Happy New Year

One of the stunning old cards in Grandma's box of saved correspondence.  And one of my favorites.  A happy new year to you all.  ♥

Henriette

Today is my grandmother's birthday.  On what would be her final birthday, the local newspaper noted that she was now the oldest person in town, a fact that she rolled her eyes upon sharing with us. 

Grandma was the only child in a family of nine who wasn't born in France.  Her father died not long after her family came to America.  Her mother hated having anyone underfoot while she was in the kitchen, so Grandma didn't learn to cook until she herself had gotten married. My mom still marvels at what a great cook Grandma turned out to be given that, but I am more impressed that someone who had never met any of her own grandparents back in the Old Country ended up being the epitome of a sweet old-fashioned grandmother. 

To her fellow high school students in the Class of 1927, she was "Frenchie."  Papa called her "[his] little Napoleon."  To her nieces and nephews, she was "Aunt Hen."  Her name was Henriette, in tribute to her brother Henri who had died not long before she was born, although it was informally Americanized into "Henrietta."  She hated it, she told me when I was a kid, and I was surprised and responded honestly that I thought it was pretty.  Her foreign name conjured up to my young mind happy images of both cozily-roosting chickens and lovely French ladies. 

Grandma taught me how to play cards and bake bread and peel an apple in one long unbroken strip.  I taught her that when an apple is sliced in half horizontally, a star of seeds appears.  She once said that it was impossible for her not to laugh when she heard me laugh, and she called me "[her] sweet girl." 

She cried while holding my younger brother for the first time, and since his, our older brother's, and Grandma's birthdays are all in February, she would always make a special birthday dinner sometime that month in shared celebration. 

The next-to-last time she and I saw each other was a May afternoon in a city hospital far from her home, and I was wearing a tie-dye t-shirt.  When I leaned over her bed to give her a hug and kiss, Grandma took in my wildly-colored top and weakly commented, "My arms look like your shirt."  Poor Grandma's skin was splotchy with bruises in various stages by that point.  Her observation was the last dry-humored comment of hers that we smiled at together.   

A rainbow appeared soon after she died, and as she had requested, she was buried with a letter my dad had written her from Vietnam.  She had wanted me to have her writing desk and handmade crochet tablecloth, and I do, but it is her scrapbooks and recipes and family papers and photos I treasure more.  She has appeared in a few precious dreams since I've died, and one helped me gain perspective at a time I felt I was spinning out of control in life.  

I think of her when I see cottage gardens, round loaves of homemade bread, delicate script handwriting, canned goods, cantalope, Poinsettias, political cartoons, poetry anthologies, pastel mints, and barkcloth.  When my ex-boyfriend and I visited her grave a couple weeks after she died, I left her a letter promising, among other things, to try always to be her sweet girl.  That I am forever her granddaughter is one of the most beautiful-to-me things about my life.  I miss her more, not less, every year.  And I hope she still laughs when she hears me laugh.  

Happy Birthday, Mom

Happy birthday to my mom, The Most Thoughtful and Beautiful. When we would complain as kids about having to return to school after Christmas vacation, she would remind us that she had always had to return to school on her birthday, thus trumping all our arguments. 

Mom loves the color blue, Grover from "Sesame Street," Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings movies, Doctor Zhivago, and Sam Elliot. She never fails to say "Ooh, Baby!" when Clark Gable first appears on-screen during Gone with the Wind, and she is still sad that "Captain Kangaroo" is no longer on the air, as she thought it was by far the dearest "kids'" show. She used to do a lot of oil painting but later worked more with acrylics and has sold her artwork in shops in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Her great-grandparents were from France and Norway.  She adored her grandparents. She is known for singing out "Cup of tea!" when stressed, and she thought to bring my grandmother bouquets of garden flowers to the hospital to give Grandma life and color and beauty and a taste of home during her final days. ("Why do people always wait to give flowers to people after they've died?" she wonders.) 

Mom is better with children than anyone else I've ever met, and they gravitate toward her. She loves antiques and the ocean, Sophia Loren and red gingham, sugar cookies without frosting, and houses that are what she calls "small and chubby." She is creative in all things and talked my dad into tearing down our garage in the 1980s so we could use the space as a patio. She hates to sew but is always making pillows and curtains, and when a stuffed cat I fell in love with in 2007 cost so much as to be absurd, she made a replica of it for me as a Christmas present. 

She has three brothers and three sisters and helped raise the younger ones. She is still in touch with her best friend from high school, sweet Vickie. She is sarcastic and self-deprecating, and our sense of humor is quite similar. We can get each other laughing hysterically, although, as with most mothers and daughters, we went through our stages of not laughing together much at all. After my best friend, Sommer, died in 1995, she had dreams of her that were so detailed and lovely as to make me jealous. Without Mom, I would not have gotten through the rest of that year. My friends have always loved her, and she is still impressed that even now, when she runs into my former kindergarten teacher, Mrs. R remembers her and asks about us. She is short. She would live in her garden if she could, envies the "Hobbits" their little round homes, loves rabbits and miniatures, and she thought my dad was pulling her leg the first time they went to a baseball game and my dad told her there would be a seventh-inning stretch. ("But then everybody stood up! I just could not believe it!") 

Mom's favorite person in the whole wide world, although she would never admit to choosing just one, is probably her sister Laurie, pictured with us above. Mom doesn't like rudeness or vulgarity, and I've only heard her swear maybe three times. ("Yourmotherdoesn'tsaythat!" she races to apologize afterward.) She watched the "Guiding Light" soap faithfully, loved Robert Newman's "Joshua Lewis" character on it, and remembers watching the show with her own grandmother as a child. Daisies are her favorite flower, she thinks the world of Eloise Wilkins' illustrations, and she never forgets a birthday or anniversary. 

Somehow, in the haze of the past week and a half's cold, I still found myself in line at the post office December 30th to get her card and package mailed out on time, and since I'm determined to visit my family more often this year, I will actually get to see her again in just ten days. Happy birthday, Mom. ♥

To Papa and Grandma

Tomorrow, July 1st, is my grandparents’ wedding anniversary. To celebrate, I’m making Papa’s gnocchi and meatballs and Grandma’s chocolate cream pie for my parents and brothers. As at all of our family dinners, there will be much laughter and teasing and no small amount of love. At tomorrow’s dinner, we thank Papa and Grandma for setting the example.

One Sunday afternoon while we were all visiting at their house when I was a kid, Grandma started talking about her and Papa’s wedding day. They had dated for a year and a half and were 28 and 29 when they got married; Grandma was a year older. When she mentioned how “jittery” she’d been that day, I interrupted, “Why were you nervous?!? It was just Papa!” She, Papa, and the rest of the family laughed and laughed, but it was many years before I understood that they hadn’t always been “Papa and Grandma,” let alone that they weren’t “Papa and Grandma” to each other. I laugh now, too, thinking about it, but a part of me wishes I could sit them both down tonight and say, “Really, in all honesty, you guys didn’t know that it would work out like this? You truly didn’t know that this would be your story? You really didn’t see all of this?” Forget space: just as I was as a child, I am still at least as taken aback at the thought of “Papa and Grandma” having a beginning or an end.

Had I had the foresight, I would have been sure to ask my grandparents all kinds of things about their courtship and marriage, but I didn’t have what could be considered my first date until after they both had died, so by the time I cared enough to know the answers, it was too late to ask the questions. Once when I was in college, Papa delved into the topic, but I was too embarrassed and self-conscious to discuss it in any real way. “You’re not interested in the boys yet, are you?” were the words he found, and it was more of a statement than a question. Assuming he wouldn’t understand, I simply answered, “I haven’t found any yet who interest me. I’m—I’m picky.” Feeling stupid, I half-expected him to laugh, but he didn’t, of course. He just nodded his head slowly and, squeezing the back of my neck, responded, “That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with being picky.” Had I been braver, I’d have admitted to him and Grandma that I doubted I’d ever find a man I loved as much as I loved him—and that I didn’t think, dateless all my life as I’d been, that even if I did someday find such a man, that he would love me in return. Papa had set the bar. The summer after I graduated from college, I’d started writing a poem about him, but seven years later, I still haven’t finished it. I get as far as “You were my first hero, Papa, and the first man I ever said ‘I love you’ to,” and I again set it aside to work on another time. It has always just seemed too much to hope for: a husband as fine as my grandfather, a marriage as blessed as my grandparents’.  This is a conversation I now wish the three of us had had.

 When Grandma called one afternoon to let us know that Papa died, a few months before what would have been my grandparents’ 62nd wedding anniversary, my parents and brothers and I left our jobs for the day and raced to gather to be with her. As we sat around her in chairs and at her feet, Grandma handed me a book of her favorite poems and asked me to read “Should You Go First” by Albert Kennedy "Rosey" Rowswell. She had been reading it to herself just before we’d arrived, she explained. The last stanza buoyed her but further broke my heart; She was imagining their reunion--only five weeks away, not that any of us knew that then--and I was just aching for the past.  

“Should you go first and I remain,
One thing I'd have you do:
Walk slowly down that long, lone path,
For soon I'll follow you.
I'll want to know each step you take
That I may walk the same,
For some day down that lonely road
You'll hear me call your name.”
 

At Papa’s viewing, Grandma joined me at his casket and tried to get me to stop crying, but it was quite awhile before I collected myself enough to see and speak, and when I did, Papa’s hands were what caught my attention. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band. I asked my grandmother if she had kept his ring, and she replied that Papa had never worn one. I had never even noticed. He just never wanted one, Grandma explained, and the extra expense at the time they got married didn’t seem worth it. I nodded in understanding, and Grandma pulled me closer and said, “He always said that we were his jewels, our children and I--and later on, you kids, of course.” That set me off again, and Grandma rubbed the small of my back as I wept.
 

My grandparents didn’t exchange birthday or anniversary or Christmas presents with each other, and neither had grown up in a time or family that encouraged demonstrativeness or sentimentality. I never saw them kiss or hug. But Grandma would cook and bake Papa’s favorite foods, and Papa never returned from a walk in the woods without a bouquet of wildflowers for Grandma. He teasingly called her his “little Napoleon” because she was French—her family had come here from France years before Papa’s had arrived from Italy—and she would begin all of her retorts to him with a combination “Shhhhh!” and clucking sound. In 1993, my mom bought Grandma a book to fill out for me and my brothers in which she was to record her anecdotes and memories. A line in the book asks for a description of how she and Papa spent their days. She stayed busy with the “usual household chores,” Grandma dryly reported, and Papa spent his days “working, gardening, and picking at me.” I laugh as I reread that now, and I’m also remembering that my grandfather would often tell her, “You know what? You’re a good kid, Mum!” It would make us all smile, Papa working his charm this way on a now-blushing-but-still-pretending-to-be-annoyed Grandma. You’re a good kid, Mum!
As the final guests left the viewing, I asked my mom if she was sure that Grandma understood that she wouldn’t get to see Papa again after that night—it would be closed casket for the next morning’s funeral—and she said she thought so but went over to Grandma to see if she wanted to go up to the casket one last time before we took her home. Grandma did, and exhausted by the past few days, was gently led by some of the family to the front of the room. After a few moments, she collapsed onto Papa’s chest and whimpered, “Goodnight, my buddy.” My mom and just about everyone else in earshot completely dissolved then and hurried to help her, but I stood by momentarily too stunned to cry or move. It had just dawned on me that above everything else, my grandparents were each other’s friends. The very last thing she ever said to him taught me what I had most needed to know about marriage—and what I most wanted out of my own. After 62 years--more than six decades! more than half a century!--the very last time she looked at him, she was seeing “my buddy.” My buddy. “Papa and Grandma” was a friendship. Papa and Grandma were friends.


As a swift kick when we were already down, the morning we received the florist’s bill for Papa’s funeral arrangements, we also got the phone call letting us know that Grandma died. The only peace there was to be had that day was in the hope that they were finally (out of pain and) together again. Even in those short five weeks after Papa had died and we would speak of going to visit Grandma, it had been “going down to Papa and Grandma’s.” Before Papa had died, the only nights they had ever spent apart were those of my grandmother’s three maternity stays. Grandma had been ill the last six months of her life and had lived just as long as her doctors had predicted, but the fact that Papa passed on one month and Grandma the next still struck us as a detail most-fitting to their story. One of my second cousins told me at Grandma’s funeral that my grandparents “could have been a TV show!” As we sat beside each other waiting for the service to begin, she turned in her chair to face me and laughed in half-whispers, “Ohhhhhh, when they would start in on each other! You know, [your grandmother] didn’t have his sense of humor--she was so dry and quiet about things--but she still gave it right back to him! When we were kids, we’d look forward to their visits just to hear them together!”

Had I ever put any thought into it while my grandparents were alive, I’d have been able to figure most of this out, of course. That they were people before they were grandparents and each other’s friends above and beyond “Papa and Grandma” should have been no mystery. And I suppose I did understand these things on some level. While I was staying with them one summer week as a kid, the song “Friends and Lovers” came on the radio during lunch. Grandma liked it and asked why they didn’t make more nice songs like that. I was mortified--the song was about lovers!--and tried to change the subject. If 30-year-old Val could have a do-over of that moment, she would leave the blushing 10-year-old to her pancakes and listen more closely to the tale her grandparents were telling, for however long they had to tell it. Was Papa always your buddy, Grandma, or did he gradually become that to you? I am interested in the boys now, Papa, if you want to talk? There are no do-overs, though, so after saying thanks tomorrow for the gathering of family over gnocchi and pie, I will pray to Papa and Grandma that I paid enough attention to their story to shape a sweet one of my own.