[I began writing this on Monday, Memorial Day, but got sidetracked by the obvious excitement of Crocs]
Not necessarily being in a morose frame of mind this week what with remembering dead people, nevertheless the date prompts me to reflect.
For today is, or was, the birthday of my grandmother, Miriam.
Miriam was my dad’s mother, and brought with her, at least to my mind as a child, the strict academically-oriented emotionally-distant energy that I always thought my dad had. We were not a close-knit extended family: I had grandparents in Arkansas and Florida, and we were in Califormia. It didn’t make for frequent visits or even much in the way of getting-to-know-you. Most of my contact with my grandparents was via birthday and Christmas cards (with obligatory $5 inside) or occasional forced and uncomfortable phone calls with some distant old stranger on the other end of the line. I always wondered about the people in books who knew their grandparents. What was that like?
When I was five, my family made the Grand Tour and we visited both sets of grandparents in their respective locations, sedately posing for snapshots of us pretending to pick backyard grapefruit in Florida. This was the trip that my mother never lets me forget was when I left my white sweater on the airplane. That sweater must have meant a lot to her. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t fit me now.
In Arkansas, things were a bit more fun because my cousins were there. Not having had cousin-contact before, it was thrilling and somewhat appalling to interact with these strangers who were somehow related, a part of us yet not. I couldn’t wrap my head around it somehow. The stand-out memory from that trip was a day at nearby Horsehead Lake (I had already begun a lifelong love of horses, so this must be a magical lake, I concluded) where I watched my uncle throw his kids into the lake. I wasn’t used to seeing dads play that way. Me, I just watched them enviously while I walked around feeling the squishy lake-bottom beneath my feet.
My grandmother remains a bit of a mystery from that time, but they did come to visit us several years later when my grandfather’s Parkinson’s disease was more pronounced. I was deathly afraid of her (so proper! so reserved!) but she insisted on slipping me a $20 anyway.
After Jess was born and my grandmother had been on her own for several years after the death of her husband, she insisted on driving from Arkansas to Arizona where I lived to meet her great-grandchild. Evidently this driving thing was a big deal to her, being in her 80’s at the time. My dad came too and I still have the obligatory multi-generational photo that commemorates the occasion.
Even in my twenties, I was still afraid of her. All five feet of her!
She inflicted herself on me yet again a few years later. My biggest memory from that visit was the fact that she timed her teeth-brushing activities: three minutes.
Years went by and I still received the obligatory semi-annual cards, now each containing an inflation-adjusted $10. I also received occasional surprise phone calls, which always threw me off base a little. What did she want? Why is she judging me? Why is she calling me? Why does she hang up abruptly without a ten-minute extended goodbye like everyone else I know?
The year Miriam turned 95, Nathaniel was a toddler and we went to Kansas where she was now living in an assisted-living community for the celebration. She had given up her car and much of her independence, making choices instead that seemed prudent; there was distant family nearby, and she’d be taken care of if there was a problem. While neither of her sons lived anywhere close (both in California at the time), she was okay and seemed content.
It was during that trip that I started to glimpse a different woman than the grandmother I thought I had. She clearly had made an impact upon the other residents of her building, a everyone greeted her warmly as they walked by. She played piano weekly in a common area, and although she may have lost some of her ability over the years, she still played beautifully and strongly. She showed me her paintings, having taken up oil painting in her 90’s. I have some of them here in my house now.
She sat like a diminutive queen during the birthday proceedings, which weren’t much: her two sons, me and my family, and my youngest cousin and hers. The other cousins maintained a family grudge that had to do with their father, my uncle, that likely pained her considerably.
But through that weekend she gave me tantalizing glimpses of the woman she had been, the woman she was.
Miriam was the loved and petted child of a Methodist minister, who along with her sister grew up to marry a Methodist minister. Runs in the family. Somewhat of a rebel, she showed me pictures of herself as a teenager leaping over fences in her slightly post-Edwardian dress. Miriam went to college, not the expected thing for women in those days, and instead of becoming a flapper created change on a small-scale level as the wife of a preacher-man in small towns in the west and northwest.
Miriam married my grandfather Roy about a month before the stock market crash of 1929. He was still a student in seminary but being married was able to obtain a student pastorate. The Depression hit and times were hard but they managed. Before my uncle and my father were born my grandfather was still attending seminary and was away all week. One week there was no money in the church treasury and Miriam ate nothing but parsnips all week from their garden. After that she wouldn’t touch them again.
Miriam likely resisted the role of preacher’s wife but managed. She said many times later on that if people in the church knew what she really thought she’d be drummed out for sure!
At age 98, she wrote a book containing many memories of her life, especially as a child. I have a copy of that book, which I treasure, because it gives me a real picture of who and what she really was. After that birthday party when she was 95, we remained in much closer touch and I was able to let go of many of the presuppositions I had kept about her.
Like my mother, Miriam was a woman who simply and quietly went on about her life and gently created change about her simply by being there. Most of the people whose lives she touched are no longer around. She died in 2003 at the age of 101, having left behind her a small handful of people who will be forever changed having known her. I truly think that’s probably the best legacy a person can leave: small bits of themselves intertwined in the lives of others.
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