Bornfamous

I remember Gramma smiling at me, which was a rare occurance. She smiled when I asked about her childhood, and when I occasionally spouted an intelligent thought, and when she was teaching me about her beloved Christian Science.

I don’t remember seeing her smile at my Prom night, graduation, wedding or new baby, though she could have been smiling and I didn’t notice. Maybe if I’d smiled at her, she would have smiled back. Gramma’s smile, when I saw it, was a tight-lipped grimace barely discernable from a frown except by the softness of the eyes.

I couldn’t understand why she changed so much. When I was in kindergarten and we were alone together in the afternoons during Minnesota’s deep, bright winter, she seemed to enjoy my company. By the time Mom and I had moved to our own apartment and then moved back three years later, Gramma seemed angry all the time, mostly with me and the neighbor kids I played with outside.

Other children weren’t allowed near the house, and if I forgot and a friend followed me into the yard, Gramma slammed open the screen door, screeching at them to get out. My reputation in the neighborhood was not enhanced but the kids knew that her behavior was beyond my control.

Of course, a five-year-old is much easier to manage than an eight-year-old - more respectful, quieter, more impressionable. And Gramma was older too, sedentary and fat. She walked with her back slightly bent at the hips, a sign I’ve since come to understand as constant pain.

Older people are more sensitive to noise too, and I certainly brought noise into her life when we moved back to her house in 1954. It was a year after my father died. Within months, Grampa was dead too. Gramma must have resented all these children running around outside, laughing and screaming while she was grieving her husband of over forty years. She liked to read her “books”, the Bible and the Science & Health, doing her lessons in the quiet mornings. My friends and I couldn’t have been good for her concentration.

Now, let’s suppose that this granddaughter who’s suddenly been dropped in an old woman’s lap to raise while the mother works, is a different sort of kid. Maybe this girl reminds her a little of her own childhood self, except that she’s lazy, very lazy - something the old woman has been taught to despise. This child has a disposition that later becomes known as ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder]: a dreaminess, a way of hyperfocusing on a book or TV show that renders her deaf to everything else, an acute imagination, a willfulness, an inability - or unwillingness - to quickly change focus and do as she is told.

A difficult child to tolerate, especially for a 67-year-old woman who has already raised six children through the Great Depression.

My mother once said to me, “You hate her because you are like her.”

I was so insulted that I sputtered.

“I am not anything like her!” But I have wondered ever since, could it be true?

What was she like, anyway? What kind of person was my grandmother, when you took away all the arguments with me? Who was she when I was not around to provoke her?

My grandmother was once an English teacher, before she married in 1910 and began her family. She took pleasure in correcting the grammar and pronunciation of radio announcers. [When I later became a radio newscaster long after her death, she was always in the back of my mind as I wrote and read the news. Now I correct TV announcers, much to my son's annoyance.]

She was vain about her appearance, dressing and acting as though she was attractive while in fact, she was quite the opposite. I remember the shock when I found an old photo from her teen years. She was beautiful in sepia, slim and dark-eyed with thick brows and brown hair done up in a bow. I couldn’t see any resemblance to the angry old woman I knew, not a bit.

The Gramma I knew had a long nose and faded features that blended with her skin. She walked with the splayed feet of a dancer, except that she was not a dancer. Young ladies in her day, she told me, were taught to walk with their toes pointed outward rather than forward. To me, it looked awkward and old-fashioned.

Her short, tightly permed hair was pure white and she took enormous pride in it. She rinsed it with bluing to counteract the natural tendency to yellow. Sometimes after a hair appointment, it was a pale shade of lavender, like the lilacs that lined her tidy little garden of irises, tiger lilies and hollyhocks.

Gramma dressed to accentuate her white hair, in pastel pinks, blues and greys. She wore white gloves to church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, crocheted gloves in summer. Her shoes were thick-heeled, solid, old lady shoes. And she wore hats, lots of ugly hats. Think Eleanor Roosevelt of the time, or Queen Elizabeth II today, and you’ve got a good idea of my grandmother in the fifties and sixties. She would have loved the comparison.

She loved all things English, though she was a full-blooded Swede raised by immigrant parents. After Grampa died, she spent some of the insurance money on a two-week dream trip to England and Ireland. I could hardly wait for her to come back and tell me all about Ireland, the land of poets and wild, green hills. Instead, she showed us photo after photo of her beloved English gardens and cottages, so neat and dull.

I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“What was Ireland like?”

“Oh! Ireland,” she said with a disgusted wave of her hand. “Nothing but drunks sitting on their porches, drinking ale. The laziest people I’ve ever seen.”

I was crushed. I wanted to live in Ireland with drunken poets and writers all around me, where words were given their true worth, and the luxury of laziness had its place.

I knew then that Gramma despised everything that I valued. I never trusted her with an unguarded thought again.

I couldn’t be like her. I wouldn’t.