Dear Grandma,
How did you learn? I mean, I know your mom taught you. But she didn’t know everything.
I think of her and how my mom would warn my brother and me not to pick up her bad language whenever we’d go visit. She was tiny but dangerous, and her eyes were huge behind her big glasses and she was almost always laughing. It seemed impossible not to make her laugh and of course I loved her from the start, this happy lightning-fast chatterbox. As soon as we arrived, she’d pull us in and wail about how big we were and how cute, and then she’d pull us by the wrist to her bedroom and stuff $20 bills from her dresser drawer into our pockets. “Shh! Don’t tell anyone!” she’d say in the loudest mock-whisper possible, and we knew better than to argue.
Who was this wild-haired Gramma Robin Hood? We’d visit her little apartment once a year, and she’d make a feast, covering every surface of her tiny eat-in kitchen and we were not allowed to stop eating. The whole time, she’d tell us her neighborhood news, swearing like a longshoreman, and moving like a dervish to spoon more food onto our heaping plates, and we’d snicker while we chewed, trying not to spray anything out of our noses.
When I think that she raised you, I wonder how you got so calm. Remember the onesie you got me as a baby? It said, “My Grandma Loves Me.” Maybe that’s how I always knew. You always wanted to know me and you made me feel normal for preferring quietness. You never took any guff from Grandpa, and your independent strength still inspires me. I learned to play piano because you paid for lessons after I plinked out some tunes on the Fisher Price xylophone you got me for Christmas. You gave me books–The Berenstein Bears, Hats for Sale, and Blueberries for Sal–and I read them over and over. My Mac Classic was from you when I went to college, though you’d never had a computer yourself. Countless gifts, trips to Maui, the waterslides, new school clothes, and pancakes in the morning before skiing, and fireworks in July, and Easter egg hunts in your yard, and ice cream sundaes made of snowballs and chocolate syrup.
I can’t trace your influence far enough–it winds through my life in so many directions, thickening into cords that bind it all the way through. Dad once told me the long stripes in the granite rockshelves around the Sierra wilderness are where the lightning struck it, creating quartz marbling. You’re like quartz in my memories–Tahoe snow, Hawaiian coconut, and apple pie. You’re in the Emerald Bay of Lake Tahoe. You’re in the excitement at Christmas.
You owned a little bookstore for a while and you’d give me activity books to draw in when we visited. You worked at Pacific Bell for years before AT&T took it over, and you love Shirley Temple movies and some terrible Christian fiction. And your BBQ garlic chicken is famous around the world.
You were there when I was born. You gave me a new set of bright Play-Doh cans when my brother came, and I was still special. You knew 30 years before I did how new babies eat parents.
And of course, Grandmas don’t last forever, though you have outlasted most everyone’s my age. And I know that I know God gave you to me.
So I’ve decided all my friends need to know you. You’ll help them be happy and know that’s how we make other people happy. And they’ll know my family is who we are because of you being you. There simply are no amazing people without amazing people like you.
I know love because I know my grandma loved me.
Leave a Reply