Old Ladies - Vinita

Today I come to the end of my old lady stories, and of course this one is the hardest to write, because Vinita was my grandmother. How to condense a lifetime of memories and feelings into a few paragraphs?

For starters, Vinita wasn’t anything like those grandmothers in books and movies. I don’t know where they get the role models for those, but not from my family. Grandmother (not Granny or Grandma or Nana or any of those pet names, thank you) was born in Indian Territory in 1904. The middle child of three, Vinita seems to have acquired a remarkable sense of adventure along the way. As a young woman, she sneaked out of the house to go to a barnstorming show, went for a ride in the biplane, and ended up dating the pilot. She later married a nice, prim-looking chap named Kenneth who worked for the phone company and settled down to a normal, rather privileged life as wife and homemaker. Except, of course, that she wandered off the straight and narrow path, for which I am grateful, since otherwise my ginger-headed self wouldn’t be on the planet.

Widowed a few years later with a teen-aged daughter, Grandmother became a librarian and worked at the University of North Texas library until she retired. She lived in a beautiful old Victorian house in Denton, with no AC or heat but wonderful 12-foot tall ceilings and oak plank floors blackened with age. Her bedroom was lined with filing cabinets where she stored massive amounts of genealogy research. Her dining room was furnished with a very small table and a very large loom, where she would create the most amazing woolen rugs and fabrics. The kitchen, modernized to a sort of rustic 1960's aesthetic, seldom saw much use; Grandmother seemed mostly to live on cantaloupe, yogurt, and soft-boiled eggs. Not that she couldn’t cook; she could whip up a really lavish spread, but she was just as likely as not to burn whatever she was making.

This is what I learned from Grandmother – how to thread a loom and throw a shuttle, how to make my own yogurt, how to properly ball a skein of yarn, how to make a rubbing of a gravestone, how to appreciate the delicious taste of fresh wood sorrel and dandelions, to always turn out lights when I leave a room, to never say ‘me’ when I should say ‘I,’ to face old age and loneliness with courage and humor, to never stop learning, stop planning, stop walking forward. 

Looking back, I see that she spent her life hovering on the line between courage and fear. Solo car trips across the country, traveling to Ireland to visit her brother, driving her VW Bug into the Gulf of Mexico to see if it would float, and yet on the other hand zealously overprotective of her family or overwhelmed to the point of tears at minor frustrations, inconveniences or for no reason at all. She was always volatile, often unkind, and sometimes magnificently generous. Grandmother died just before Emily was born. She was living with Mom then, and she called me and my sister a day or two before she went, just as if she knew and was saying farewell. She slipped away quietly in her sleep on my mother’s birthday.

Grandmother’s beautiful old house is an architect’s office now, and the shed in the backyard where she stored her yarn now houses blueprints. For years, I dreamed about that house; often in my dreams it was under attack and I was its fierce defender. Those dreams have faded, but a painting of the house still hangs over my bed. 

Of all those in my life that I have loved and lost, Grandmother’s voice is the only one that has reached to me from beyond the grave. One sunny Houston summer day, when I was kneeling in my rose garden venting all of the frustrations of my corporate life on weeds, allowing the therapy of sweet dirt and pungent herbage to work its magic on me, I heard her voice like a clear, soft whisper in my mind. I sat back on my heels and listened. “Follow your passion,” her voice whispered. “Your passion is never wrong.” To this day, I wonder which passions she neglected to follow and what regrets may have fed her tears.

Old Ladies - Lucy

So, Lucy wasn’t just an old lady – she was my aunt, that is, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. Lucy and her husband Lofland lived in an old house in Shreveport. Lucy was a pianist, had been all of her life. She started her career as a teenager playing piano in movie theaters to accompany the silent movies.

For me, as a kid living a very normal, respectable life in suburban Richardson, every trip to Aunt Lucy’s house was a journey to wonderland. There were two grand pianos in the living room, one white, one black. And there was still room for furniture – a white tufted couch, satin draperies in the window, pastel rugs on the floor. There was a big old-fashioned kitchen and a big black woman who came in to cook for the family. There was a den with walls covered in cork where we would sit in the evenings, watching Monty Python movies, my cousins sitting barefoot on the floor, rolling joints and getting high, Aunt Lucy with a glass in her hand. I didn’t realize until years later that she was a chronic alcoholic. 

I spent one summer in Shreveport. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, about 11, but I do remember the intoxicating feeling of freedom that I felt there. During the days, I would wander Shreveport with my younger cousin Chris Valentine, roaming the streets, visiting various hippie friends, going to the park on old rusty bikes, heading over to the health food bakery the older cousins ran together (Valentine’s Bakery of course) for a breakfast of fresh bread and fresh-squeezed orange juice. 

In the evenings, I went to the theater with Aunt Lucy, where she was playing piano for a local theater group. I sat in the empty theater watching the rehearsals for hours on end. The play was “The Pajama Game.” I  was amused that the male lead seemed to need to practice the kissing scene repeatedly – it being obvious that he was thoroughly enjoying himself. I sat in that theater through the dress rehearsal, watching the actors learn their lines, watching a random group of people become a finely tuned team. Sometimes when the rehearsals became tedious, I would wander around backstage or join another kid who was hanging out there for unauthorized excursions into town. I guess one of those could be called my first date, since he treated me to dinner at a local café. At that age, I didn’t think anything much of it, except I remember there was chocolate pie, which I thought then and still think is disgusting.

Years later, I took little Emily and Dan to Shreveport to visit Aunt Lucy. Lofland was long since dead, Valentine’s Bakery had closed, only one piano remained in the living room, and Lucy was a frail little woman recuperating from a badly broken arm. We spent a quiet weekend, chatting about old times, watching movies, watching Aunt Lucy drink. At one point, in spite of her broken arm, she went to her piano and played, her gnarled, arthritic hands still making magic on the keyboard. At one point during the weekend, Lucy looked at me cuddling Emily and said “My parents never hugged us and kissed us like that. I can’t remember them ever telling me that they loved me.” Then she offered to French-braid Emily’s long blond hair. I watched them together with my heart breaking. 

When we left, Lucy held my hands and told me “This is the start of a beautiful friendship.” She died about a year later. It was Emily’s first experience with death, and she sobbed uncontrollably while I held her in my arms, at a loss as to what to say. There is no comfort to offer without lies that I’m not willing to tell. In the end, saying “I love you” is all that I have.

Old Ladies - Betty

Betty Bailey was an anomaly among my grandmother’s friends. She was the only one I remember who had a husband, that is, a living, present husband. In fact, I think it was Joe Bailey who was my grandmother’s colleague, Betty having not worked at the university library.

Betty was a tiny sparrow of a woman with a round, pretty face and a neat cap of short, straight white hair. Joe, on the other hand, was tall with impressive wavy gray hair and mannerisms that were blatantly effeminate. Even my childish brain was confused about how Joe could be married and have a family; it certainly didn’t seem to be his style. Betty and Joe lived in a house on Locust Street north of University Drive, a larger, attractive home, very tidy, with the best yard ever. The back yard was this wonderful upward-sloping bowl of soft green grass that was absolutely perfect for rolling down, preferably when wearing something light-colored that was guaranteed to stain. 

My memories of Betty are mostly limited to our adventures to Hazel’s decoupage shop together. Betty would pick me up in her little brown VW Golf on Saturdays and drive me to Decatur for a day of craft and camaraderie. She was such a devotee of decoupage that for Easter she decorated with dozens of carefully decoupaged eggs, one of her specialties. I still own one such egg, a small brown-spotted one, unpainted and decorated with berries and flowers, signed by Betty. 

There was one event that really stands out in my memory, when Betty and Joe hosted a shrimp boil of epic proportions. They covered an extra-long picnic table with white paper and just poured pots full of boiled shrimp onto the table. It may have been the first and last time I ever had as much shrimp as I could eat, and even as a kid I was boggled by the decadence.

Betty’s story is marred by darkness now, for two reasons. One is that she lost Joe tragically when he had a heart attack at the pool at the gym. With no lifeguard on duty, he slipped under the water and drowned, she too tiny to help save him. The other reason is a story my mother recently told me - that when she was a child, Betty persuaded my grandmother to sell her a lovely little doll chest that belonged to my mother, one of Mom’s most treasured possessions. The fact that Betty would consider this to be a good, idea, and that my grandmother would have agreed to it, saddens me. I try to put it into context, remembering how much the concept of childhood and parenting has changed in the past 100 years, but it still confounds me. 

Looking up Betty's obituary, I learned that she served as a communications officer in the Navy in WWII, and that she died only a couple of years ago, at the age of 92. Pretty amazing.