A birthday
Apr. 14th, 2005 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumMy grandmother is dead. Has been for 11 years.
Today, were she still alive, she would be 102.
Time is funny stuff. We live in it, as a fish lives in water, aware of it, but not at any level which really impinges. When I was in the fifth grade I was doing a report on WW2, so I made the long distance call(Los Angeles to Cleveland) to ask her about it. She couldn't help much because she far better remembered WW1.
These days I'd change the subject to WW1, but then I didn't know any better. WW1 was too far in the past for an 11 year old to wrap his mind around (never mind that I was a fiend for the Jurrassic, and the Neolithic, they were so far back they stopped being strange).
She was older than the airplane, and blind in one eye; she was born with a cataract. In 1983 she had it burnt out with a laser and had to learn to see, as though for the first time. In 1975 she chaperoned me, and my sister, around Washinton, DC. We got to go with my mother to an Amway convention, as a birthday present to me (and because my birthday is a minor federal holiday, as well as the Army's birthday, the Washington Monument was closed, there are; somewhere, pictures of me trying to get close enough to step on pigeons' tails in the flag court).
Ibuprofen had just come out. my grandmother ran the two of us ragged. We went to the National Zoo (the pandas were still new. Credit where credit is due, so thanks to Nixon for that. They were hiding, but we tried) and when my mother got done Amway-ing we didn't want to go out. We were pooped.
She saw men walk on the moon. I can just remember staring at the television when it happened. She got indoor plumbing in her fifties. My grandfather put it in. Her kitchen floor was rippled. I don't know how old the house was, but it wasn't exactly new when it was moved to what became E.45th Street, near Superior, just around the corner (and across an empty lot, which was the shortcut) from our church, a huge pile of glorious stone, The Immaculate Conception of Mary, where my mother went to school, and in my day, so to I. The floor was rippled because the ancient hickory was stronger than the steel planes my grandfather and uncle tried to level it with, when the plumbing went in.
She was always a small, rounded woman. A low pile of flat curls on her head, dresses of floral print. Roses and cherries in the back yard and a plastic tree for Christmas, with the most amazing ornaments. Simple, and stunning. Glass icicles, and gossamer bubbles of rainbow glass. The living room had cigars in the table by the chair, stale as anything and still faintly; sweetly redolent of tobacco, left in the there by my grandfather, decades earlier, from before his death.
Quiet, harried by a pair of hellions, but putting up with us, because her daughter had need of a place. But in her day? Who knows. She was a left her teens in the twenties. Did she flap? Probably a bit. Her sister almost certainly did (Stella still liked her whisky, even in her late seventies. My first taste of it was at 6, from a teaspoon when she came to visit. My grandmother allowed it). I suspect, in a quiet way, she was fond of the pleasant things in life. She married a man about ten years older than she was, my mother was a surprise, at the age of 44.
I knew these things twenty years ago, but they didn't mean as much.
I don't think I've had to deal with as much scope of change as she did. Horses to cars may not seem like much, from here, but the distance to DC when she was a child was measured in days, perhaps a bit more than a week. When I was a child, it was eight hours. I thought nothing of it.
Her father was a butcher, died of blood poisoning he got from the point of a meathook. I can imagine such a death, but it wouldn't be the way of things, rather a tragic mistake; probably a mis-diagnosis.
She saw great-grandchildren. She also saw her second child die, at three, of tuberculosis. Which is part of why they didn't try to have a third.
When she was 79 she got pissed off by the Day-Glo paint factory down the block (it stank, formaldehyde hung, like a miasma for most of a sqaure mile), and got active. Made them move, as I reacall. She lived when her kids could go down to the lake and catch a couple of bass for breakfast, and she lived when the lake was dead, and the rivers burned. She lived to see the lake come back to life.
Time. Sometimes her birthday falls on Easter Sunday.
Today, were she still alive, she would be 102.
Time is funny stuff. We live in it, as a fish lives in water, aware of it, but not at any level which really impinges. When I was in the fifth grade I was doing a report on WW2, so I made the long distance call(Los Angeles to Cleveland) to ask her about it. She couldn't help much because she far better remembered WW1.
These days I'd change the subject to WW1, but then I didn't know any better. WW1 was too far in the past for an 11 year old to wrap his mind around (never mind that I was a fiend for the Jurrassic, and the Neolithic, they were so far back they stopped being strange).
She was older than the airplane, and blind in one eye; she was born with a cataract. In 1983 she had it burnt out with a laser and had to learn to see, as though for the first time. In 1975 she chaperoned me, and my sister, around Washinton, DC. We got to go with my mother to an Amway convention, as a birthday present to me (and because my birthday is a minor federal holiday, as well as the Army's birthday, the Washington Monument was closed, there are; somewhere, pictures of me trying to get close enough to step on pigeons' tails in the flag court).
Ibuprofen had just come out. my grandmother ran the two of us ragged. We went to the National Zoo (the pandas were still new. Credit where credit is due, so thanks to Nixon for that. They were hiding, but we tried) and when my mother got done Amway-ing we didn't want to go out. We were pooped.
She saw men walk on the moon. I can just remember staring at the television when it happened. She got indoor plumbing in her fifties. My grandfather put it in. Her kitchen floor was rippled. I don't know how old the house was, but it wasn't exactly new when it was moved to what became E.45th Street, near Superior, just around the corner (and across an empty lot, which was the shortcut) from our church, a huge pile of glorious stone, The Immaculate Conception of Mary, where my mother went to school, and in my day, so to I. The floor was rippled because the ancient hickory was stronger than the steel planes my grandfather and uncle tried to level it with, when the plumbing went in.
She was always a small, rounded woman. A low pile of flat curls on her head, dresses of floral print. Roses and cherries in the back yard and a plastic tree for Christmas, with the most amazing ornaments. Simple, and stunning. Glass icicles, and gossamer bubbles of rainbow glass. The living room had cigars in the table by the chair, stale as anything and still faintly; sweetly redolent of tobacco, left in the there by my grandfather, decades earlier, from before his death.
Quiet, harried by a pair of hellions, but putting up with us, because her daughter had need of a place. But in her day? Who knows. She was a left her teens in the twenties. Did she flap? Probably a bit. Her sister almost certainly did (Stella still liked her whisky, even in her late seventies. My first taste of it was at 6, from a teaspoon when she came to visit. My grandmother allowed it). I suspect, in a quiet way, she was fond of the pleasant things in life. She married a man about ten years older than she was, my mother was a surprise, at the age of 44.
I knew these things twenty years ago, but they didn't mean as much.
I don't think I've had to deal with as much scope of change as she did. Horses to cars may not seem like much, from here, but the distance to DC when she was a child was measured in days, perhaps a bit more than a week. When I was a child, it was eight hours. I thought nothing of it.
Her father was a butcher, died of blood poisoning he got from the point of a meathook. I can imagine such a death, but it wouldn't be the way of things, rather a tragic mistake; probably a mis-diagnosis.
She saw great-grandchildren. She also saw her second child die, at three, of tuberculosis. Which is part of why they didn't try to have a third.
When she was 79 she got pissed off by the Day-Glo paint factory down the block (it stank, formaldehyde hung, like a miasma for most of a sqaure mile), and got active. Made them move, as I reacall. She lived when her kids could go down to the lake and catch a couple of bass for breakfast, and she lived when the lake was dead, and the rivers burned. She lived to see the lake come back to life.
Time. Sometimes her birthday falls on Easter Sunday.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-14 05:52 pm (UTC)My birthday does that too. She sound like a helluva woman. : )
no subject
Date: 2005-04-14 07:02 pm (UTC)She was frumpy, strong, weak, old, funny, sharp, harried, tired, tireless, a baseball fan (she was at the park for the unassisted triple play when the Indians were in the World Series; I got to see Hank Aaron get his record breaking home run because she was watching the game), religious, irreverent, a so-so cook (except for her stuffed cabbage, crabby, patient, ad nasuem.
She was a person, like any other. No different, really, than I. What will my grandkids be astonished to ponder my having seen? At the rate I'm going my kids will be born for me, about the time her last were born to her (navajo phrasing, I read too much), and my grandkids will never see me as much more than an old man.
I was never old enough, when regularly around her, to know her as more than an icon.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-04-14 06:00 pm (UTC)Thanks for sharing the memories.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-14 07:07 pm (UTC)A story, of my youth: I was five. My grandmother sent a check for my birthday. She didn't send it to my mother, she made it out to me. That was my money. Five Dollars I could do whatever I wanted with.
Forget what I bought (books, but that's not the point), the shaping my grandmother made was that my mother didn't think, for a moment, of using the money to get me something. She asked me what I wanted, and made the trip to get that. If I'd wanted ice cream, I'd've had ice cream.
My mother was young when I was born, so it isn't as if she had a lot of time to shape those aspects of her worldview before then. For all their faults (and both of them had faults, though I see my mother's more clearly, and less objectively) the sense of others as people is the one I see both of them having most.
Perhaps in August, when my mother's birthday comes around, I'll do another one of these.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-04-15 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-14 07:07 pm (UTC)Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
Thanks, Terry.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-14 07:15 pm (UTC):)
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-04-15 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-15 05:14 am (UTC)