I wonder if Grandmother knows the legacy she left me. Upstairs in my daughter’s room one of those three-dimensional puzzles sits half finished in a protective tray her father built to keep the cats out. Boxes of foxes, lions, sunsets and famous paintings line the upstairs shelves, waiting for a power outage, a cold rainy afternoon or a visit from friends. Tucked away by the dining room table is a puzzle mat rolled up with a half-finished treasure inside it.
I’ll take it out once my husband goes to work and smile. And just in case I get carried away with my own “quiet addiction,” I’ll have an onion close at hand by the frying pan.
Nancy V. Bennett
Like the Turtle
Honor the old. Teach the young.
Old Danish Proverb
My grandmother is one of the kindest, most giving and beautiful people I know, but never, at least during my lifetime, has she ever been called “athletic.” The colorful dresses and vintage suits stored carefully in dusty garment bags in the spare room’s closet give testament to both of my grandparents’ younger lives as sparkling social butterflies and first-class swing dancers, but as time passed I knew them as the relaxed and smiling retirees I always liked to visit.
As my grandfather got older he had blood pressure problems, and with them came the trimmed diet and regimented exercise program that doctors recommended. I can say without hesitation (though perhaps not without reluctance) that he is more physically fit than I. I was once outpaced by this cool and casual senior citizen when he motored past me as I panted up a steep hill in West Hollywood. By contrast, my grandmother had to be pestered to take a five-minute walk around the block a couple of times a month.
In the summer of 2002, our family took a thirteen-day trip to China. We expected Grandpa to fare better than Grandma, and for the most part this was true—until we visited the Great Wall.
The Great Wall is just that: great in every possible sense of the word. We traversed stairs of jagged stone, two feet high and three inches wide, ascending hillsides that make a mockery of San Francisco. There were towers with tiny staircases so narrow that only one small person could pass through them at a time.
My young niece and nephew were, of course, undaunted. They ran at full tilt back and forth along the straightaways and gamely clambered up steps more than half their own heights. When we made it about halfway to the tourist checkpoint, my great-uncle and grandfather turned back—the altitude, heat and sheer aggression of the Wall had defeated them. My own quads were burning and so were my lungs; my brother, two years younger than me and quite a bit stronger, wasn’t faring much better. As we struggled to keep up with our niece and nephew, eventually it occurred to us that we’d lost Grandma. Unworried but curious, we used our walkie-talkies to triangulate her location.
She was at the far-end checkpoint. Buying a souvenir. A little plaque that commemorated one’s stamina and fortitude in making it that far along the Wall. Many energetic and athletic young couples, armed with water bottles and expensive walking shoes, had endeavored to make it this far and failed.
We were amazed. My grandfather was astounded. “I was like the turtle,” was my grandmother’s simple, almost laughing explanation. And indeed she was; as the rest of us had scrambled to keep the younger generation in sight, we’d been completely unaware of Grandma’s steady progress toward the far-end checkpoint—a place, by the way, that neither my niece nor nephew had the energy to overtake in the end. I fought my way, exhausted, to also get a plaque. Grandma wasn’t even breathing heavily.
To this day I still don’t know how she did it. Neither does my grandfather. Maybe she’s been hiding her physical fitness all this time, though that seems unlikely. Maybe her Chinese ancestors imbued her spirit with some unnatural strength to conquer the Wall they had built. Or maybe—and more likely—the will we all knew was strong carried her along.
Erin Hoffman
Nan
Perpetual pushing and assurance put a difficulty out of countenance, and make a seeming impossibility give way.
Jeremy Collier
Nan was my bonus grandmother. By the time I reached the age of twenty-five, all of my grandparents had passed away, and when I married Jay and acquired Nan as part of the package, I was elated to establish a relationship with her.
She was a bright, unquenchable little spark, a whirlwind of activity, a dynamo of energy, a formidable garage-sale shopper and an unending source of optimism and fierce determination. She didn’t believe in just sitting around and crocheting, although she did even that with finesse.
Nan’s apartment was a magical and enchanted place. My children and I would ride the elevator up to the ninth floor for afternoon tea and step out into the hallway to see her twinkling in the doorway of #914. She loved to wear long flowery skirts, shiny slippers, frilly blouses, sparkly belts, yards of chunky beads, dangling earrings, rhinestone brooches, lots of bracelets and numerous rings. Whether any of it matched was irrelevant. My sons, Barrett and Thomas, would enter reverently, eyes wide as saucers, with my warning “not to touch” ringing in their ears.
Every available inch of the apartment was adorned with antiques. The paintings she produced in astonishing numbers marched across the walls. Garage-sale treasures were crammed between expensive knickknacks. Clocks ticked and chimed and bonged and cuckooed. A canary sang in the corner. It was a dizzying, delightful celebration of who Nan was and what she loved.
Her energy seemed boundless. The apartment was not only immaculate, but entire rooms of furniture would be rearranged from week to week. I often wondered how she managed to negotiate midnight trips to the bathroom. Beds traveled from one bedroom to another. Dressers were hauled on strips of carpet from the pink room to the hall to the painting room to the blue room and then back to the pink room again. A huge cupboard of antique dolls vanished from the hall only to reappear in the back room. “Slow but steady, that’s the secret,” she would say sagely. “Pull, don’t push, and just keep at it.” Each visit was a bit of an adventure as well as an inspiration. I usually left with renewed resolve to dust and clean and smarten up my house.
I admired not only her outer, but her inner strength. I saw it surface often during her long, debilitating struggle with skin ulcers. It was a battle that lasted more than twelve years, yet as those horrible sores worsened and multiplied, her pluck and fortitude burned brightly. She was not inclined to complain or despair or quit. She kept on going even though the furniture didn’t move quite as often, the paintings took longer to finish and the lure of garage sales lessened.
Shortly after Nan had been admitted to the hospital for the last time, unaware that she would never leave, I ran into a friend there who had become a nurse. “Who are you visiting?” she asked. When I told her she exclaimed, “She is your grandmother? We just love her! She is so amazing.”
For a long time Nan talked about getting better and going home, but the skin grafts were unsuccessful. Her appetite, meager to begin with, waned; she lost weight. I noticed clumps of hair on the pillow. Heavily medicated to cope with the pain, she drifted in and out of sleep. Sometimes, to reassure myself that she was still breathing, I watched the little pulse in her throat. Though her tiny frame seemed impossibly frail, that flicker of life beat strongly. “Slow but steady, that’s the secret,” I could almost hear her say.
Even then, on some of her worst days, when the agony of bedsores, infected graft sites and gangrenous ulcers crept through the morphine, her response to, “How are you?” was a whispered, “Oh, not so good and not so bad.”
As her body weakened her smile grew sweeter. The reserve she had always cloaked herself in slipped, and she seemed to glow with a new tenderness and appreciation for people. Traversing that vast desert of adversity, she discovered the riches of relying on others.
One Saturday afternoon I spent some time with Nan. She was heavily sedated and semicomatose; my efforts to wake her were unsuccessful, so I read to her. Remarkably, as I held her hand and told her not to be afraid, that it
was okay for her to go, her eyes fluttered open a few times. When I told her I loved her, her hand began to shake.
The next morning at approximately 5:00 Nan stepped over the threshold of death’s door. I had longed to see her at peace, yet after that portal swung silently shut, the luster of this world seemed paler and its music off-key. I thought I was prepared. I thought her anguish had readied me. But there is no preparation. Ever.
From her life of quiet strength and impressive dignity in the midst of unrelenting pain and suffering, I carry these words and do my best to apply them when things become difficult: “Slow and steady, that’s the secret. Pull, don’t push, and just keep at it.”
Rachel Wallace-Oberle
Gram’s Garden
Nature and wisdom always stay the same.
Juvenal
My cousins Michelle and Joey and I were fortunate to live with our grandmother in her home during her final years. At ninety-three, her health declined, and we became homebound along with her. That was when the real heart work began. We knew we were going to keep Gram home and her spirit alive. She had given all of us so much, so our hearts opened up and accepted the direction our lives were meant to take.
Gram loved her garden and planted one every year. But this summer she was too weak and frail even to walk outside. Still she said, “I want to plan the garden like I always did, and help with the planting and picking, too.” Her bedroom was on the side of the house on the first floor, where the sun shined bright every morning. The four of us decided to plant the garden right outside her bedroom window.
On that sunny morning, as we tilled the soil, Gram’s head peeked out the window and her fingers pointed to the middle of the garden. “Plant the Italian pole beans right here.” Then, “Hand some seeds to me, Joey.” She tossed them out the window into the dirt. “There, I wanted to show you how to do it,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Now, plant the rest of the vegetables over there, and we will sit and watch them grow.”
As weeks went by, Gram often walked the few steps from the living room into her bedroom and sat in the chair looking out the window, watching her garden coming alive.
Joey and I asked her once, “Gram, did we do okay with the planting?” Her arms stretched out, pointing to the garden, as she said, “Look how high the plants are!”
As the summer went by, Gram reveled in the joy of watching her garden grow. She never lamented about not going outdoors anymore.
When the beans were ready she told us, “Let me help you pick them.”
Joey opened the window as she sat in a chair wearing her apron. He picked the beans, handed them to her through the window, and she gathered them in her lap. “There,” she said, as she stood up with her apron filled with the beans, “I have some work to do now.” She sat on the porch later and snapped them. “These are really good,” she boasted, tasting them. “Not too stringy or tough.” Joey and I relaxed on the porch reading the paper while Gram tended her harvest.
The tomatoes were her favorite. Joey pulled the six-foot vine close to the window, and she reached to pick one. With salt shaker in hand, she took a bite and juice squirted down her chin. “Not only are these plump and red, they are so juicy this year.” We knew life couldn’t get any better than this.
There were a few mistakes the first year we assisted with the garden. We didn’t ask Gram how many zucchini seeds to plant. We checked them at first and saw they were small and few in number. Then one midsummer day Gram told us, “You should check on the zucchini, they are probably coming in by now.” Joey and Michelle went out and the garden was full of them! Hundreds, it seemed! Joey kept walking in with more and more armfuls, gasping, “These plants are out of control!” Much to our surprise, they kept growing and growing. We gave many zucchini away that summer, and for weeks the three of us ate it fried, baked and sautéed, and in zucchini cakes and breads.
Little did we know how much closer we’d all become on this gardening journey of ours. Not only were we taking care of Gram, she was taking care of us, too. At the end of the day, I still rested my head on her lap and told her how much I loved her. A smile would come across her face while she rubbed my head and said, “I know.”
Our love and closeness grew more abundant than zucchini.
Paula Mauqiri Tindall
Reprinted by permission of Jonny Hawkins. ©2005.
Digging in the Dirt
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you. . . .
Leo Tolstoy
“Dig in the dirt with me, Noni.”
My three-year-old grandson, Ethan, stood in the kitchen with pleading eyes and a big spoon. I had two large clay pots with soil that needed changing, and he needed something to do—a perfect match. After getting the necessary digging utensil from the junk drawer, he’d rushed to the deck and sent dirt flying everywhere. I could just imagine my daughter’s reaction to his dirty clothes, but that was okay with me. As the grandma, I’m allowed to spoil.
It was hard to resist his invitation to play, but I had a meeting that night and I still had to fix supper.
“I can’t right now, honey. Noni’s busy.”
Ethan hung his head and stared at his shoes all the way back outside. Guilt hovered over me while I chopped celery and onions for meatloaf. Some grandma! But, I reasoned, it’s different being a grandmother these days. I’m younger, busier. I don’t have time to play like mine did when I was a child.
As I watched Ethan through the window, memories of a tea party with my grandmother surfaced. I remembered how Mammie filled my blue plastic teapot with coffee-milk and served toasted pound cake slathered in butter. She carried the tray as we walked to the patio and sat under the old magnolia tree that was full of fragrant, creamy-white blooms. I served the cake, poured the coffee into tiny plastic cups and stirred with an even tinier spoon. Our playtime probably lasted less than thirty minutes, and yet, after all these years, I still remembered.
Ethan saw me watching him and pointed to the pot. He had emptied it. I waved and nodded to him. Just then it dawned on me that my love for flowers came from Mammie. She had dug in the dirt with me. I recalled the new bag of potting soil and flower seeds I had in the garage. It would be fun to plant seeds and watch them grow with my little grandson.
I left my knife on the chopping block, found another old spoon and went outside.
“Noni can play now.”
Ethan clapped his dirty hands as I plopped down beside him. What fun we had that sunny afternoon. Supper was on time, and so was I for my meeting.
I learned the important life secret that Mammie always knew: there’s always time to play.
Linda Apple
The True Lesson of Homework
He that will make a good use of any part of his life must allow a large part of it to recreation.
John Locke
She is a study in consternation. Hannah’s brow is furrowed; she is squinting and biting her lower lip, sure signs of anxiety in this granddaughter.
The woeful mood is due to a second-grade scourge known as “homework.”
Hannah has begged to play outside on this glorious day, but I am under strict orders from her mother that she must first attack her assignments. And as the babysitter-in-residence, I am pledged to follow instructions.
Never mind that I, a former teacher, have decidedly mixed feelings about the importance of missing a golden afternoon when the sun is winking off the back patio, the trees are dancing in a lovely breeze and nature herself is celebrating spring.
Hannah’s work sheets are spread out in front of her. It’s been a while since I’ve seen what second-grade homework looks like, so I sit near Hannah, careful not to disturb her, but fascinated by watching this child I love so much as she attacks word configurations on a printed page.
Her teacher wants Hannah to transpose some letters to make new words. Hannah is working on set number three—and has been at this for nearly twenty minutes. She had sailed through the first two se
ts—the easy ones, she’d assured me—but this third set was the killer.
So we sit together, a grandmother and a grandchild, and neither of us speaks. Once, Hannah throws down her pencil in frustration. Another time, I think I see the start of a tear in her chocolately brown eyes.
“Let’s take a break,” I attempt. I even offer to make her favorite apple/raisin treat, one that usually gets Hannah racing off to the kitchen with me. But this earnest child is resolute. “If I finish,” she reasons aloud, “I can go outside and play with Julia and Trevor.” And to make matters worse, we can hear their shouts and occasional laughter through the open window.
Minutes later, Hannah has symbolically climbed to the language arts mountaintop. The word work sheets are finished. Now only two pages of addition stand between Hannah and the great outdoors.
Once again, all goes swimmingly at the beginning of Hannah’s math homework. The computations come so easily that she’s lulled into eight-year-old cockiness. “These are SIMPLE!” she exults, almost offended, it would seem, at the lack of challenge.
But on the second math worksheet, toward the bottom of the page, Hannah collides with a tough set. And she has her comeuppance. No matter how she struggles, the instructions—and thus the solutions—elude her.
I feel a meltdown coming.
It’s nearly five in the evening. Hannah has been up since six-thirty in the morning. She’s put in a full day in school, including a play rehearsal that both delighted and drained her. Her little brother is on a play-date, and he doesn’t have homework because Zay is, after all, only in prekindergarten.
The injustice of it all finally gets those tears spilling. “I HATE homework,” Hannah sobs. And she means it.
This time, I ignore my pledges to her mother. I make an executive decision that my granddaughter and I are going outside to catch the last—and hopefully best—of this gift of a day.