What Nana Left Behind

Hair stylists – the good ones – are artists.

They not only know their tools and products, they’re intuitively tuned in to what looks good on you. Long hair, short hair, layered hair or something else altogether, the really good stylists understand the underlying pattern of who you are and how your public persona hopes to look.

I’ve known Angie for many years, through three marriages and many changes in the lives of her two sons and daughter. She’s a Virgo, the perfect stylist any woman could hope to have. Perfection, details, an intuitive grasp of what your hair needs, of the style you desire. She’s also on the same political page that I am and a truly wonderful person.

I enjoy going to the salon where she works – everyone is positive, upbeat – and we invariably catch up on each other’s lives. Recently, Angie told me that a story had “come to her” and she’d written it in a kind of fever. Every writer knows this is the purest kind of writing, the flow you can’t stop.

It’s a little kids’ book that doubles as a coloring book, and is called What Nana Left Behind. I‘m not a grandmother yet, but there’s something about Angie’s beautiful little book that touches my heart.

The story is told through the eyes of her grandson – in real life, he’s Joaquin – and it’s about the stuff that, as the title says, Nana leaves behind every time she visits him. Glasses. Her wallet. Cell phone. And later, as Nana ages and then passes on, she has left the indelible parts of herself, the curiosity and compassion, the essence of who she is, which has shaped the essence of who her grandson is and becomes. What I’d really like to know is when the next Nana book is going to appear.

Will she be a Topper-like spirit? The voice of the grandson’s intuition?

What Nana Left Behind is about how each of us, as children, is shaped and sculpted by our environments and the people we love and revere.

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