His Take:I’m 99% sure that there’s a special place in Hell for ex-girlfriends & old bosses. And just as sure as I am of that, I’m sure that there’s a special place in Heaven for Grandparents. And I know that that’s where mine are right now.
First, I have a very important PSA for everybody reading this. If your grandparent are still around. TALK to them. Sit down and write as many questions as you can possibly think to ask a person. Did they play sports in grade school or high school? What role did they have in their Kindergarten play? Who was their first kiss? When they were little, what did they want to be when they grew up? You should have a full big yellow legal pad pull of questions. Then go spend the day with them and ask them these questions. Even cooler, record it. My phone can hold up to like infinity songs. There’s gotta be room on your phone for a day’s worth of voice recording. Someday you might be a grandparent and this will be something SO cool to pass on to them. I had all the time in the world to do this, and I never did and I can honestly say it’s one of the biggest regrets in my life. Like Cinderella once so wisely sang, “don’t know what ya got, til it’s gone”.
Okay, back to my grandparents. They met when my grandma, her sisters, and a couple of their friends were driving down the road and they came upon a hitchhiker. Back in those days, Uber wasn’t a thing and the world hadn’t learned to not pick up hitchhikers. Long story short, they fell in love and were married. Fast forward and they had 3 daughters and 7 grandchildren. They took care of my for the majority of the first 18 years of my life.
Most kids can’t wait to be adults, and when they become adults, they wish they could be kids again. But not me. I can’t ever remember wanting to be an adult, the only thing I always looked forward to was summer.
My grandparents were pretty young for what I thought at the time were “old” people. In grade school, they went to every game (both home and 99% of away games), every recital, every church service, EVERY function that I had. They would also let me had friends over once in a while and rent a VCR so that my friends and I could hang out and watch movies. Not to mention feeding me, clothing me, making sure I stayed out of trouble.
There’s a lot more to this story than I can give you right now. Maybe someday I will, but for now it really hurts to think of the rest, and that they’re not here anymore. Life never turned out for me the way that they wanted it to, but I’d like to think that they look down now and are pretty okay, maybe even proud, with it. And who knows? Day ain't over yet. Looking back there was one of life’s lessons that they never gave me. Neither one never, ever told me not to pick up hitchhikers.
Her Take:
I have this friend at work who, sometimes, when I say that I was ‘Lucky’ something happened will correct me.
“You’re not ‘Lucky’, “, she’ll say, “you’re blessed.”.
And this friend, I’ll call her Bonita even though that’s not her name because then she’ll know I’m definitely talking about her, she says that with such total certainty that I have never thought to ask what she really means.
I think she means that I’m giving credit to some unknowable, chaotic force called luck and acting like I stumbled upon something good in my life, even when it’s something I or someone else actually worked very hard to make happen. It means that, while I might be acting like I’m grateful, I’m afraid to talk about who I should be thankful too and, instead, just shy away from the topic by calling it ‘Luck’.
She’s saying, I think, that I’ve been given a gift, and I’m forgetting to thank the giver.
So, with the love she shows me by giving me such good advice I can tell you that I have been abundantly blessed to have two grandmothers who perfectly shaped the two halves of who I am.
My Grandma Winters was a teacher before I was born, a reader, and a thinker, and a lover of shenanigans by the time I came around. I remember her having a curious nature and asking my brother and I question after question about our lives then listening carefully and laughing in all of the right places, sometimes devilishly. She had time for books and thoughts and conversations with silly little girls because she was confined mostly to her chair by rheumatoid arthritis.
When she passed, I was 17 or 18 and I found a book by Kurt Vonnegut in with her things. I don’t know why, but that book told me all that I needed to know about who she was as a person and what that meant I could aspire to be. Grandma Winters passed down the half of me that makes what you’re reading possible. The thinker, the questioner, the mischief maker in me.
For a long time I thought that was all I needed, to be free to be that person, fully realized, and with no practical concerns to get in the way. Then, for an even longer time, I felt like I had let myself and Grandma Winters down by NOT achieving that. I had a family and a day job, a responsibility to buy groceries and write Christmas cards and everything else that created a perfect excuse not to live my life like a dream.
But let me tell you about my other grandmother, Grandma Andreasen, before I go any further. My mother’s mother was still working when I was a kid. I can remember that there was an article about her in the newspaper with a picture of her in the school cafeteria where she worked and maybe the caption even said ‘Beloved Lunch Lady Retires’. She was beloved, and she was a lunch lady, I just can’t swear that I’m not making that part up.
Once she retired, she kept a garden the size of a city block in the summer with vegetables and flowers that lasted the season and beyond. She made her own soap, took care of her own home, and could, as far as I knew, do almost anything by sheer force of will.
For every long, relaxed afternoon I spent chatting away with my Grandma Winters in her living room, there would be another day at Grandma Andreasen’s house cleaning peas, picking weeds, hauling brush, and generally making myself useful if I could. I have no doubt in my mind that Grandma Andreasen loved me, and our whole family, fiercely, just as Grandma Winters did. She demonstrated it, though, through time in unceasing movement.
Cook the meal, serve the meal, clear the table, take that to the breezeway, show you this other thing, move to the garage, out to the garden, into the back door, back to the woodpile, down to the cellar, up to the attic. Endless, driving motivation that swept me up and left me feeling exhausted and exhilarated all at once.
I remember wondering as a kid why Grandma Andreasen didn’t like me as much as Grandma Winters did. Why it was all work, work, work with her and why she didn’t talk to me that much.
But I think I understand. She was in motion, because she needed to be in motion. The engine that drove her is very much like the one that drives me today. The need to find a task, any practical task, and accomplish it well. The desire to have a tangible result, if not for myself then, certainly to give to the people around me and show them that I love them when the words fail me.
A poem is love. A song is love. A cup of coffee is love. A clean toilet can also be love.
This is my blessing, then, the two halves of me from these two remarkable women, balanced. The words to express how I feel, the motivation to put them to paper.
Thank God for that blessing.
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