Grandma's Gifts

Grandma’s Gift

Love is a language which the blind can see

and the deaf can hear.

-Donald Wildman

She made it look so easy. Living. Loving. Day to day, week to week, year by year. I wish I could ask her how she did it.

She laughed easily and was relaxed about life. She could window-shop all day and buy nothing. She often sat in the car, knitting for more than an hour, while she waited for me to be dismissed from school. She was short and fat and wrestled constantly with wisps of greying hair that often escaped her tight bun. Her feet were short and bent into shoes that looked as if they caused rather than accommodated her bunions. Every single day of her life she wore a girdle, pantyhose, and a dress.

She lived what appeared to be an unextraordinary life, but to me she was an extraordinary woman. It wasn’t her Phi Beta Kappa honors from Radcliffe. It wasn’t that she volunteered to read and knit for the blind and homeless well into her eighties. It wasn’t her paying $5.00 of her own wages in 1918 toward the United War Campaign Fund and being named a Victory Girl. It was her ability to make peace - to find peace, really - wherever she was.

She played bridge with “the girls” once a week. She cooked and cleaned, and loved her husband in an easy matter-of-fact way every day. While he prayed each morning, she cleaned the kitchen, made the bed, and checked in with her friends. Her home was comfortably kept although she rarely did more than run an old vacuum around.

When it was a day for him to go to Temple, she would drive him and wait outside. I was five and I would go along because I knew we would walk and talk, or I could color in my book and sing to her while we sat in the car or in the park, and she knit. Other times we would go “downtown” and have a “little something” at the counter in the five-and-ten, or an ice cream at Bailey’s. If I hadn’t been there, she would have knit or worked the daily crossword, but because I was there, we shared a special love.

I know she was once a daughter, a sister, a school teacher, and later a wife and a mother, but I knew her simply: as a grandmother who always loved me.

Family Prayer

“If you are going to love my son, I’ll love you like the daughter I never had. If you are going to hurt him, I’ll kill you.” Grandma Sadie was suddenly earnest because the fact is, my mother was not Jewish, and this would be a problem for some of the family.

I was not there to see it, but they had been preparing tea in the kitchen, and my mother sat down, her eyes filling with tears. She cried because she suddenly dared to hope that the man sitting respectfully with his father in the living room, down the long narrow hallway from her, might bring her not only humor and sweetness, safety and balance: marrying him would bring to her, it seemed, the kind of mother she had longed for.

Grandma Sadie was big – and short. She was slopey, golden, soft: warm, buttery, and sweet. I was her youngest surviving granddaughter and I knew how lucky I was: my other grandmother was distant, reserved, and untouching – especially to her middle daughter.

Grandma Sadie loved all her grandchildren, but me in particular. She taught me to knit. She taught me about window-shopping, and Bailey’s sundaes, served in shiny chalices with fudge dripped about: messy and generous. Grandma was my first best friend. She drew the most beautiful picture of living I ever knew.

She taught by deed, not by word. She was a woman of action, and the text that her steps made across the city are part of her story. She knit everywhere, all the time – for us in the early years – and later: hats, mittens, and socks for the homeless. She read to the blind. She took me to the symphony, in time for the pre-concert lectures, where we put down our knitting needles only to applaud. Her stout figure, carried by fat, bunioned feet, on stocky Cuban heels, in Queensize l’Eggs nylons, traveled widely through the city of Boston for over eight decades.

As a child, I knew Grandma in the simple, unfettered way children “know” things. I rejoiced on the days Grandpa went to temple because it allowed for a special time between Grandma and me. Grandma could have gone in, covering her head, and sitting with the other women, in the balcony, to pray, but that was not her style. She chose instead, to be with me. We would walk a little to the park and select a bench in the sun. I would color until we got settled and she would ask, “Can you sing while we sit?” Her favorite, which was also mine, was the Riddle Song and I rarely refused.

“ I gave my love a cherry, that had no stone…” I would thread out the beginning line. What I loved about that song was the puzzling and answering of all the questions. Grandma would knit and listen with a small smile.

When I finished, she always mourned a little the passing of the song. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. So lovely.” I heard her, and I only secretly let myself be convinced. My voice might not have wobbled like hers, but it was hardly like the singing on the records I had or the operas my parents played. She was biased – even if I did not know the word for it – but I hoped she wasn’t, and that it was true.

In her pocket, Grandma carried hard candies and – for me – butterscotch or bullseyes. Every now and then when we were together one would appear.

Sometimes Grandma Sadie came to pick me up at school. When I burst through the front doors to cross the street to the Gym for my last class, she was sometimes already there: sitting in the car as if waiting for me for another hour (or more) were the most natural thing in the world. She would be knitting or pondering the crossword while the world went on its way around her. I knocked on the car window. “BOO!” I often yelled. She would startle looking up, and chuckle, and then beam to see me.

For the last 18 years of her life, Grandma Sadie lived as a single woman for the first time. It was during these years I knew her best. I became more of an adult myself then: wrestling with how much is too much aloneness and separation from family, and how much is not enough. I rented my first apartment, and then another, and then my last. The first was in the building where she lived.

This meant I could model outfits for her when I was going out on a date. It meant I faced her “Es & Es! Eat!” refrain, and we breakfasted together often. She never visited anyone without bringing something to eat – including me, whether it was 2 floors up in a studio apartment, one floor below in a one-bedroom, across town, or – finally – in the suburbs of the city, in my own home.

It was in these years that I heard of her bravery when she learned it was my mother who pleased her son. No religion could have meant for a parent to stand between a child and his happiness. In this, she stood against her father-in-law and her husband, as well as her Jewish upbringing.

When Grandma died, I was 28 and I found myself angry with her for not having written down any of her wisdom. She was an educated woman: a college graduate – Phi Beta Kappa – in 1923, and a teacher, long before she became a wife and mother and grandmother, after all. Instead of sharing childish songs with her, I had begun to share my writings, and I would have treasured anything she might have left.

At Grandma’s eulogy, I learned many entirely new things about her: that she paid $5.00 of her wages in 1918 toward the United War Campaign Fund and was named a Victory Girl; that she played piano – in public! – At the Chelsea Theater she modulated tempo and key based on the action on the silver screen; that she was a member of the Motor Corps for family members of patients at the Beth Israel Hospital in 1928.

But all the things I learned about this wonderful, sweet-smelling woman washed over me. “It was time. She had a good life. She didn’t suffer long. It was time,” People told me. But what I needed to know – the feeling I was looking for – was already in my heart – even if it has taken me years to find it…

She loved me.

(c)



The Riddle Song

I gave my love a cherry
That had no stone
I gave my love a chicken
That had no bone
I told my love a story
That had no end
I gave my love a baby
With no crying.

How can there be a cherry
That has no stone?
And how can there be a chicken
That has no bone?
And how can there be a story
That has no end?
And how can there be a baby
With no crying?

A cherry when it's blooming
It has no stone
A chicken when it's piping
It has no bone
The story that I love you
It has no end
A baby when it's sleeping
It's no crying.

What My Grandma "wrote"

I recently found the photo which had been pushed to the back of the buffet where Grandma Sadie displayed her family for the world to see. It was one of her. I looked at it hard, for the first time in many years. I imagined her telling me about that day: about her thoughts as she posed – not exactly smiling – for that picture.

“I knew my responsibility was to hold still for the photographer. I knew all the women before me in the world stood as images behind me. I knew my papa would be proud of this picture and would cherish it on the mantle, or in the glass case where we kept our family’s treasures, like the porcelain he and his sister, carried here from the Old Country.”

“I did not imagine that at my death, this picture would be poured over by grand nieces and great grandchildren I never met. I did not know that while peering at this image they would hear about my piano playing efforts one summer at the silent movies. I did not know that I would be marveled at for having attended college in 1923…

“For having been taught to drive by my papa so he wouldn’t wonder about his four sons’ whereabouts… For driving in the Beth Israel Hospital families-of-patients program… For teaching in the Waltham Public Schools… For struggling with ovarian cysts for 8 years, and then – for miraculously having a second son… For raising a doctor and a lawyer…

“I did not know that again, years later these same strangers – and many more – would look at my image, reproduced in a newspaper, and say I was lucky to have died before the lawyer disgraced himself and our name.

“I only knew my responsibility on this day was to hold still… To show my respect for my papa, and my mama, and their long journey to this world, and my happiness at turning 19, completing college, and getting my first teaching assignment, and at wearing my mother’s brooch for this photograph.”

This is what might have gone through Grandma Sadie’s head as the shutter captured the quizzical look every one of us has of her: the one where she is posing with her Phi Beta Kappa club.

My grandma was not an extraordinarily bright woman, but she was sent to school, like the first few women to receive higher education in the United States, to learn to teach. Only on Saturday nights were the women allowed to walk through the men’s part of the library to their own special reading room.

Did they have access to additional resources on those special nights, or was it part of a manmade bureaucratic courting dance designed by the Harvard men? In the animal kingdom, male animals do the dancing and courtship to signal they are looking. Men are (or were back then) – and women seem to know it – looking all the time.

The women dressed up on Saturday nights. There were discussions of whether or not to spend allowances or wages on new hatpins or scarves. Did the Harvard men actually study on those nights? Did the women? Today and even in the years I attended college, the student body seems to take Saturday nights – if not others – “off” from all obligations whatsoever.

My grandma left no texts behind when she died: no paintings or scribblings, no stories – not even any class notes: only what we might vaguely remember of her voice when we look at the unlabelled photographs in the albums my father has lovingly stored. She referred to her high honors club irreverently, as the “Phi Beta Krappa,” but she rarely missed one of their lunches. The community in which they had learned was special: strong, and during her last 18 years, when she was a widow, it became even more so; they were survivors.

I know this by what I witnessed of her life – by the tracks her footsteps left in the city. From the market to the kitchen, from the dishwasher to the table, from her knitting needles – carried everywhere – to the Temple; to luncheons, and book sales, and to my high school to pick me up in the afternoons. In this way, she did perhaps write a text. It is a record of her existence, found only by an excavator looking deeper than the press release. Someone who asks: who raised these two men? What made one choose to care about humankind as deeply as he has? And who raised his brother? How did he come to breaking the law? How would my grandma’s text have ended if she had lived to see this son’s fall from grace – or the more global evil of September Eleventh?

My grandma may not have been extraordinarily deep in her thoughts, but she was wise and buttery-soft and believed in Good. If she had lived to witness her younger son’s imprisonment, she would have learned a new path, and created a new pattern in order to write a new chapter in her book of what love is. And that seems to be what her elder son (my father) has done. As the sword of the fallen warrior is picked up by the next line of the infantry, as the flag is not allowed to fall to the battlefield, my father has taken up her text and woven his footprints into hers: caring for his brother, treating the aging (and blessedly senile) father of his brother’s wife to visits and candy every week, and providing what support he can – moral rather than financial – to his brother’s wife.

I now see that the story of my grandma is written in the hearts of her boys, and by extension in their children. She had two, long, honest, books that she wrote. And while there were chapters unfinished when she died, the texts have been growing and shaping themselves further in the years since. Perhaps my father’s book – his heart and his humor and his love will be read in me someday by another excavator, looking at a photo of he and I: looking deeper; to see the future he has made.

(c)

I am here

This is the beginning.

I am here
for my dogs
because of my dogs
to love the light from the sky
with them
I sing



(c)