My paternal grandmother, ma petite memere, passed away almost ten years ago. I was pregnant with my youngest offspring at the time. She would have gotten a total hoot out of this kid. She would have seen him attempt to walk across a porch railing, and she would have clutched her chest in fear and pride. I thought a lot about names that start with G and U (her name was Gertrude Ursula Peabody) when I was pregnant with which to bestow upon that baby, but all of the names were wrong for him.
My grandmother has been on my mind a lot lately. Signs have been pointing me to her, so I figured it was time to write about her. She lived such a wonderful, extraordinary, ordinary life. Her life was so small and so big at the same time. I read a book many years ago by Pat Barker called Liza's England that reminded me of her. It's the story of a woman's life. She's an ordinary woman making her way through her life as best she can, living her days. Someone posted recently an article written by someone extolling the need for stories of regular people living regular lives. That would be my grandmother.
She loved me. She would shake her head and say, "Oh, Pop," about my shenanigans, but I knew her love was never in doubt. I could ride my bike over and watch Jeopardy! with her. If hockey was on, I could stay, but I had to be quiet. She was excellent at crosswords. She's the person who taught me that if you see the clue "newt", the answer was "eft" and vice versa.
Memere - or Mem as most of us grandchildren called her - was widowed at age 44. I wonder if that's one of the reasons why I've been thinking on her so much; that's the age I just attained two weeks ago. She learned how to drive after my grandfather passed away. She had four children aged twenty (my father) through nine (my aunt Chickie). She got a job as a secretary in the local junior high school. She retired as soon as she was able, sold her house, bought a trailer, landed herself on a little plot of land in a trailer park, and stayed right there for more than twenty years.
Maybe you're thinking to yourself, "This is fascinating, but where is the True Story?" You are right; this is a lot of background information. I implore you to withstand just a bit more background and then we will get to the True Story.
Mem loved to sunbathe. I mean she loooooooved to sunbathe. She loved to sit outside in the sunshine, slathered up in baby oil, letting the sun's rays fire up her melanin. If you know me AT ALL, you likely know that is not something that my skin could do. Here is a sample of how brown her skin would get in the summer:
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| This is not an exaggeration. She got tremendously brown from all of her efforts. |
And here's a sample of mine:
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| This is not an exaggeration. If I had slightly more skill I could add in some faint blue lines to represent the veins you can see through my skin. |
When I was in junior high, and we all started learning about sun safety and the danger of sun and skin cancer, I used to beg her to stop sunning herself. She told me that she loved it. Sunbathing was a pleasure for her, and she wasn't going to give it up. She also told me that she read in the Bible that 70 was the "Biblical Age" and that anything else after that, she'd consider a bonus. That sums up her philosophy of mortality. In the end, she got herself seventeen bonus years.
One last piece of background: Mem always wore swimsuits to sunbathe in, and in my memory, they always had a skirt on them. I'm pretty sure my memory of that is correct.
Mem had two sisters: one older and one younger. The only one still alive is the eldest of the three sisters. Mem's younger sister died before the other two. She and her husband had done well financially, never had kids, and invested well. It was a really lovely thing to receive birthday cards and graduation cards from Aunt Teresa because there was bound to be a little windfall of money inside. When Aunt Terry died, she had a healthy estate, and Memere received an inheritance of one million dollars. For a woman who had never had much money in her entire life and had lived on a very fixed income for a lot of years, it was pretty wild to be a millionaire at 80 years old.
I asked her about being a millionaire in her later years, and she told me this story: at some point she realized that she needed a new bathing suit, and she decided to go to L.L.Bean's to get it. (Bean's is about a fifteen minute drive from my town). She tried some on and made her selection. Then she went up to the counter and put the swimsuit down. She realized when the person scanned the tag that she hadn't checked the price tag. She said it was the first time in her entire adult life that she hadn't checked the price tag before choosing something.
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| Was this what the swimsuit looked like from L.L.Bean? I don't know! Maybe. Those purple blobs are supposed to be flowers. Will I get better at one-handed line illustrations on Google Docs? I don't know! Maybe. |
That was huge for her. She had had to watch everything for so long. I don't think it was a horrendously onerous existence; she seemed quite content by the size and scope of her life. I was also a child and quite possibly missed signs of challenge. The swimsuit was one thing, but I know that she was also so happy to give some financial assistance to her family members to ease a bit of burden there.
Memere was one of the best people I think I will ever know. Making her laugh was one of the greatest things in the whole world. Toward the end of her life, I called her at the nursing home where she was living. At one point, someone came to check on her because she was making odd noises, but it was because she was laughing so hard at the story I was telling her. She said, "No, I'm all right. I'm just talking to my granddaughter, Poppy. She lives in Brooklyn...New York!" I'm certain she thought I was a bit insane living in New York, but I think she accepted that, too, as one of my shenanigans.
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