04/24/2026
The Boy from Fez
Stories My Father Remembered (Ai compiled )
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Story One: The Aunt Who Made Candles
When my father was a boy in Fez, a woman returned to the house.
She did not arrive with luggage or announcements. She arrived the way people did then, quietly, inside the circle of family. She was his aunt. She had sadly divorced her husband, and in those days a divorced woman did not ask for money. She simply came home.
So she lived with them.
My grandfather did not speak of charity. He spoke of work. He sat with her and showed her how to decorate candles so she could sell them. Not plain candles, but colored ones. Yellow. Blue. Red. He showed her how to carve the wax along the sides with a knife so the layers folded outward like petals. He taught her how to set the wick straight, how to mount them on sticks, how to make something beautiful enough that someone would choose it.
My father watched all of this.
He watched a man help his sister stand again.
Later she took care of the children as if they were her own.
She woke them for school. She prepared their meals. She welcomed them upstairs to her living room, which my father still remembered as “very nice,” the way children remember warmth as architecture. Sometimes they slept beside her in the same large bed, safe in a world that still made room for them.
She taught them things no classroom taught.
Painting without brushes.
They used combs dipped in color. Toothbrushes flicked with their thumbs until hundreds of tiny dots scattered across paper like constellations. They scratched patterns into wet paint. They invented textures with whatever their hands could hold.
Art before they knew the word art.
Sometimes she took them walking through the cemetery outside the neighborhood, not in fear, but in curiosity. There were butterflies there. Lizards. Small creatures that boys notice and collect and name. They carried bottles and tools and built a child’s museum of the natural world. Later they gave the collection to their teacher.
He placed it in the classroom as if it were something official.
A museum.
My father remembered that part proudly.
There was also the season of black olives.
In Fez, there is always a season that defines a memory. That year it was olives so dark they looked almost blue in the sun. Birds came for them—black birds that loved black olives. My father watched them carefully. Everything he watched, he recorded.
Because he kept a notebook.
Not a secret notebook like other children. Not hidden under a mattress or behind folded clothes.
His notebook was open.
He wrote what happened each day so anyone could read it.
He did not believe memories were meant to be locked away.
Even then, before he was a man, before he crossed oceans, before hospital rooms and medications and visitors who spoke softly at the bedside, he was already keeping a record of the world.
A boy in Fez, writing things down so they would not disappear. 📖
