afternoon, after my visit to Pommes de Reinette—and right before heading off to the bookstore where I’d host my nightly event-- I placed each of those forty-eight little packets in my already-bursting suitcase. Each one was small. I made them fit.

When I get home, I’ll mail off a small padded envelope containing the first of my treasures from Alex and Alain’s magical toyshop. There are enough of these to last through the year.

And here’s what makes me happy: Every time I mail off another padded envelope, I’ll feel almost as if I’m putting my arms around my granddaughters. Every time they open one, I hope they know how much they are loved.

PS: You can follow Pommes de Renette toy shop on Instagram. And if you’re in France, or even if you’re not, it’s worth the trip.

https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/274980762/pomme-de-reinette-et-pomme-dapi/

And if the experience of estrangement from a beloved adult child is one with which you have made painful acquaintance, yourself, you may find it worthwhile checking out my most recent novel, How the Light Gets In.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0727TN8C8/?bestFormat=true&k=how%20the%20light%20gets%20in%20maynard&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-pd-bk-d_k0_1_29_de&crid=10M832M58WIYE&sprefix=how%20the%20light%20gets%20in%20maynard