I bit my tongue a lot during the two weeks I stayed with Grandma.
I didn’t, for example, tell her that my dad got bit by a dog while he was in Ecuador. She would have worried, and worried even more to know that he was undergoing rabies treatment.
I kept silent when she told me stories about relatives that I like, and she was critical of them. She’s critical of a lot of people who love her. I wish she could let go of the acid and vinegar tongue and learn to accept them.
When she actually said to me, outloud, “If there’s one prejudice I have, I guess you could say I’m prejudiced against fat people.” I didn’t say, “I know this, Grandma,” nor did I point out that she does have other prejudices, even if she doesn’t realize it.
Grandma is a model to me. She models lots of behavior I don’t want to emulate. I don’t want to be the kind of old woman that people have to tiptoe around–withholding information from me, refraining from responding to the criticism I dish out to others. I hope I’ve let go of my interior bitch, as well as my interior worrywart, by the time I’m 99.
But Grandma has always been a model in other ways, too, more positive ways.
Grandma has always been an advocate of education, a firm believer in it–she was a teacher for decades in what she calls “country school,” otherwise known as “one-room-schoolhouses.” The last year she taught at a country school was in 1975. I can’t verify this, as I haven’t looked up the history, but I suspect that was one of the last one-room schoolhouses in the country. Anyway, she was the one relative and family friend who understood my parents’ decision to homeschool us kids when my parents first started doing it in 1983. Back in those ancient days, nobody was homeschooling–it wasn’t like today when everybody and their mother is doing it. Those were the days when nobody homeschooled except fundies and polygamists, and my mom got an earful from people she loved who thought she was doing the stupidest thing, ruining her kids’ chances in life, maybe even committing child abuse. But Grandma understood and helped, too. I’ll always remember her getting down on her hands and knees in her kitchen floor and showing me how to get the area of a square. We measured tiles and multiplied, then looked at other shapes. No, I’m no math genius today, but she helped me understand some core concepts.
She stuck to her marriage vows through almost twenty years of Grandpa’s alcoholism. Then she took care of him for ten years while he slowly succombed to Alzheimer’s. Even as a kid, it was obvious to me that the care he received was superb, far better than what he would have gotten had he been put in a nursing home. She may not be able to say, “I love you,” but she put the sentiment into action. Even as a kid, I recognized that. Maybe that’s why I tried so hard not to be hurt when she’d open the door to my knock with a grimace and an annoyed grunt, “What?” Her tone of voice with Grandpa wasn’t so hot, either, but she obviously loved him.
I doubt Grandma ever would have called herself a “feminist,” but she was fiercely independent and willing to do things that most women wouldn’t do during her era. As a teenager, she chopped her hair off short in solidarity with a friend who lost all her hair when she endured scarlet fever. As an eighteen-year-old, she bought a car with my grandpa before they were married–shocking behavior in those days. She continued teaching long after she was married, in a time and place when women really didn’t do that.
Determined. That’s the right adjective to describe her. My favorite story about determination and Grandma is the time she broke her ankle in January 1970. She was teaching at country school and had let her students go because a blizzard was starting. She had gone out to the car and started the truck, then ran back to the schoolhouse to lock it up. She slipped on a snow drift and broke her ankle. She was alone, snow was falling, and the temperature was below zero. So she crawled to the truck, pulled herself inside, and figured out a makeshift way to drive the stick-shift. She took a stick and used that to push on the shift pedal, and used her good foot for the brake. She drove to the nearest farmhouse and just leaned on the horn until the farmer came out. He drove her to the hospital. Now the story gets interesting. Because Grandpa would drive to town and get drunk if he had access to a car, Grandma had started hiding the car keys. Now she had to call him and tell him where they were so he could come out to the hospital and visit her. But he didn’t make it that night. No, he went and got drunk instead. So Grandma spent that night in the hospital alone, worried about what my grandpa might be up to, but knowing where he was. (There weren’t that many bars in the area…) Grandma ended up with a cast and a wheelchair for a few weeks, and that’s how she went to my parents’ wedding. She asked the doctor if she could go, and he said, “Well, you only get married once,” so, determined, she went. I guess she didn’t keep Grandpa entirely out of trouble during that time, since she couldn’t keep the car keys from him, but she did what she could.
Yes, I do admire a determined woman. The other side of determination is stubbornness and that describes Grandma, too. I guess when I come right down to it, that’s me as well. Both determined and stubborn. So we have a few things in common.
***
On Friday, the day before my parents came home from Ecuador, Grandma suddenly declared, “It’s going to be dead around here when you go. I’ll be sorry to see you leave.”
It wasn’t quite “I love you,” but it’ll do for now.
