Grandmother Stories (Taking Notes)
FOR ETHEL
1.
I am 2 years old, and Mom and Dad have left me for the afternoon with my grandmother! She is an excellent babysitter, conscientious and game. We have two BIG dogs who I am fascinated by, and while Grandma’s not looking I make the studied decision to stick my finger down the ear canal of one of them and see what happens next. The dog bites me, which I find mildly offensive. Grandma is distraught. She conducts a thorough medical exam: no blood, no obvious carnage. Still she follows me like a shadow around the house, fretting. Soon I have forgiven the dog her overreaction and am interested in resuming my bodily experiments on her. But Grandma allows me no investigative independence, will not even let me leave her sight. Until I approach the threshold of the room and turn around. Serious voice. Palm up. “Stay, Grandma,” I tell her. “Stay.”
2.
I am 5 years old, and sleeping over at Grandma and Grandpa’s house on the regular. This is a very brave and grown-up thing to do. My house is nearly a whole mile away. We are all there, my little sister and my cousins, my baby brother left at home. We watch The Wizard of Oz; my cousin David hides behind me when the flying monkeys come on screen. I don’t hide, though, on account of the bravery. We watch Meet the Parents; I learn many new things about grown-up relationships (Mom later gets mad about this). Bedtime at Grandma’s takes multiple hours and dozens of stories. She tells us stories about fairies, but they’re nothing like the stories you’ve heard about fairies before. Each of her fairy stories is a magnum opus, and in their telling it’s like she’s trained for it all her life. In the morning we eat toast. We embezzle candy from Grandma’s candy drawer. Her golden retrievers bark at their own reflections in the kitchen skylight.
3.
I am 6 years old, and we are building GARDENS in Grandma and Grandpa’s backyard. Each grandchild chooses a plot of the yard to cultivate, to design. We pour wet cement into circular molds and decorate them with our names, with colored beads. We pick out plants at the hardware store. We are not great cultivators but we are gifted designers. I see their backyard as an enchanted forest: I see trees, I see deer, I see birdbaths and stone fountains and running water. The grandchild gardens were Grandpa’s idea; Grandma’s job is to keep his plans realistic. Perhaps this is the secret to their marriage.
4.
I am 8 years old, and I love to read. I read under the covers; I read fifteen feet up in trees. This is something I directly inherited from my maternal lineage. My grandpa has told me, my entire childhood, how beautiful I am. He tells me, Of course, all my grandchildren are beautiful, but you…dot, dot, dot. Grandma does not comment specifically on my appearance. I imagine she worries such remarks might reinforce the wrong ideas about how a young woman should be judged. She tells me how intelligent I am instead. A secretary and a scholar, she takes me to the library and feeds my love of books. I am much older before I realize that, in my mind, the Carmel Clay Public Library smells like Grandma, and Grandma smells like the library. It’s a smell of feminism and my favorite fiction, as well as something akin to chlorine. I would wear it as a perfume if I could.
5.
I am 21, studying abroad in England, and Trump has just won the election. I find that this fact makes it hard to stop crying. My mom knows this about me, and soon my grandmother knows it, too. One day I receive a letter from Grandma in the mail. Most of her letters are short and to the point; this one is elaborate and typewritten. “You will no doubt live to see a woman elected President,” she writes near the end of the missive. “I won’t, but right now, I’d settle for a Democrat, male or female. Things don’t always work out the way we think they will, or the way we dread they might. I don’t think for a minute that Donald Trump will redeem himself, but this time people knew from the first what he was and they voted for him anyway because they think he can do something for them. We are disappointed now and they will be disappointed in good time. Keep the faith, dearie. The best person doesn’t always win, but there is always another day and another fight. Be ready for it because I know you can do it! All my love, Grandma.” A few months later she sends me another letter. “Your time as a student at Oxford will soon come to an end. Unfortunately, Donald Trump will still be President when you return but he is doing his level best to get impeached. May he soon resign! Or be impeached! Or perhaps his big head will explode in a shower of self pity! Every day is a new and scary soap opera/horror show. On a happier note, spring is here, the birds are singing, and everything looks pretty. I have a League of Women Voters meeting tonight. I enjoy that group of people.”
6.
I am 22 and graduating from college. Grandma caravans to St. Louis to watch me cross the stage; the journey makes her nervous but she comes anyway. I take a photo with my two grandmothers on the grassy college quad. They both beam. This particular grandmother wears a floppy hat.
Graduations, birthday parties, orchestra performances. Pizza nights and public joys and private family griefs. I lived my whole childhood in the same town as her. All her grandchildren did; we were lucky like that. Our proximity to her bred INTIMACY, which was a gift in a thousand installments. It also bred traditions. Being our family’s resident socialist, I’ve never been someone with a particular reverence for tradition. I used to think this was a difference between me and my grandmother, whose decades-long tenure with the Carmel Historical Society is the stuff of legend. But as I grow increasingly Marxist, I develop a new relationship to history. For starters, I start teaching it, along with English, which connects me to both my mother and my grandmother, as all of us have been licensed to teach English at some point in our lives. But I also come to see a kind of poetry in the push and pull of history and progress, tradition and invention. This is a poetry my grandmother knows well and lives her life in accordance with, as evidenced by, among other things, her involvement with both the Historical Society and the League of Women Voters, the Democratic Party and the Methodist Church. She’s a skilled enough documentarian of our family lineage that she has all the papers to prove we could join the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she’s anti-establishment enough to tell us she’ll disown us if we actually do. Despite all that record-keeping, the paper trails she creates are no match for her prodigious mind, which somehow contains the stories and wisdoms of a historian and community organizer and art critic and C.S. Lewis-esque Christian apologist, all at once — a nearly perfect brain, in my opinion. When we get the news one August Monday about her prognosis, I immediately hatch a plan to interview her about all those mysterious notes she’s been taking, mentally, all her life. I fly home only days later but already the dream of an interview has become impossible. It all happens fast. She listens mostly toward the end, speaking in a few syllables or less. She winks at me, once, to get me to stop crying.
7.
I am 24, and my grandmother is 82, and today is her second-to-last day on Earth. All our lives we’ve been watching her, taking our own notes. She showed us what it means to live gracefully; she showed us what it means to live. And to die? Can that be graceful, too? A few hours before her spirit leaves us (a day before her body does), we are gathered around in her bedroom at my mother’s house when she requests, of all things, coffee, as if to say: I’m still here; I still need my caffeine, too. We may call our protest against mortality the soul,* but we could also call it coffee.
I give it to her through a sponge-like, hospice-provided straw: black, strong, a coffee lollipop. She savors it, closing her eyes, fortifying herself for whatever is Still To Come. She is caffeinated and at peace. Me, not so much. I want more time with her, because I am selfish. I want more time with her because I am human. I want to tell her, Stay, Grandma, stay, she who has always told her grandchildren, Go, child, go. With one aforementioned exception. But as usual she knows better than me. To paraphrase my grandmother herself talking about her mother: If heaven is real she’s undoubtedly going there, accepted early and with a full scholarship. And if it isn’t real, well, that’s OK, too. Already she is standing on the platform and tomorrow she will go, onto whatever constitutes the next grand adventure, grander than this life, grander than college or presidential elections or studying abroad. Her train is arriving. She steps onto it with grace.
* “I can’t remember
where, when and why
I let someone open
this account in my name.
We call the protest against this
the soul.”
— Wisława Szymborska in “Nothing’s a Gift,” a poem my grandmother kept pinned to her corkboard, translated from Polish.
