Three Stars for a Prayer Book

Selections from My Amazonian Reviews: Thoughts on Life's Real and Imagined Possessions.

Stepping Out from the Past

In the spirit of reviewing my possessions, I offer this reflection on a family prayer book passed down from my grandmother, Margarita.

 

Who Was Margarita?

I never really knew you, Margarita. I was twelve the last time I saw you. I’m now sixty-five, and in these moments of retirement and solitude, in this still house in the country where I am so often alone, I contemplate your existence and why I did not come to know you better. Retirement does that to a man—it converts him into a melancholic thinker.

During the years you were present in my life, I was a young and foolish child. I was a strange boy—moody, withdrawn, and full of anger and quirks that left no room for your love. You were the other grandmother, my father’s mother. You were not like Lotita, my mother’s mother, who visited us every Saturday with pastries, stories, and an imagination so big it created entire worlds. Lotita fed my love for escape.

You were the quiet grandmother, the one who lived in el centro—the heart of Buenos Aires. I don’t remember you ever visiting our suburban house. We came to your city apartment for special occasions—Christmas, Easter, maybe even New Year’s Eve.

I’m trying to recall if I ever really talked with you. Did I ever hear you speak to others? You seemed too reserved. But I remember your smile. It was soft, peaceful, mysterious—suggesting torrents of joyful thoughts and tenderness that you felt but did not express aloud. My father had that same smile in the sanatorium.

How I Got the Prayer Book

Not gift-wrapped. It arrived wrapped in maternal disappointment.

When she was sixty-five and packing up to move to Pennsylvania for retirement, Mother parceled out to the siblings a trunkful of trinkets carried over from Father’s family—willow-pattern teacups, drawings, photos, Bibles, and prayer books. The oldest sister received the pretty Family Bible, the one with gold leaves and everyone’s birth, baptism, and death recorded inside. The others got less precious items, based on my mother’s mood and whimsy as to who deserved what.

I was not my mother’s favorite, so it would have been unlikely I would be awarded a precious bible. Instead, I received a Book of Common Prayer with your name on it: Margarita Smith de Beckford. The name was written in pencil, not in your hand but in my mother’s—elegant, unmistakable. Beneath it, she wrote two dates: your birth and your death. That was it—your life, reduced to two dates penciled in.

Condition Summary: The Prayer Book:

I thanked Mother for giving me your 1800s Church of England prayer book—it had a handsome leather cover—but I never opened it. I was miffed at not having snagged one of the pretty bibles. I put your prayer book in a velvet box where I keep sentimental things. I rarely open that box of keepsakes, but when I do, I always find something I’d forgotten—or never noticed before. Recently, in such a moment, I found your prayer book, and this time, I opened it. Minimal wear, moderate emotional residue.

The bookmark was set on the Daily Morning Prayer page. That page was worn, creased and softened by time. It must have been your favorite. Toward the back, I found something unexpected: a chart titled “List of Forbidden Marriages.” It listed marital pairings that Christians may not enter into—fathers and daughters, sons and sisters, grandfathers and descendants, uncles, nephews, etc. Strangely, there was no prohibition against cousins. And that’s what you did: you married your first cousin.

It wasn’t unusual back then—common, even—a way to keep land in the family. Your united family once held estancias outside of Buenos Aires, stretches of pasture and livestock passed down through generations. But by the 1920s, even those lands were gone. That’s when the city claimed you for good. I picture you there, Margarita, walking those cracked  Buenos Aires sidewalks, a young woman in black lace gloves, carrying your prayer book as if it were a compass.

Still, even after you left the pampas for the city, one family member, Auntie Kittie, kept a smaller ranch thirty-five kilometers away from the city center. My father, a lad at the time, spent all his summers there. He told me stories of riding horses all day long, and coming back at sunset with a sunburnt neck and pale stripes where the reins had been. Other than Auntie Kittie, all of you left the lands and became urban dwellers. 

Holding your prayer book now, I notice only a few pages were touched. But the leather cover bears the traced imprint of your hands. I imagine you gripping the prayer book tightly, not in piety, but in contemplation—eyes closed, thinking, not praying. Wondering where life was taking you. How would the family survive without the riches of the land? What part of you would live on in your children?

Lately, I’ve been wondering what my children will carry forward about me.

What the Prayer Book Reminds Me Of

 

I didn’t expect a dusty old book to stir so much. It reminded me of you, Margarita, but it also reminded me of Mother.

A few years before Mother died, I began calling her once a week. We had our differences. As adults, there was distance. Only when I had children did I begin to understand her hardships—and how difficult children can be. My spouse, who was close with their own mother, urged me to call more often. Once a week became twice, then daily. Sometimes, more than once a day.

In the last days of her life, Mother lived alone in a one-level home, just a few blocks from the nursing home where Father—like you, Margarita—was slowly lost to Alzheimer’s. I would occasionally drive her there for visits. It was as bleak as every story you've ever read on the subject. But they treated him well. I didn’t bring your prayer book to the nursing home, but I carried it in my mind—like a soft echo of your endurance.

Father recognized only a few—Mother, of course. In me, something familiar, though my name never quite surfaced. If I asked, “Do you know who I am?” he would smile—glad to see me—but his eyes drifted, blank with effort. He had drifted far. But like you, Margarita, he never let go of his smile. I’d ask, “How are you?” and he’d beam, “Wonderful!” Then point at the clouds and say something like, “Look at that cloud—that’s Auntie Kittie’s place. I can see her riding a horse.”

Those visits always left me hollow. I wouldn’t say much on the drive back, but Mother could see it in my face—what it did to me, watching someone I loved vanish in slow motion.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We are all alone. We’re born alone, we die alone, and in between, we live inside our own minds. At best, we survive as a faint impression in the memory of others—but even that is incomplete. No one can truly share themselves.”

So now I try to reimagine you, Margarita. That smile. Those inward thoughts. You weren’t absent, just reserved—someone who shaped the silences I now find myself drawn to. Maybe I’ve come to believe the things we hold—books, memories, even silence—shape us slowly, the way fingers wear down a leather cover or pencil fades from a name written long ago. Maybe that’s what you were doing too, Margarita—trying to hold something steady while time rearranged everything else. And maybe it’s not too late to hold them differently—to see in those small inheritances not just what went unspoken—but what was offered.

Rating: Three stars. The product held more than it revealed.

Ernesto Beckford

June 25, 2025

© Ernesto Beckford 2025

Please leave one of your amazing comments! See the comment box at the page footer.