“Ie lavalava teoteo fa’a samoa.”
Every time I hear that I think of my grandmother. She listens to her Walkman all day. The volume so loud you can hear it from the kitchen. She is 89 years old; her name is Mele Vaele Ioelu and is part Samoan and German. She stays with us in her own room. Her walls are filled with necklaced photos of her brothers and sisters. Their faces look pale because of the black and white contrast.
All she does to occupy herself is listen to 531 P.I. And her daily routine is to check her Lotto tickets to see whether she has marked the “laki numeras” as she calls them.
She used to stay with my cousins in Ponsonby. When I was five years old I went there to stay the night. I remember it clearly. When Grandma Mele ate dinner we imitated her because it looked like she couldn’t chew her food. She got angry and scared us by taking her clean fangs out and pretending she was a hungry monster. All we could hear while we ran through the hallway was “Clatter! clatter! clatter!” We ran through the door of my cousin’s room and hid under the bed. We felt like we were being hunted by a bear that’s after honey.
“Don’t push me!” I said, trying to whisper.
“Shut-up! She’s going to hear us!” My cousin Imrana said.
“You shut-up!” I replied.
My cousin Aleem said, “Why don’t you both shut-up?”
When Grandma Mele fell asleep we sneaked in her room like burglars. Her teeth were drowning in a glass of water by her bed. She woke up ‘cause she heard us snickering like animals in the corner of her room, snapping at her fake teeth. She slowly reached for the lamp and switched it on. The light snapped on frightening the socks off us. She got a big grin on her face like Krusty The Clown. She jumped out of bed with her holey mouth and chased us down the hall, back to our rooms and back under the bed. She was pretty fast for an old lady - like a cheetah sprinting after an antelope. When she got to our room she commanded us to get into bed and go to sleep.
“Tatou tafao taeo. Moe loa Fa!”
“Fa!” we said in a fa’ali’i way.
She turned the light off and we pretended to sleep. What she didn’t know was that we got the last laugh. We crept back into her room and played with her teeth all night.
This work was originally published in the YWCA booklet, Ehara i a Koe Anake - You're Not Alone, and is subject to the copyright conditions of that publication.