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create grandmothers

My parents were born fairly late in their parents' lives, so I only ever met my two grandmothers. When I was six, I met my mother's mother, who was in her late seventies. My uncle drove her from Michigan to central Massachusetts in 1954. She stayed with us for maybe a weekend, but I got a sense of her as a person who was keenly perceptive. She would have had to be perceptive to be the teacher that she was in her youth. But you don't get to bond with someone that you meet for just a few days. A year or so later, she blacked out while driving and her car went off the road into a stream. She was 79, and had severe atherosclerosis. She died a few days after the accident. I went with my mother to Michigan to help clear out her house. I remember the bees' nest in the house's attic. I also remember the fruit trees and the odd cotton balls (in pastel colors and strange scents) in her bedroom. The house seemed small and cramped, with small rooms. The ceilings were kind of low, but what you have to understand is that the whole family lacked height. No one was more than 5 feet six inches tall. Also, my grandfather built the house himself in the late 1890s, and he wasn't going to waste lumber and energy on unnecessary space.

But my father's mother was a wonder of genetics. Barely five feet tall herself (though she had brothers who were more than sixfeet tall), she survived absolutely everything that life could throw at her -- a mean mother who gave her nightmares as late as her seventies, the death of said m,other as well as her ow husband to amyotropic lateral sclerosis wihtin a year of each other, a catastrophic fall down a flight of stairs that tore her internal organs. Oh, and she survived a depression and two world wars (my father had to leave college in the late 1930s to come home to nurse her through the nervous breakdown she had after nursing her husband through his fatal illness).

But you wouldn't guess that she had had so many troubles. Maybe she perked up when her two sons produced six grandchildren between them. I loved her dearly, and she loved me back. But I was a nervous kid who acted up. I remember getting so excited about having her there at an outdoor picnic that I accidentally knocked her over, chair and all. Guilt-stricken, I ran away as fast as I could. (Running away was my preferred strategy). She knew I loved Disney comic books, so I asked her for a lot of them, and my mother had to intervene. My grandmother was on social security, so she didn't have much money. I was maybe six or seven at the time, and had no idea about money matters. Mom limited the amount that my grandmother was alowed to spend on me. Probably for the best.

My grandmother was always afraid that she wouldn't have much more time to live. Indeed, in her mid-seventies she had terrible circulation problems -- which were partially solved with medication.
She came to live in our house not long after this, which nearly drove my mother crazy. My grandmother managed to get into the Clinton home for the aged in her late seventies. No one thought that she would be there for long.

But the years went by. She was determined to do her daily walking, but angina interfered with this. I aged through my teens. After my junior year o college I got a summer job at my father's company (a printing press that had been cobbled together using textile mill buildings during the depression). My shift ended around three, but my father's shift ended at 5:00. So, I would sometimes walk up the hill and across town to visit my grandmother in th hom for the aged. Then my father would bring me home.

Sometimes my great-uncle would come from Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania to visit. He would argue with my grandmother, and they would get very agitated, but neither one seemed to have hamed by this. My mother joked that this got their circulation working.

More time went by. I got through college. I went to graduate school and got a job in a library. My grandmother kept right on going. She coped with the suicide of my cousin (she had risked her life to save this cousin from a playground incident). She was in her late eighties now. I used to dream that everything was all right as long as she was still alive. The terrible recession and gas price crisis of the 1970s came along. And then, when I was thirty, the news came. She had had a stroke and heart attack. But she hung on for a week after this. She was 93 going on 94.

I still miss her to this day. My parents were worn down by the Depression, and seemed muted, but my grandmother had a fierce will to live that kept her going long after other people would have given up.

What I remember about her was that when she smiled at me, the whole room would light up. You don't forget someone who can do that.



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