Life is a Journey: Ride Shotgun with Good Drivers and Take Notes

My 96 year old grandmother’s travel journals are great guides for navigating life with love and fun.

“How we remember, what we remember and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.” ~Christina Baldwin

Seeing my grandmother in her new nursing home facility, I wasn’t quite prepared for the fast downfall she had taken since our last visit a few months earlier.

Faye is almost 97. If it weren’t for the arthritis and the hearing loss, she’d be the picture of health—other than the dementia. It’s bad.

Her eyes rose when I left, at least. She blew me kisses.

The rock, the spitfire, the joy of a grandma whom I’ve idolized my whole life… with her dance costumes, her telling people they’re full of shit, her picking up pennies, her chocolate peanut butter balls…

…she’s far away from this place now.

[Edited to add 12/27/2014: I am on my way to my grandmother’s funeral this morning. She passed away in her sleep, just before Christmas, a couple weeks short of 98 years old. As I like to think, if there’s a dance floor in heaven, there will be no “resting in peace” for Faye. Please read on and enjoy…]

But in a recent visit, I received something to literally connect her to me, in the present world, forever. Her memories.

As written in two journals she kept while on “Merry Widows” tours to Europe in the 1980s.

A view into her life and mind; laughter and love. What a gift. Because hers is not an ordinary life, mind, laughter or love.

Her notebooks are like diamonds to me. Or, crystal balls.

They make grandma last forever, shining as only she can. I can see her past, as she translates moments that shaped her. Moments she chose with care.

I have found a side to my grandmother I never knew. While at the same time, the Faye I already know and love is still teaching me. Inspiring me. Making me laugh.

Reading her words as she lived them is revealing to me the value of deep and abiding connections to the past. But also how not to get too caught up in any one time…life is change.

As I said. What a gift.

She kept some records like a schoolgirl interested in the history, geography and culture of the places she visited.

If you knew Faye, you’d be surprised by that, like I was. You’d expect them instead to lean more toward the observation on the first page of her 1988 notebook, as her tour group met up at JFK airport:

“There are 17 single men & 33 single women. I’m sure I will meet all the guys before I get to Poland.”

Faye was always good for a few surprises.

She was never one to mince words. She played the hand she was dealt. She’d been a cute, short, blue-eyed grandma for as long as I’d known.

So it’s easy to see how you could be caught off-guard the day you learned she had smoked those Belair cigs so as to transition out of Kool no-filters. Then quit cold turkey after 35 years. Tough as nails.

She drank her coffee cold like mud every morning, on purpose.

She knocked bridesmaids out of the way to catch the bouquets at her various granddaughters’ weddings, also on purpose.

Her name is not really Faye, it’s Marie.

She is the most interesting granny in the world.

Faye has been my idol for over 50 years. My dad, her oldest of six sons, “gave” her me, the first grandchild and the first little girl she had the pleasure of playing with in a very long time.

She cut my bangs crooked, burned my freckled skin in the sun with baby oil, and took me to Wrigley Field every summer as her younger boys outgrew play dates with their mother.

I was up for it all—though, with her, one had little choice. Still, I loved riding shotgun with Faye around Chicago. She was a notorious lead foot, and wasn’t shy about letting other drivers know how she felt about their skills, either.

This makes for a most interesting comparison when looking at my grandma’s years of churning, forward survival.

If life is a journey, then even when all maps seemed to fail, Faye was a confident driver.

• She was one year old during the Spanish Flu pandemic—family documents show at least one sibling didn’t make it
• They were so poor on their Ohio farm, they had to cut off the fronts of their shoes so their toes could grow out
• She took whatever work she could find as a teen in during the Depression, married and had my dad at 19
• She went through WWII with two small sons, a virtual model for Rosie the Riveter
• Her husband came back a broken soldier four years later; a mostly drunk Polish tradesman who struggled to help her raise children, earn money, or better their life
• Their second son died with a rheumatic heart at age eight
• Faye loved her husband, had made a vow, and there were more boys… and her aspirations. So she stayed all in, saved, moved to a suburb,and bought property in lovely Cape Coral, FL
• Another son lost to heroin in the 1970s. Faye somehow drove on
• Soon after retirement, she was a widow. In her second act she starred as a Dancing Queen (trophies involved) and world traveler
• She lost a third son to alcoholism when he was 65
• These days, though she has no idea who I am, she blows me kisses goodbye because she knows I love her, and that is enough. And I share this with you

We all should take notes.

The journals I have recount her travels through Europe, ending in Poland in 1988. There, at a polka party with a big orchestra, Faye met Nobel Peace Prize winner and political activist Lech Walesa a little over a year before he would become President and preside over the end of the Communist rule in Poland.

Yeah, he was kind of a big deal. From my grandma’s journal:

“I had a picture taken with him. He’s very handsome.”

Fascinating take on his position and character. Mind you, he’s 25 years her junior, so at this time he’s about 45 and my grandma is about 71.

“I went up to him and put my arms around him and said ‘Kochaj mnie,’ which means ‘Hug me.’

Or, it doesn’t. “Kochaj mnie” means “love me.” As in “make love to me” in some forms of the translation. So, how do you say “cougar” in Polish?

“Everyone was surprised to see me do that.”

Yes. And there’s that.

Finally, completing this same entry—which turns out to be the end of the journal, by the way:

“Also went shopping & bought some dried mushrooms. Went back to hotel. Left next day.”

Well, Mr. Walesa, Solidarity Union leader and Communist Party breaker, you might have been quite important, and quite handsome to take a picture with, but on the Life-of-Faye scale, it seems you ranked about as high as shopping for dried mushrooms.

I am so lucky.

Even though this amazing woman can no longer communicate with me, guess what? She can.

Like no other ever could or ever will again. So please. Collect some thoughts about your perspective and experiences in life, and pass them on. Scrapbooks, diaries, notebooks, letters.

Because Faye did that, not only was I able to be surprised (again!) by her actions, she has given me an even better gift in the form of an everlasting lesson for us all:

No one’s life is ordinary.

Each life is an individual collection of experiences that only happens once, and passes through that one experiencer in just that one way, during that one journey.

That is humanity. I’m certain that sharing it strengthens it.

I hope sharing Faye’s story has helped you feel like she makes me feel:
of course we can make it. And enjoy ourselves, too.

If you see someone like Faye driving a route you’re interested in, call shotgun! Hug handsome people. Splurge on dried mushrooms.

May you one day blow kisses to someone who also takes notes, like you.