Grandma made her point in four words. Was she worried? Maybe. Did her sharp eye notice my absence in the middle of all the commotion of people arriving? While others were stomping boots, handing off paper bags full of packages, shaking snow off coats and layering them on the bed in the front bedroom, greeting each other with booming voices, did she make time to phone? Yes, evidently she did. Had she asked my mom or my dad that same question before she dialed? Likely.
Although all of the above may have been going on, in that question, I heard something more. I heard, ‘How self-indulgent are you?’ That, as it turned out, would become a timeless question, launched that night to orbit my life for years. Self-indulgence is not a good thing. You can’t come up with a bible excuse for it and that should settle the question, period. Yet, at the same time, you are the only one who can honestly assess it for yourself. That’s the tricky part. Sometimes someone puts it into words for you.
She wasn’t mean, my grandma. She was asking pointedly. She was like that. No child-indulgence. Or young-woman-indulgence. No nonsense-indulgence. She was abrupt and direct and yet, not mean about it. She seldom singled me out so the few times she did were as disconcerting and as loaded with expectancy as a Kiss-Cam finding you in the crowd at today’s baseball games. One Sunday after church when the family had gathered for coffee, we coincidentally happened to be walking through the dining room at the same time. She said, “Nice dress. Did your mother make that for you?” And without warning, she reached down and took up the hem, circling her arthritic fingers to assess the quality of the fabric. Me? I was mortified that my slip might show to my boy cousins or uncles. When I first wore lipstick, I was noticed. Or nylons. Or got a new perm.
Once it worked to my favor. I remember repeatedly making the case with my mother that I wanted to have my ears pierced. Mom and aunts all around the Sunday coffee table were against the idea. Why would you want to do something permanent to yourself like that? Grandma was quiet. When they turned to her for back up, she said, to their astonishment, that her own ears had been pierced years ago and then, to me, that she had some little silver bells somewhere yet and if I were to have my ears pierced, I could have them. Have them? Not Christmas, but close. Better. The gift of hearing that what might appear to be final, to be a dead end, isn’t necessarily so. The future holds possibilities because people are not who you have them pegged to be. I like that. I didn’t get my ears pierced until years later and I never asked for or saw those earrings, but I wore the promise well.
I noticed her continually. She twinkled before she teased anyone. She would get a word in, even if she had to turn it edgewise. She had beautiful, pink parchment cheeks and whipped cream white hair drooping softly to fill her white hair net. She was thickened in the center. Her hands became ever more bent through the years, but, nevertheless, she crocheted. One Sunday she came into the kitchen with a shallow box full of bookmarks in the shape of a cross for our bibles and said each of the children could choose one. I think I may have drooled over them as I deliberated. Finally I chose the one that reminded me of Joseph’s coat of many colors. I’ve kept it safe in my King James zippered bible ever since. She continued to crochet small, square red or white bags to fill with 5 silver dollars and hang on the Christmas tree each year for her grandchildren. I don’t have a single one of those to show for all that handwork. The cousins would toss them aside and examine the silver dollars, comparing who had the earliest dated ones. (Afterward, I put the money in a savings account at Old Kent Bank and eventually, along with birthday cash over the years, babysitting income, and payment for good grades, it accrued enough to become half the down payment toward my first car -- a used, 1963 Pontiac Grand Prix. My dad put in the other half. I digress. It runs together.)
A story she told: When she was young, in the Netherlands, for a while she would walk past a gypsy each day on her way to and from somewhere she was going. And also each day the gypsy would call out to her to stop so she could tell her fortune for a fee. Each day, grandma would pass by without acknowledging this barker because, of course, you can’t come up with a bible excuse for stopping and that should settle the question, period. She was a woman of faith not superstition. A woman of predestination, not a gambler. And although she was tempted, she was stalwart. She walked by. She walked by. She walked by. I have absolutely no doubts that she was telling the truth when she said she walked by. This must have frustrated the gypsy because one day as grandma was passing, the gypsy loudly yelled a fortune to her back, free of charge. Grandma said the gypsy described the man she would marry. And, then with the twinkle and the gesture toward my grandpa with those deft arthritic hands, she added, “She described him just right.” Ha! We all laughed with her at the fun of it. That laughter made the indelible impression that we were a family who would keep on walking past temptation, not once but every time. We were a family who trusted that God would provide in good time and who half expected that at any moment God could slip in an insider’s joke to boot!
She would fish intently. It wasn’t a past-time. It was supper. She wore a triangle straw hat out there in the wooden rowboat with Grandpa. The only other time I ever saw a hat like that was in photos of women in the rice paddies in Viet Nam years later. It was how we could spot them from the shore when we were sent out to call them for lunch. That and the willowy bamboo poles they used long after everyone else on the lake had moved on to more modern ones. Fishing is mostly quiet, except for water lapping and the plopping of a cork onto a new spot now and then. Often my cousin and I would yell to get their attention so we wouldn’t have to row all the way out to their boat to pass along the message. That never worked. At the time I figured they just didn’t hear well, but now I suspect they had other things on their minds, things they kept to themselves most of the time, although I’m sure God was in on it. Fishing is mostly about what goes on beneath the surface. They spent a lot of time together on the water.
I wonder if my Grandma really knew me. I watched her a lot, but I wonder if I knew her. What I do know is that she made the family what it was and along the way, she also shaped some part of me.
