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.
