My grandpa and I were destined to become very close, since we had the same birthday. Because he would come and stay with us every other 6 months we would always get to spend our birthday together. My mom would usually make the cake and she would make it chocolate with chocolate frosting, my grandpa’s favorite. In really big letters she would write “la multi ani bunicu” which in english translates to happy birthday grandpa and in really small writing in the very bottom corner she would include “and Naomi” with whatever little frosting she had left after she decorated the cake with flowers and cool designed patterns around the edges showing she spent a lot of time on this cake.

His name was Dan Roman, no he doesn’t have two first names, that’s his whole name, and it’s pretty great just like him. The magical aspect of dan was his ability to dream about a machine or project and when he wakes up will know exactly how it works, what went wrong, how to fix it, and the exact piece that made whatever it was made it break in the first place. This was especially true for clocks and watches. Dan was happiest when he got a new watch or clock, especially when it was broken so he could take it apart, get to know it’s insides, find out what made it tick before it stopped ticking, and restore it to its prime. Because of him my entire house is full of grandfather clocks. He got my dad into it so they could go to clock stores all over Michigan to get the right parts and tools to fix all the broken clocks he bought. I believe his secret motto was ‘no clock left behind’ and sought out to fix every clock he could.

When I was a little girl I always wanted to learn new things so I would follow my grandpa around all day and ask him a hundred thousand questions every single day. He never seemed to mind and let me tag along and he would explain what he was doing the entire time, and on occasion he would even let me help if only my tiny hands could get to the broken part. We had a great time together, I got to learn way too much about everything on the planet. He even one time taught me how to milk a cow and tipped over the sadly empty bucket under the cow from laughing at how weak my 5 year old arms were, then gently put his hands over mine to show me how to properly milk a cow. It smelled like warm milk fresh from the stove and newborn bunnies, not clean ones though. it was gross, but I loved every minute of it because I was with someone who enjoyed my company as much as I enjoyed theirs.

We would like to sit at the kitchen table, eating pancakes, and reminisce the times when he was young and romania was in war so he joined the army with most of the rest of the youth of Romania. His stories would start with,  “have I ever told you the story of when I was in the war?” Dan would look and ask me with his sky blue, wise old owl eyes almost everyday.

I would reply, “no, what happened?” I already knew all his stories but I knew how much he liked to talk about his war adventures. He would also really like to tell them to me in different languages to see if I knew what he was saying so I would just give him my usual puzzled look and that would amuse him. This would prompt him to say, “I learned Russian, Czech Slovakian, and Italian in one year, how come you don’t know how to speak them as well?”

The two of us were very good friends, he would continually ask my parents to bring me back to Romania with him, I wouldn’t even notice it was a different country he said. Yes because if you go to the opposite side of the world to a country that speaks a different language most people wouldn’t notice the difference, right?
“You could finally learn Russian!” his face lit up at the thought of finally being able to tell me his stories in Russian and being understood without having to repeat his story in another language for me to understand.
This is how I remember my grandpa: happy, curious, ready to laugh, full of funny stories in 20 different languages, and most of all, magical. He was a great man and I’m grateful I got to meet him and learn to love the man with whom I shared a birth date.