Grandma Gets An A

My sister has been at my house every weekend for the past three weeks. I’ve lived in my new house for three weeks. That right there is some serious sisterly dedication. The first weekend was to help me move, the second weekend was to attend Mason’s graduation, and this last weekend was to help me out with mom’s illness and her unexpected hospital stay. Erin went into the quintessential Eldest Child Mode. Cleaning, organizing, getting nurses to take care of business, filing papers, going through photographs, ensuring that mom will continue to get good care.

If you are familiar with that classic tearjerker film “Terms of Endearment”, you know that Shirley MacLaine’s character is the best possible advocate for her hospitalized daughter. Remember the scene where Debra Winger needed to get her shot and her mother would not give up until the nurses took care of that? That’s my sister, Erin. Everyone in our family wants Erin present if they become ill. She will get all, “It’s past ten. My daughter is in pain. I don’t understand why she has to have this pain. All she has to do is hold out until ten, and IT’S PAST TEN! My daughter is in pain, can’t you understand that! GIVE MY DAUGHTER THE SHOT!” and then everyone in the entire hospital, nay the county, will be afraid and start giving shots to everyone just because my sister said so. She is just that badass.

Any free moment that mom slept back at home, Erin was out in my garage. She’s been fascinated with all the stuff my mother has collected over the years. I’m not so much fascinated as I am WHEN CAN I PARK MY OWN CAR IN MY OWN GARAGE? with the whole thing and I’m struggling with patience over the seemingly eternal mess of boxes. Moving, as everyone knows, sucks. That’s the word people use for it, too, anytime you mention that you are moving.

“You’re moving? Ick. Moving sucks.”

“How’s it going with the move? Moving sucks.”

“There’s a devastating oil spill? Moving sucks.”

Every day for the past three weeks I have spent time out in the garage futzing around. That’s what I say when mom asks what I’ve been up to when I’ve spent any length of time downstairs.

“Hey, mom. You ok? Need anything?”

“I’m good. What are you up to tonight?”

“Oh. Futzing. You know.”

Here’s how futzing works. I take a large glass of ice water and my phone with me to the garage, search for the corner I want to work on, and start moving stuff around. Or futzing, if you will. (And you will. Because I have already used that word a ton.) Sometimes I just want to clear a path or find the box of coats that still need to be hung up in the front closet. Other times I am distracted by things I’m moving to a specific corner of the garage so that when mom feels better she can start to go through stuff. The thing that is constant is that I find something from my grandmother or from my childhood or even from my marriage that will make me stop and have need to sit down and cry about it. What have we learned so far, boys and girls? We’ve learned that moving sucks and there is crying.

The quick and dirty on The Garage: My mom has a lot of stuff. My grandma’s stuff makes me miss her and is a source of pain when I go through it. There are some unidentified footwear that I keep moving to a new spot. I have a new gas can (but no mower – go figure) that I try hard not to trip over. I’ve done the calculations and about 10% of the stuff belongs to me. Everything else of mine has made its way into the actual living part of the house.

I think that by now I have touched every single thing in the garage and it still looks a mess. Let me provide a visual for you (taken with my phone of course):

Thank you, Angella, for helping me label my horridly taken photograph of my disgusting garage. Next time, I’ll let you Photoshop my head on Halle Berry’s body.

It’s a treasure hunt out there for sure. There are family heirlooms that would be worth quite a bit to a collector. My grandpa’s cowboy hat, an old tractor seat, and a box of photos of relatives who came over on the boat and photos of my great aunt who was a state representative. I know I come from good stock when I explore the richness of my heritage, but some things just can’t have a price put on them.

During her first visit, Erin found something in the basement when we were packing up at the old house. It’s from a Freshman English extension course she took in 1968 in Lemmon, South Dakota.

Basically, no man of the white race is superior to a man of another race. All men’s tears are wet and salty, all men’s blood runs red, whether his skin is yellow, brown, black, white or red. The pangs of hunger, the bliss of happiness, spasms of pain, the fury of anger, or the blessed relief of sleep for a tired man are universal feelings for all with no regard for the color of their skin.

But it was the first paragraph on the second page that really did me in with her words.

Should one of my children wish to marry a person of another race, all other things being equal, I would not exclude them from the family because of the color of their skin. If they are the means necessary for my child’s happiness they will be welcome in the family. Oh, yes, I’ll admit there would be some fear in my heart because I am well aware that the world is not ready to accept inter-racial marriages, particularly the black and white, and of course no mother finds it easy to see her children experience heartache.

It’s never occurred to me that I had to question my grandmother as to how she felt about my mother marrying a black man or how she felt about me and my sisters being of mixed race. Not once as a child did I question whether or not she loved me as much as my all-white cousins. When we visited her in South Dakota and stopped by her work as we pulled into town she welcomed us with open arms and introduced us to her friends and co-workers like we were family. Because that’s what we were. It only occurred to me to start wondering when other people asked me. “How did your mom’s parents feel when she brought home a black man? Was it like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” If I were smarter and sassier back then when I started getting those questions I might have retorted with, “I don’t know. How did your family feel when they brought home such an asshole from the hospital?” Grandma pulled out her best jams and homemade breads and fed us amazing homemade foods when we arrived for a visit. Every family does that, right?

When people ask what it was like growing up with my heritage I usually have to stop and wonder what they mean. My experiences are mine. Yours belong to you. I grew up eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and we went on trips and we visited museums. Didn’t other people do that? My guess is that people want to know things like how my white mother figured out how to do my hair. Incidentally, she didn’t, it was a total mess that my father took over and after I was old enough to get corn rows the older black girls in my neighborhood took over from there. Or maybe they want to know how I identify and the clear cut reasons as to why I associate with what. Perhaps their queries are geared to the perspective we had as young children and how people, all completely ignorant, responded to us and asked us to whom we belonged and why such light-skinned kids were hanging out with such a dark-skinned man. Did it not occur to them that he might be our dad? Those were the most confusing questions from strangers because it seemed so obvious to us.

The other papers my grandmother wrote were about Orwell’s 1984, a critical essay responding to an exhibit of the Indian peoples of the Dakotas, a critique of Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener, and two character studies. One of Calpurnia from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the other from an Irwin Shaw short story entitled “The Girls in their Summer Dresses”.

In 1968 my mother was 20 years old. She would marry my father two years later and give birth to me another year after that. Grandma was a good writer. She got an A from her professor on that paper.

But I couldn’t possibly ascribe a grade to what reading those words gave me.