The metaphor:
For the past two weeks, I’ve been living in my grandma’s log cabin, where she spends the summer. We bought our house because it’s next to the cabin, and now that we’re having work done, we’ve moved into the house itself. Some days - like today - my whole family is there; other days, like twice this past week, it’s just my grandma and me.
I spent this week revisiting a piece I wrote two years ago, which is poignant both in the ways that feel the same and the ways things have changed. She still treats talking like a fancy circus act, though thankfully, she also still lets me trick her into talking anyway.
The story:
My dad’s mom doesn’t talk much. Just ask her.
When my parents get up to make dinner, there are three of us left: my partner, my 94-year-old grandma, and me. Making a gesture of futility, Gram says curtly, “Well, now it’s just us, but I’m sorry, I don’t really talk.”
She emphasizes “talk” like it’s something extreme: a circus trick. Like we’ve come expecting a show, and she has the unpleasant job of telling us that the star is out sick. Like she can’t even refund our tickets.
Our green eyes meet. “You’re more of a listener?” I clarify with my grandma, like we’re meeting for the first time. Like she hasn’t been my Christmas benefactor from my American Girl childhood to my L.L. Bean middle age.
“Somehow, I always ended up with talkers. Don talked.” She gestures to a chair where my ornery grandfather would’ve sat if he hadn’t died 15 years back. “Mary Ellen talked.” She motions north, where an hour away, her former travel companion now limits her voyages to one floor of her nursing home. “And I just never, you know -” beckoning to herself now, to the words inside that aren’t forthcoming - “I don’t talk.”
She took that bait, I think deviously, and I know I can keep her going. It’s just a question of what to ask next. She’s brought up her 50 year marriage and the friendship that took her on dozens of international trips, but lately, I’ve liked hearing about the times before that. “What about when you were a kid? Did you talk much then?”
I smile contentedly as she speaks at length about the relationships that limited her talking as a child: her structured German dentist father, her beautiful piano-playing mother, her gravitation to fetching tools for him rather than ladies’ lunches with her. Though she grew up to run domestic life for her husband and two sons, she’s always done it more like a German tool-tinkerer than a Scotch-Irish homemaker, engineering everything from their social life to their finances. Her successes haven’t flowed from grace but from efficiency, from behind-the-scenes force of will.
Her words are rigged up by the scaffolding of her gnarled-hand gesticulations, fingers curled with concentration as well as age, clutching at ideas that threaten to evade her. Even as her stories unfold, they come in pieces, needing prompting. They are punctuated by her laugh, a surprised-sounding series of staccatos or sometimes just a single guffaw. I’ve inherited the force of this laugh, but mine peals out frequently and without inhibition. After hers, she winces, even now, hearing an echo of my grandfather’s rebuke that she’s been too loud.
When my parents come back - they’re approaching 70, but she calls them The Kids - she seems relieved to relinquish the spotlight. Still, she can’t always restrain herself from jumping in, like when she mutters that if the meat doesn’t go on the grill soon, we’ll be eating in the dark. Schedule missteps are a frequent source of consternation for my grandma. She’s explained that her family lived across the street from her father’s dentist office, and her mother watched out the window, putting dinner on the table at the moment when he walked home.
As we’ve phased out her driving, I’ve given her more and more rides; when I comment on how she’s always ready right on time, she says, “I was a dentist’s daughter!” Once, Gram told me, “I was expected to be on time to all appointments. I was late once, and it cost me.” I held my breath, afraid for what might follow, then laughed when she continued, “It came right out of my allowance. And I guess it made quite an impression.”
Her father himself was the son of a dentist and German immigrant. Sometimes she adds that she would’ve been a third-generation dentist if she’d been a boy. She says it in a blase tone, the way you might say, I would’ve ordered chicken if they’d had it on the menu. Not the way you might say, gender norms irrevocably limited my life. But I try not to project on her. Or rather, I try not to admit that’s what I’m doing.
When my parents call us for dinner, she seems meek and obedient. After dinner, she is relieved to get up and do the dishes, back in control of her domain, even though we’d all rather see her relax (or pretend to). Gram sees life as something she can treat as a verb so that others can enjoy it as a noun: her hands in the hot sink, her family talking together at the table, all is right in her world. I shatter the moment by coming to help her, and she gripes that she’s never minded washing dishes. She pronounces it “warshing dishes,” her Intrusive-R accent making her speech as rough as her callused fingers.
Sometimes a seed of concern takes a few days to germinate into the need to intervene. I’ll see her name on my caller ID and answer warmly, but learn we don’t have time for pleasantries. “Gwen?” She’ll interrupt, all but seizing my collar through the phone. “If it’s a celebration, it can’t be hot dogs.” She’s been ruminating on the cookout we planned for my partner’s birthday. “I have a pork shoulder we can thaw. OK?” I explain that Steve loves hot dogs and requested that menu. I can almost hear her hands swiping the air, longing to bring order back to the world around her, before she resigns herself to letting me do it wrong.
For someone so committed to a timetable, Gram is baffled by her own longevity. She sometimes announces her good health as bad news: “Well, I don’t know why, but nothing’s wrong with me.” She may even add, “Isn’t it time to go?”
One time, she caught herself, ricocheting between comforting me and comforting herself. “Not that I think anything will happen. Well, I hope it won’t! Or…if it does, I hope it happens quick! No one wants to linger.”
“No, I suppose not!” I answered gently.
“I was thinking, though,” she continued. “As I come up on 95 - I mean, it’s getting harder to imagine I will linger. I’m running out of time - no one can really go much past 100.”
“Gram! You think you used up the time you might’ve spent lingering by just being healthy? That’s brilliant!” And I was gratified to hear her laugh, even a little proudly. To reframe her ongoing health as a strategy.
When her laugh joined mine, I was happy to hear it sound a little proud. She confirmed her buoyant mood by turning to her one vanity. “You know,” she said confidingly, “I don’t know that I’ll ever look in the mirror and see a 94-year-old. I mean, I just don’t look it, if my hair just never turns.”
I smiled wryly. My grandma has some gray hairs, but they’re well outnumbered by the brown ones. The overall effect is less gray than my mom’s and at this point, maybe even than mine, which is getting more salt with its pepper all the time.
“You sure don’t!” I told her, because hell yes, spend as much time in this place as you can, Gram. And while the mood was good, so she knew it wasn’t just to comfort her, I added, “You know, Gram, I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Oh, love. That means a lot. Thanks for saying it.”
Then we hung up, and I imagine she got back to work: those dishes won’t warsh themselves.
The question: My grandma chalks her timeliness up to her German dentist father. How does your ancestry or profession mirror or shape who you are?
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Beautiful! ❤️