Three days ago was my birthday, and it was also my mother’s mother’s, born in 1903, fifty-six years before I came along.
The last time I was saw her was in 1990, a year before she died. I’m so glad I had that visit, because, for whatever reason, she let down more of her reserve than she ever had with me.
In a charming way.
She was living in a senior residence in northern California. After two strokes she was in a wheelchair, but mentally mostly there.
“”We don’t want our girls to get a swelled head’–and they’re stoic, they never complain. . . ” my aunt who lived nearby, had been saying at dinner. The two traits went hand in hand from both Grandma and Grandpa, who had died two years earlier. Modesty and forbearance were watchwords for them; after all, Grandma had grown up in South Africa, daughter of missionaries. She came back when her older sister began college at Oberlin, attended a local high school and then went to Oberlin herself. So had their mother, back in the horse and buggy days. That’s where she met Grandpa, who’d come a long way from the rubber factory he’d worked in as a kid after his father became disabled. That’s what America with no safety net was like–and will be again.
“It was a letdown sometimes,” my aunt said, the way her parents couldn’t be more demonstrative when she’d achieved something. Which isn’t to say that they didn’t both have a twinkle about them; they laughed and enjoyed life. I don’t want to unfairly make them seem unduly dour. But they were indeed both descendants of Mayflower Puritans!
One day I was visiting Grandma with my brother and his friend, with whom we’d come out West.
I decided to eat my sandwich outside, then went in, and the first thing out of Gma’s mouth was, “Congratulations, Joel. We never say it, but congratulations.”
“What was that about?” I asked my brother after we’d left.
My first book had just come out, and it seems that, direct-action as usual, he’d said something admonitory to her while I was outside, how they never gave people compliments to their faces. Gma objected vehemently, but then she came out with what she came out with.
It obviously stayed on her mind–she said it to me a few days later, when my aunt and I dropped in for a brief visit.
You see–even at age eighty-seven, you can still evolve!