Grandma(s)

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am not sure if this is the right forum; while I hope it’s not MPS, this is something IMS. Via the “Watershed moments” thread, I wound up reading another old thread about grandfathers, and that prompted me to finally put down something that I’ve needed to write for a couple of years. Warning: if you’re sentimental you may cry.

If people want to respond with their own stories, that’d be great, but I really have no expectations. This is all about catharsis.

FWIW the story, including dialogue, is as true as memory allows, though a couple of the dates are approximate.

It wasn’t the affair, it wasn’t the fighting, it wasn’t the alcoholism, it wasn’t the Depression; it was all of them together that finally convinced her to leave the farm near Altoona. She quit school and went to live with an older brother who had escaped years earlier and now was married and living in D.C. It was 1926; she was 14 years old.

She eventually found a job as a switchboard operator at an ironworks. The work was a little bit repetitive, but she liked the people at the plant, and they liked her. She held the job off and on until her retirement in 1979, and they did not replace the old-fashioned switchboard until then. One afternoon not long after she started, while routing a call, she made a misconnection.

“Police Department.”
“Police Department? Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you.”
“Well, you can’t have me.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said you can’t have me. I didn’t offer myself, did I?”

She was speechless, but the police dispatcher was in the mood to talk. He was Elmer; she was Margaret. He was new to the city himself, and had grown up on a farm like her. Went to school to be a lawyer, but times sure were hard, weren’t they? Did she like baseball?

They hit it off. He called back the next day just to chat and because he said she sounded pretty. How could he possibly know? And when he asked, “Well, aren’t you?” … how does a girl respond to that? And what kind of police dispatcher – what kind of man – flirts with a girl he meets through a wrong number?

“Put your boss on.”
“What?”
“Put your boss on the line, let me talk to him and he’ll tell you I’m okay. Then will you agree to let me take you out?”

What in the world…

“Mister Gichner? Could you come in here, please?”

She was 17 when she married him. Elmer never did get that law career going, but always found something to put food on the table. He made her laugh, he made her safe, he made her loved. She took him to church; he took her to Senators’ games. Her brother worked for Greyhound and on weekends he’d get tickets to the beach for the four of them. A baby boy came in ‘35, another in ‘41. They added a third during the war when the family up the block couldn’t afford him.

She was devastated when Elmer died from a heart attack in 1948. She survived, raising three boys on her own with the help of her brother and his wife, a patient employer, and a lot of prayer.

Only when the boys were mostly grown did she remarry. Al was a good man whose wife decided she didn’t want a good man and had left him. He was more a friend than lover, but he gave her twelve years of companionship before he too died of a heart attack, in 1969.

I was born in 1970, so I never met Al or Elmer. My mother’s dad also died before I was born, and my mother’s mother died when I was five, so Margaret was the only grandparent I ever had. She moved in with my family when I was very small, and when she finally left the iron works for good in ‘79, it was because my dad took a job in New Jersey and she came with us. My mom worked, and it was Margaret who did the cooking and cleaning, and it was Margaret who was there when I came home from school. It was also Margaret who sat in the kitchen every night writing letters to distant friends and relatives and reading her Bible while her grandkids were glued to the idiot box in the living room. Once in awhile, though, I’d summon the curiosity to walk out there, and she’d patiently tell me about distant cousins and what they were doing now; the births, deaths and weddings of people I would never know. With prompting she’d talk about war, or Depression, or men walking on the moon. And sometimes, if I pried really really hard, she’d tell me about herself.

They initially gave her six months, but it was only a week after the initial diagnosis that I got the phone call saying I’d better come quick. When I arrived, the tumor had taken away her speech, but she was still conscious and alert. Margaret beamed when I came in the hospital room, and when we managed to make jokes around her bedside, she laughed along with us.

There wasn’t a lot of time for sad farewells, and when I got my time alone with her, I struggled for the right words to say. I told her that I loved her very much and that she was very important to me, and that she was the wisest and best person I’d ever known and all the obvious things that I really meant but that sounded so empty. She was the one that had always taught me to be philosophical about hardship. She was the one that always comforted me; it had never worked the other way around.

Not that she was sad. There was joy in her eyes, and I tried to tell her that I thought I knew why. She had always been so afraid of going slowly and being a burden, and now she wouldn’t. And all three of her boys had made it here, and so many of the grandchildren had made it, and friends, and they all loved her very, very much. And she didn’t fear death; her faith was unshakeable.

“It’s going to be so great, Grandma. You’re going to see Charles and Anna again, and all the people you’ve ever loved.” She nodded silently. “And you’re going to see Jesus, Grandma. You’re going to see Jesus face-to-face at last.” Tears of joy.

“And you’re going to see Elmer.”
I had always wanted to know what my Grandma was like when she was a child, a teenager, a young woman. She had always been so unselfish, so unselfconscious, that I could never get her to talk about herself enough to really know, and it had always hurt a little bit that that part of her lay hidden from me. But that afternoon, the last of her life, I said Elmer’s name and I had spoken her secret.

Her eyes shone, and at last I knew her for what she had always been: a sixteen-year-old girl so beautiful that men fell in love without needing to look at her.

2

Excuse me… got something in my eye snif

3

Keep that lip stiff, man!

The only grandparent I knew was my mother’s mother. She died when I was barely a teen. My father’s mother died when I was very small and both grandfathers died before I was born.

Gran had a stroke and never recovered but lingered some months before she died. I would not wish that on anyone. I’m glad your grandmother did not suffer the same fate.

4

My mother’s mother was born dirt-poor in Alabama into a large family. She was small and dark – Melungeon blood. Her parents named her Mary Eunice Thelma, much too big a name for such a little scrap of humanity. She grew up in a large family, and as children she and her siblings would snuggle together under the thick quilts their mother had sewn for them and listen to the rain’s pitter-patter on their tin roof.

She met the man who would become her husband when she was fourteen. Him and his brother had come down that way on a fishing trip; they got married and she followed him to Mississippi. He took her to a fair and bought her an ice cream cone, the first she’d ever seen. My mother’s mother bit the end off it and cried when all the ice cream dribbled out. For their first Christmas her new husband gave her a watch, and she pouted because she’d wanted a doll.

A son was stillborn, and was rarely talked about. Then World War II came, bringing Pearl Harbor. Her husband left for the army, going to the South Pacific and leaving her behind. They devised a code before he left, so she’d know where he was. “Got any new guineas in the yard?” meant he was in Papau New Guinea. He returned in the late Forties and a daughter was born to them, living and healthy. Then a second, and a third. Finally my mother was born in 1952. Their raised their children in a small town in rural Mississippi, all through the riotous years of the Sixties.

She toiled in fields, sewed clothes till her fingers bled, and drove tractors. I have some photos my grandfather took of her in the Fifties, and she was indeed beautiful in a petite, dark sort of way. Their daughters married and gave them grandchildren, a wealth of grandsons to make up for the little boy who died as he was born. These grandchildren were all tall and blond, young Vikings, nothing of her in face or coloring.

My mother became pregnant with me in 1984, and it was my grandmother’s last chance for a granddaughter. She cut out a picture of a little girl with curly blonde hair and mailed it to my mother, writing “This is what I want”. She gave me a name, the only daughter born of a daughter of hers. A heart attack came, then strokes, five in all. She couldn’t speak and couldn’t care for herself. Her husband died and she wept, unable to say his name.

We buried them together, under a tombstone with a forest and a little house carved on it. The forest belongs to my grandfather; the house, to my grandmother.

5

That’s a lovely tribute to your grandma, Nichol_storm, but I have a question. What does “melungeon blood” mean? I’ve never heard that term before.

6

Ask and ye shall receive: Ask the Melungeon!

7

My family is thinking now about the party we will have(God willing) come November, to celebrate the 100th birthday of my grandmother. When that happens I may bump this thread. The eloquence shown by other posters here, when speaking of their grandmas, will hopefully be stimulated and I can say something more memorable.

She’s my maternal grandmother, and I am her eldest grandchild. Until a little over two years ago she lived in her own home, which her family, including my mother, had moved into in 1942. She’s one of the three people I love most in this world.
Although she’s now in a care home, and her hearing and eyesight aren’t very good, I thank God her mind is still sharp. She likes pizza, and on her last birthday she ate two slices and half a can of beer.

She is the family repository of our history, and I always love to hear her stories. Twenty years ago I sat her down and taped some long conversations of those stories, because I have a tendecy to forget. She’s a person with a living memory of someone who fought in the American Civil War, her own grandfather, who was in Andersonville for a time. Grandma was raised around religion, but not exactly in it, but started attending church when she was being courted by my grandfather, and eventually became a pillar of the congregation where her family was raised. She may be the member with the most “seniority” as it were.

Grandma had a breakup of her engagement with my grandfather, then when she made it up, and he wanted to get married right away, she insisted they wait until the next weekend. My grandparents had to travel to another state to get married, as grandma wanted to keep the marriage a secret for the next school year. She was a teacher and didn’t want to have to quit on account of being married.

She’s helped and inspired so many people over the years. I don’t want to ever lose her, I’m going to be majorly depressed when she dies. But that’s selfish of me. I know that when she dies she will get to see my grandfather again. Grandma is the last family of her generation. No brothers or sisters left, nor their spouses, and her husband has been gone for over twenty years. She doesn’t think “the good old days” were all that good, but she does miss folks she’s known and loved. I don’t want to keep her from them, but oh, I will miss her so.

Dear Grandma, your Nicie loves you.

8

My fathers grandmother had a difficult life. She was a poor immigrant, married young, and lost two of her three sons in World War 1.

The two sons who were killed were each the parents favourites: after their deaths in France the grandparents rarely talked- they blamed each other for the deaths. Her husband died in 1917, so she was left with no husband and two lost sons.

I mentioned this to my father recently - he is quite elderly now- how tragic it was for his grandmother to suffer the losses and having to bear up to it. He replied: ‘Tragic? - She was a real old bitch! Worse than my mother.’

9

The breakfast of champions!

10

You made my day! :stuck_out_tongue: