For some reason I am missing my grandmother this morning. It’s nowhere near either her birthday (early February) or the anniversary of her death (early May). She’s been gone for 23 years now. I have friends that were born after she died. Computers that ordinary people could use had just begun to appear a few years earlier; there was no internet, no email, no blogging or message boards or all these things that I have come to take for granted, and yet I was already an adult at the time. I guess that’s what it means to be middle-aged.
And yet today is a day when I send an e-mail to our realtor, and think “wouldn’t this have fascinated Gram?” When I hear a story well told and hear her laughter at it in my mind. When I look around at this place I live, unlike anywhere I’ve settled before, and remember when Gram – already very frail by then, moving unsteadily and with difficulty – got my dad to drive her down to Bloomington so she could see my first apartment that I had all by myself. She’d have been the first in line to learn to use this laptop, with a plate of strawberries beside her because her two favorite foods in the world were strawberries and smoked fish and the smoked fish was too messy for a keyboard.
Everyone loved Gram, and she didn’t turn anyone away. People wonder, sometimes, why I never learned to say “no”, even when I’m exhausted, so that I have to work so hard at that basic skill of self-preservation now. It was Gram. She listened to people by the hour, in person or on the phone, gave them wise advice so gently phrased that even when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear, they couldn’t get upset at her. She wore herself out doing it, so that Gramps and Mom were forever protecting her from too many demands. They’d learned the hard way that she wouldn’t stop when she needed to. When she was about the age I am now, she spent a month or six weeks at “that place in Martinsville” to rest and recover where the demands of her life simply couldn’t reach her. Mom can’t remember the name of it, nor what that type of establishment was called, but by her descriptions I think the modern equivalent must be a spa. I understand, now, how Gram got to that point.
But Gram’s greatest gifts were her sense of joy and of adventure, and those are the things I tend to think of at odd times, like this morning. The mist was over the fields I see out my side door (a sliding glass door where most houses would have a picture window); I wanted to take a picture of it to share with Gram. My son – her great-grandson – said something incredibly funny, and I wanted to call her and tell her about it. I wish she could have seen him, and then I sometimes think she has, she just didn’t bother bringing her body along so the rest of us could see her. I want to share my new book of Jewish bread recipes, A Blessing of Bread by Maggie Glezer, with her because it was she who taught me to make challah when I was seven, standing on a stool as my son now stands on the stool beside me. Gram hadn’t ever learned to bake bread; her mother always did it, and by the time she was teaching me her mother had just recently died. So she taught herself out of one of her cookbooks in order to be able to teach me. She said we could learn together, adding laughingly that she would never be too old a dog to learn new tricks. She was right. She never was. She taught me a lot more than bread-baking with that adventure.
She broke the molds when she thought they needed breaking. In a time when women were extraordinarily limited in what they were permitted to do professionally, she ran the Jewish Credit Union in Indianapolis. They tried to keep it going without her after her health forced retirement upon her, and couldn’t do it; it closed about a year after her departure. It even applied to little things. Long before the poem Warning by Jenny Joseph (“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple”) appeared, she was wearing the brightest colors she could find, predominantly red. She said it made her happy, and why should she care what a stranger might think? She was tremendously proud that I was going to be an attorney. The rest of the family didn’t know what to make of my pursuit of education and a profession; none of my female cousins had ever done such a thing. But Gram was right there behind me, ready to burst her buttons.
Gram never walked, she ran. Even when her doctor gave her a walker (wheeled walkers not existing yet), she simply picked it up and carried it ahead of her while she ran. My cousin and I laughed at that, shrugging and saying “well, at least if she stumbles she’ll have something to catch herself on.” Almost to the end of her life, she ran to meet her life with exuberance, with delight, with a loving heart. She’s a hard act to follow, and this morning, for whatever reason, I miss her terribly.
