| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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the day before i left for london my grandfather had a heart attack. a minor one, the kind they tell you you’ve had when you go to the hospital for other reasons. “i feel weak,” he might have said. “well, yes, you’ve had a heart attack.” they might have replied. he still feels weak, my mother tells me. she drives eight miles each way every morning before work to make his bed and help him get to the recliner by the radio. i imagine her boss has told her that she should take some time off, and i imagine her declining. she’s a strong, wonderful woman. my grandmother died in january, 1995. or maybe 1996. i always have trouble placing events in those years. it was during my second year of my second college. B came home with me for the funeral. he and i were both vegetarians when we started the trip, and we both had carl’s jr. hamburgers enroute. maybe in salinas, maybe a double western cheeseburger, if there is such a thing. my grandmother, my mother’s mother, was the first person whose death affected me. my dad’s parents had died in the years previous: granddad on my 20th birthday of a massive heart attack. grandmamma during the next year, a few days after kids running in a public bathroom knocked her over. her insides fell apart, a cancer she’d had for years and never told us about. neither death really affected me at the time. my heart was cold then, in ways i cannot understand now. my mother’s mother died in a hospital bed in my parents’ dining room. it took a long time for her to die. she had cancer and decided not to fight it. the morphine never quite cut all the pain. she told me never to get old. over winter break i played quiet guitar for her while she slept. i kissed her paper lips before i returned to school. the last thing she said to me was “behave.” she died a few weeks later. for years after i’d find myself in bad places. depressions of anxiety, depressions of excess. i often wished she’d come back to me in my dreams; i wished that she would stand in my bedroom in the middle of the night, glowing white in her nightgown, her white hair full and long down her back. she wore her hair up in a grandmotherly bun. a tall, white castle of hair. my childhood mind identified her by her hair, her cane, and the veins on her hands. but mostly her hair. then, one night in their arizona home, she walked into the living room in her nightgown, her hair let down. i must have been six. i’d never seen her without white hair towering as high again as her head. i was amazed. if her ghost walks through my bedroom she should look like this. whenever i called out in the night, drunk and pitiful and insane in my college years, she never came. i wanted her wisdom and her guidance. i wanted to return to the aura of safety i felt on her lap, playing the veins on the back of her hand as she read to me. whenever i called out all i got was the memory of my last moments with her. “behave.” over and over, “behave, behave, behave.” i’d try to push the word out of my mind, tried to focus on bringing her into my room, but all i could think was “behave.” ah, grandmother. thank you. i realize now that you’d been there every time. you imparted your wisdom on me with that one word. i understand it in my heart in ways that i could never express in words. behave, not in strictly obeying the rules of men, but in strictly obeying the rules of a man. this man, the one i’ve become. behave as part of the whole, harmony. recently i had my first chance to read my grandmother’s poems. just a few of them, pulled from her writings by my aunt for a book she is making. pulled from a sizable collection of her writings that have mostly gone unread since her death, and overall by anyone but herself. her poems astounded me. evocative. amazing. and her life philosophy, what i gleaned from a handful of poems, was nothing i would have expected. it was so close to what i’d arrived at myself, in finding god outside of the rules of men, and finding the peace of Knowing. happiness is everywhere if you choose it. i immediately turned to my cousin and suggested that we read through the rest and have a collection published. she immediately agreed. my grandmother is strong in the lineage. i see her in the powerful women of my family. quirky and intelligent, unending love, kindness, compassion-- my mother, my aunt and her daughter. and i see my mother’s face in my brother’s daughter. the blood moves through them all, a living thread. a living yarn from grandmother’s unending ball. i hope she comes in the night to stroke my sleeping head. i hope she is proud of who i’ve become. i hope someday to see her standing in my bedroom, glowing in her nightgown, white hair down her back, ball of yarn in her hands. i hope she whispers, as my wife sleeps beside me, that my daughter is nine months away. i picture her the way she was when i first realized she was even more than my Grandmother, a six year old to whom Grandmother meant herbie the cane, back of hand veins, and a castle of white hair, as high again as her head. and then, she stood in the dark hall glowing in her nightgown, her hair, not in the towering white bun, but for the first time let down and brushed long down her back— i picture her ball of yarn in hand, leaning to stroke my future head, as my future wife sleeps beside me; leaning to softly announce my daughter coming. and smiling in my sleep, as Grandmother knits into the barely conceived, the intelligence and compassion, endless love and determined strength; the living yarn that joins the women of Grandmother’s blood. |
Something that stands out in my mind..... During the summers when I was a young child (5-10) I would go stay with my Grandparents for a month. They managed a 92 unit apartment complex. Kids were allowed to swim on Saturdays for 3 hours. I would swim like a fish, then come in and eat grilled cheese sandwiches and split pea soup. That evening I would sit on her lap and she would sing to me and read to me from her disney collection and peel the dead skin off of my legs. That night my cousins would come over, and we would dress up in her old clothes and put on some silly fashion show for them. Then we would all put on Grandpa's t-shirts and sleep on the floor in the extra bedroom. All of us, with them. I never will forget our silly fun, and how much they loved it. Grandma left a lot of legacies, though she didn't write. Legacies of faith, music (she sang professionally before there was television), and a million other things. I will do my best to teach them to my children, because she truly was the strong one in our family. I just don't know if I am up to the task. She left some hard shoes to fill and I am not sure if I am a good enough person to do it. I will just do the best that I can. |
Some get it, others don't its the ones that don't think they will be as good as the last who do the best. Those who strive for it end up getting alsheimers or something else. You either get the wisdom with age or you go crazy thus is being human. |
The one I remember/the only one alive during my lifetime/was my mother's mother who came to live with us for a few years when I was young. My father put up a wall across the playroom downstairs & it became Grandma's room. She died when I was 10 or so. She was always growing things. She made a big garden in our backyard & grew corn & tomatoes & stringbeans & squash. Good things for us to eat. She tried to get me to help her in the garden/to learn how to work the soil. But I was always afraid of the bugs. I asked her to grow chocolate/but she said chocolate doesn't grow in America. She never lost her Irish accent/her no-nonsense Protestant faith or her wit. She told me stories abt my grandfather/a half Black-half Indian man she met after coming to Virginia after one of the many potato famines in the 1800's. The anti-miscegenation laws prevented them from marrying. But they had 15 children & a farm together. Only 10 survived infancy. My grandfather died before I was born. I have only seen 1 picture of him. She said he had a temper/but she loved him becuz he was tall & handsome w/a beautiful singing voice. And becuz he wasn't afraid of anything or anybody. Nate's description of his grandmother w/her long white hair & the veins on her hands/brought my grandma back to me. It has been a long time since I thought of her. Thank you for that, Nate. |