OMG—I just saw my dead grandmother!

OMG—I just saw my dead grandmother!
I went to my Vermont apartment kitchen for a snack. I found my basket and unclipped a clothespin where there are three separate bags of snacks-unfinished:

This is something my grandmother, Eva, deceased (RIP), would have done.  She was the epitome of self-restraint—we would give her a box of Sees chocolates for Valentine’s Day and, eating only one piece a day, the box would last her until Easter.

Other things I do because of my maternal grandmother:

--flatten milk and OJ cartons  (she HATED taking up extra space in the garbage can.)

--pick up lint off the floor (or pick weeds from the cracks of the side walk in the front walkway)

-know Bible stuff (I started going to Sunday school in a serious way when my family moved to San Diego in 6^th grade—broom hockey Sunday nights and memorize the verses/books of the Bible by day/teach Sunday school to the toddlers/counselor to junior high group)

but, okay, I don’t, as she did:

-ask someone to cover up snake pictures in the dictionary lest she come across them while looking up a word (I think Grandma Eva had a snake-penis phobia)

-I don’t forgo playing  games just because I  might lose (i.e. Grandma Eva would not even play cards)

-I don’t wash my tinfoil and baggies to re-use (But then, I didn’t go through the Depression as she had.)

Grandmother Eva (she did NOT tolerate Grandma or Grannie) wore a dress and stockings and "pumps" every day of her life.  Here she is at 70 something, on a group trip to China and Taipei, memorialized on a souvenir plate, still intact in my possession. She taught me to sew and in 6th grade I was making my own clothes. When her eyesight got bad, she would have me thread 6 or 8 needles at a time on weekends for her so she could still mend or baste.

 Her husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 36 yo, leaving her a single mom with 2 daughters, her first two children already dead:  Margaret, at 4 yo of pneumonia and Donald, at 16 yo in an airplane crash.  Geraldine (my mom) and Greta (my aunt) struggled along with my Grandma Eva working full time for an ad company. I remember her recounting one tale of varnishing broccoli so it would look very shiny in the pictures. If we think it’s hard on single parents nowadays, I can’t image how difficult it was for a widowed mom in 1940.

My mother, a pedestrian in a crosswalk, was hit by a car at age 16. The driver had run a red light. Back then when you fractured your femur, you were in the hospital a long time. I mean three years long time. My mom, when she was 16 to 18 years old, was in a Chicago hospital with her leg in traction requiring 10 different surgeries for the osteomyelitis and complications and skin grafts. She was always embarrassed to have me see her left inner thigh which had divot the size of a piece of toast where they had harvested a slab of skin to put on her right shin. Little suture marks went all the way around the square on each leg, like a hobo’s patch on his blue jeans. She hated wearing skirts/dresses because of her leg scars and this was back in the 50s when it was just beginning to be okay for cool women to wear pants. Thank you Elizabeth Smith Miller and Coco Chanel.

http://www.nps.gov/wori/historyculture/elizabeth-smith-miller.htm

In fact when my mother got the instruction sheet, as an enlisted man’s wife, about how to go to a Captain’s wife’s tea, she had to wear a skirt. This ticked her off no end. My mom became a big women’s libber in spirit pretty early on. (Except she really wasn’t a bra burner, more because of social pressure to wear a bra than to admit it gave her any comfort in harnessing the double D breasts.) Here’s a picture of not-my-mom, but Elizabeth Miller’s first pants.

www.nps.gov -www.nps.gov -

My mom loved babies—anyone’s babies but especially my babies. It ripped her heart out when I moved from the west coast to Maine, taking baby Malindi with me. She always wanted to volunteer to rock babies in the hospital but it seems like there wasn’t a real need for that--not enough orphans, I guess. Instead she volunteered in the Hospital business office until she was Volunteer of the Year and they offered her a job.

 Here's a picture of my mom, with me as a baby and with me the day I went off to Peace Corps after a friend's wedding.

She loved the color orange and traveled a couple times to Maine to see the autumnal leaves.

She loved fresh tomatoes that my dad would grow in the terraced garden of our southern California canyon back yard. (A different blog entry to come.)

My mom taught me to write thank you notes, a skill which has served me well. After one Residency picnic at the Director’s house, Dan Onion wrote my mom to say the only thank you card he’d received was from me and she had taught me well.

My Mom loved me –  from when I was little to when I was big. I know because she told me often and showed me in her ways. She sent holiday cards, gave me little treasures she knew I would like. When I was in Kenya in Peace Corps, she sent me weekly packages with home made recorded albums on tape, packages of pea soup, film canisters of Lawry’s seasoned salt.

the end-- because I'm moving out of Vermont now--maybe I'll see my Grandmother or my Mother in other things I do  (or don't do) later.