Lives like Ours

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Lives like Ours

December 1952

My daughter looked so beautiful as she sat beside my mother; her tumbling curls cascading over her petite shoulders. Regularly I found my self pausing, oblivious to anything else in the world, to stare in fascination at her. It seemed natural to me that a mother should love her daughter, as I loved mine and as my mother had loved hers. At the age of three she had already developed a shocking resemblance to the woman sat opposite and beside her; an angular jaw, a straight but soft nose and a cute heart shape face. She also resembled my mother and me in other ways, like how she preferred strawberry ice-cream to vanilla and loved the smell of peppermint. However my daughter also resembled her other half, a half I force myself to ignore.

        We were sat in my favorite restaurant of all time, Jazzies. A small knockout, its entrance found down one of the duskiest alleys in the whole of New York. From the outside the building appeared to be the last place a mother would want to take her three year old child, but once you stepped through the pokey corridor you would find a room filled with the best music in town. Every person who dined at Jazzies always came back for more.

For me, all of my childhood memories were in Jazzies; I used to come here in the evenings to hear my mother sing. She was truly wonderful; her passion and hearted soul would light up the bar every Friday evening and was enough to have the whole bar up on their feet dancing. My grandfather used to play the sax, and he was good, I mean really good. My mother told me that by the age of 11, her father could already play like his grandfather, from whom he had learnt. Nowadays I worked in Jazzies, performing on their beautiful black grand piano, one I would have died to play when I was a little girl. It was my dream job. I was able to do something that I loved in a place which I had grown up in. In Jazzies I knew everyone; my uncle Dudley and his wife Janessa, both who worked behind the bar, my childhood friend, Kita, and how could I not mention him, my great grandfather Billy. At the age of 98 he still found life inside himself to get up on stage every now and then to play his double bass.

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        So here I sit, in my most favorite place in the entire world, watching my daughter twirl into my mothers awaiting arms; her deep purple dress twinkling in the dim light, a dress she would have worn everyday of the week if she had the opportunity. I look at their faces illuminating happiness, my daughter turns to look at me, grinning; she waves her purple fingernails at me, beckoning to come over. As I smile back to her and begin to walk over to her I think that there is nothing else in the world I could possibly wish for.

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