remembering my grandmother
My grandmother died this year. She raised me off and on, she was as much a parent as a grandparent. The last few times I saw her… my mom brought her to visit after my older daughter was born, when my daughter was still a baby. I have pictures of my grandma holding my baby daughter, they make me smile, to see my grandma looking happy and holding the baby, and to see my big girl as a little bald baby, with that toothless bird look to the shape of her face, smiling her baby smile. Another time, when my wife was pregnant with our older daughter, a cousin brought my grandma up to visit. She stayed at our small apartment. We made a bed on the floor for us to sleep in, gave her our bed. We tried to, I mean. She refused. “I’ll sleep on the floor, I don’t want your bed.” “No grandma it’s fine, you take the bed.” “I don’t want the bed, I want to sleep on the floor.” This went back and forth for a while and finally she pulled me aside and said in a loud whisper “listen I ain’t having that pregnant gal sleep on no floor while I take her bed. I’ll sleep on the floor, I’ll be fine, you two sleep in your own bed.” So that’s what happened.
She brought her small yappy dog, the one she adored and that was such a bad-tempered thing. It bullied our dog, twice or three times its size. Our dog wagged her tail excited to have another animal around, and grandma’s dog growled angrily and snapped at her. Our dog ran and hid.
Another time we visited before my wife got pregnant. Grandma told us stories about when she was younger. Her mother died while my grandmother was young, her father started drinking too much. She was proud he worked as a bricklayer when he could find work. She talked about brick roads he had helped lay as part of work crews during the Depression. (She ate sandwiches of butter and sugar as a dessert her whole life, remembering them from the depression, and corn bread with maple syrup - “we called it johnnycake” she always would say.) She learned typing and book-keeping in school. She got a job as a secretary at a small bank and ended up doing book-keeping for them, serving as their accountant. The bank got robbed once. “Gun looks like a cannon when it’s in front of your face.”
She moved out of her father’s place, moved in with a friend. The friend’s husband was in the military and the friend started dating other men. “I had to move out then. She kept having these fellas over all the time and people talked, so she told them they were my fellas and they weren’t and I didn’t want people thinking that about me so I had to move out.”
I never heard how she met my grandfather. There are lots of old pictures of the two of them. I forget how young they were, really. I’m glad my mother had me young though I know it shaped her life differently. Having young grandparents made a difference in my life, and of course their individual character as people mattered, that they chose to be actively involved in my life. At this point I am closer to my grandmother’s age when I was born than I am to my mother’s age when I was born. That’s a strange thought. What if in ten years I have a grandkid? I don’t wish that on my daughter but I won’t lament it if it happens.
My grandmother drove me to school for years, she worked right by my schools, it was a 20 or 30 minute drive. She used to let me pick the radio station. It was only this year, like a month or two ago, that I realized how nice of her that was. She definitely can’t have liked the pop music stations I tuned in. She would occasionally comment about it but always in a friendly way and I never really thought about it that she really couldn’t have liked any of that and so she was just being nice, subjecting herself to that stuff all that time.
She smoked, so did my grandfather, and while I know how terrible cigarettes are for you, if I’m in the right mood I still have a nostalgic fond feeling for the smell of cigarette smoke, and the look of the smoke curling in the air. We ate a lot of dinners in diners and at truck stops, my grandfather was a truck driver, places with a smoking section. Where I live now there’s a smoking ban and I like it, the idea of eating while someone smokes in front of me seems gross to me now, but I feel good when I picture the dark formica topped table and my grandparents’ cigarettes burning in the silver tin ashtray, smoke rising in lazy ’s’ shapes from the orange tip, while we eat scrambled eggs and corn beef hash and and toast and bacon and hashbrowns and they drink coffee. I used to build pyramids out of the little containers of creamer at the table.
My grandparents had six kids. My grandfather had one or two from a previous marriage. I don’t know the story about that. I think some of my grandparents’ kids may have been from a previous marriage, I don’t really know, my mom wasn’t, so maybe that’s part of why it never got talked about in front of me. Now that I’m an adult and I have my own kids, I really see how different it is to know kids than it is to know adults, we’re different people with the children in our lives than we are with adults. I knew my grandparents well in the way that kids know adults, but I don’t know them much at all as an adult in the way that adults know each other. I want to know more about them but at the same time I want to know more about them in ways that fit with how I knew them as a kid, I don’t want the full story. Some things about adults are adult in character and don’t belong to, aren’t appropriate for children. I don’t want any of that knowledge about them, but I want a richer kid-appropriate knowledge, or at least to remember more of what I knew about them.