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)