One of the reasons to travel is that interactions with strangers, no matter how brief, can sometimes form happy memories that last a lifetime. I had such an interaction with a woman I met in the Cayman Islands in 1994. Her name was Nettie Levy, and people said that at 105 she may not have been as sharp mentally as she once was. But you couldn’t prove it by me.
On the main island, Grand Cayman, I’d gone one afternoon to visit Miss Nettie, as everyone called her, in the tin-roofed wooden house that was already four years old when she moved into it as a new bride in 1914.
Showing more common sense than many a government official I’ve talked to, Miss Nettie slept through most of my attempt to interview her.
And when she did awake, during a conversation I was having with her 77-year-old daughter, Ariel Christian, it was to ask “Is dat de governor?”
To commemorate Mother’s Day some years ago, the Caymans’ governor had presented Miss Nettie, who at the time was the Cayman’s oldest living resident, with an award. The governor and I both have sandy hair, a ruddy complexion, and, I like to think, a regal bearing. So, confusing the two of us seemed a mistake anyone could easily make. Especially anyone just waking from a nap.
Ariel, who everyone called Miss Ariel, attempted to assure Miss Nettie I was not the governor. I was, she said, a gentleman from America.
“America?” Miss Nettie replied. “But he speak such good English.”
This is from the introduction to a story I wrote about the Caymans that was published in the February 1995 issues of Islands magazine. Between the time I met Miss Nettie and the story appeared, she died. It was a sad loss for the Caymans, the governor, and me.
