(no subject)

[my_window_seat]

My friend Mannie likes to play the Penny Game.  This is a game he made up, where every so often he'll pull a penny from his pocket or find one in the street, look at the printed date on the face, and think of as many events in his life as he can that occurred during that particular year.

He does it as a way to exercise his memory - like bench-pressing for the brain.  He's tried the Penny Game on me, but I'm afraid my memory for events connected to specific dates is so horribly fragmented that it's an exercise in futility.  I remember the year that I graduated from high school - everything else in my life exists on a fluid timeline of "well, that was after this and before that, so it probably happened around..."

I had a discussion with My Fella^TM recently about life stories and the telling of them, and it's been circling around in my brain ever since.  For one thing, I think it's interesting to be able to look at the different shaped puzzle pieces that are a part of the big picture of a person's personality.  I think, at least to a certain degree, we're all a bit like stalactites/stalagmites - a kind of sculpture, emotional rather than mineral, shaped in part by deposits of experience, some of which slide off and drain away, but each adding yet another microscopic layer to the ever-changing shapes that we are.  Being sentient creatures, we have at least a limited ability to make conscious choices about how those experiences shape us; still, everything that happens to us is a part of who we are.

Anywho, the other thing I've been thinking about is how many holes there are in my memory, and how those gaps are widening as time goes by.  Of course, having forgotten so much I don't even know what I've already lost - a darkly amusing idea - but maybe there's something of interest in getting down in writing what's left.  Snag a few of the remnants before they too swirl away.

Before starting on my own passage down Memory Lane, I think I'll start with what I know of some of the earliest Feature Players. 

And so, a one snapshot from the Family Album of Memory:  Grandmama.

The most important person in my early life is my grandmother, Grandmama.  My mom's mom.  Not Granny or Grandma or any other huggable-sounding name - Grandmama.  Emphasis on the first syllable.

Tall, solid but still statuesque, commanding, quiet, but a force of nature.  Elegant.  In a strange way, even regal.  Born Virginia Hooker, a name that couldn't have been easy to live with.  I don't really know much about her, or any of my family, but I know a few things.  An only child, raised mostly by a single mother, something almost unheard of at that time.  Strong willed, independent. 

She did crossword puzzles in pen, and valued correct pronunciation and vocabulary usage, and took me to libraries often.  She sewed, and made clothes for me that were both well-made and fun, and she always put a toy in one of the pockets for me to find.  She taught me how to embroider and how to put patches on my jeans for repairs and decoration.  She made birthday cakes for me, a different animal shape each year.  The one I remember best was a siamese cat, complete with tan frosting for the body, dark ears, and braided black licorice whip tail.

When I lived with her, she worked as a switchboard operator in the Roosevelt Hotel in downtown Seattle, back when telephone connections were made by pulling the cords for the incoming calls from the board and plugging them into the circuits connected to the rooms.  She wore a neatly styled short-haired wig to work.  When she came home at night she'd take it off and lie on her stomach on the couch, and sometimes she'd let me brush her long auburn hair as she drank glass after glass of Gallo burgundy wine and watched television.

We lived in a one room apartment in West Seattle.  We shared a bedroom and one bed, and if I didn't get to sleep before she came to bed, I got no sleep that night:  Grandmama snored so loud that I remember the windows literally rattling in the frames some nights.  I think I was the only child in my elementary that had dark circles under their eyes from lack of sleep.

I still love my Grandmama fiercely even though her alcoholism has much to do with why I have never cared to overcome my distaste for alcohol.  It wasn't until I was in middle school that I realized that it wasn't normal for an adult to keep a child up for hours into the night, discussing the nature of love in a fog of wine-soaked psuedo-philosophizing, or for adults to have screaming matches with each other that prompted neighbors to call the police. 

The WWF-style fighting matches started after Grandmama has started seeing a man, Ted, and I was moved out of the bedroom to sleep in a truck camper (Ted's) parked in the driveway - something that was both fun and exciting, and also frightening.  Fun, because I could listen to CBS Radio Mystery Theatre on the portable radio in the dark before going to sleep, and enjoyable, because it was so much quieter and more peaceful than trying to burrow under pillows to muffle the snoring.  Frightening because - well, the dark, the separation from the percieved safety of adults, the fear of having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and perhaps not getting back into the house in time or finding that the door had been locked by mistake - and of the strange creaks and groans the camper sometimes made - a prowler?  A monster?  Who knew?

Now that I think about it - and this hadn't occurred to me until just now, that camper was the very first space that I can think of that was my own space, even though it was only where I slept.  I don't think I had my own bedroom until I was in the (3rd or 4th grade?  I'm not exactly sure when this happened), except for a few months during my mom's second marriage - I had a bedroom then, and briefly, a 'real' dad.  But it wasn't until years after that, at least as far as I can remember, that I started living with my mom and had, off an on, at least on weekends, the children's verson of the Woolfian 'Room of My Own.'

Grandmama.  She had few friends, usually a great deal younger than she was, but they admired her and looked up to her.  Until she started calling them in the middle of the night after drinking.  I think they rotated out of her life.  I wasn't really old enough to process this, but that's the way it seems, looking back.

Grandmama - she loved Hawaii, and Mexico.  She is the person I credit with giving me a sense of adventure in culture.  She told me I could never say that I didn't like a food until I'd tried it, even just a bite  - then I was free never to have it again if it wasn't to my liking, but I at least had to experience it before forming an opinion on it.  She taught me how to wash dishes expertly, and would rap the top of my head with a spoon if it wasn't clean enough.  That HURT, and I learned how to rub off water spots with my breath and the dishtowel until they sparkled. One of the first games of pretend I can remember playing was making believe that the silverware pieces were a family, and I was giving them a bath and drying them off before putting them to bed in the silverware drawer.

Grandmama had a green thumb that went all the way up her elbow - she had plants throughout the living room and on shelves in the dining area maintained under ultraviolet light and baskets of hanging fuschia on the porch that all flourished profusely.  She kept tropical fish and would talk to them.  The fish were so attuned to her presence that they would all swarm to the side of the tank and 'follow' her across it as she moved from room to room.  When she discovered hermit crabs she was so delighted with them that she treated them like regular pets, letting them roam from their terraiums.  She named them, and they would actually respond to their names - she could make them 'come' when she called.  She had a dog named Buttons, a Peekapoo about the size of a large bath mat, all long hair and large eyes, that she loved possibly more than any other creature, animal or human.  She had an old Siamese, Nikki, that was part of litter born when my mother was 12.  She told me that when Nikki was a kitten, the mother cat would take each baby one at a time and burrow under the covers of my mother's bed and nest them behind my mother's knees when she slept.

I didn't learn about her early life until after she'd died.  Grandmama never talked about anything other than the recent past.  I don't remember how I found out or who specifically told me - funny, you'd think that would be something that I would remember, but I don't, though it was probably a combination of stories from my uncle and my mother  - that Grandmama was first married when she was still in her teens.  Her first husband turned out to be an alcoholic and an abusive man - who also, unfortunately, was a well-connected German man in a small town largely controlled by holdover  members of the Bund.  The way it was explained to me, this group, in its American incarnation, was essentially the German Mafia.  Grandmama's first husbands father was on a first-name basis with every political official in town, something that would later figure heavily into her life. 

When my grandmother first found out that she was pregnant, she brought what she thought would be the wonderful news to her husband.  He, for whatever reason, did not want children.  He sat my grandmother at the kitchen table, went to the garage and brought back a can of gasoline.  He poured a drinking glass full of the gas and made her drink it, apparently to force a miscarriage.  This was unsuccessful.  I don't know why she stayed with him after this, except I suppose that in this day and time, this is just what you did.  She had a baby boy, and named him Lynn.  She had another baby, a girl, not long after that.  I think her name was Linda.  After what I imagine were years of abuse, my grandmother decided to leave her husband.  When he learned of her plans, he chased her through the house with shotgun, and shot through the kitchen door.  I don't know if he actually intended to kill her or just frighten her into staying.  I don't suppose it matters much.  When she tried to take the two children with her and leave, her husband, through the family's political connections, gained custody of the children and my grandmother was forced to leave town.  She never saw Lynn and Linda again.

Sadly, she married yet another abusive German man some years later.  This will sound completely insane, but it wasn't until just this minute, coming back to edit a typo I made in this paragraph, that I realized that this man, Grandmama's second husband, was my mom's father.  I'm sure I knew this before, damned if I honestly didn't absolutely forget it.  Yeah.  I guess I should write this stuff down before my entire brain turns to tapioca.

Though this has nothing to do with Grandama, it's obvious from the subsequent history that my Grandfather was - a strange man.  He remarried and had three other girls with another woman sometime after my mother was born, because all of these girls were closer to my age than my mother's.  I only remember one of their names right now, the middle girl, Rebecca. That's an entirely different story, but the those three girls attempted to get away from him several times, once jumping from a moving car and trying to run into the woods beside a freeway to escape.  I know that he tried to 'raise' them as though they were all still in the Old Country, forcing them to always wear floor-length dresses and headscarves - and beating them frequently, which was apparently 'how girl children were supposed to be raised.'  I don't know much else about them, only having met them a few times.  I know that Rebecca, as an adult, eventually became a member of the Intelligence Community and I think even a part of the Secret Service, which considering her background, seems strangely appropriate.

Grandmama.  No one in our family is entirely sure, but we think she may have been married as many as seven times.  My mother and my uncle were the only children she was ever actually 'allowed' to keep.  I don't know what my mom and uncle's childhood was like, aside from the fact that it couldn't have been good.  My uncle loved and hated her, and would go for years without speaking to her.  My mother ended up in foster care in her teens.  I know that one of Grandmama's other husbands committed suicide, with a shotgun, in my mother's bedroom.  My mother was the one who found him after coming home from school.

By the time I was born, I think Grandmama wanted a do-over.  Because my mom was practically still a child when she had me, Grandmama took over the job.  I think she did the very best that she could, given her own life experiences.

Because of Grandmama, I love art and literature.  Because of her, I've never been afraid to try something new.  I didn't have the perspective or the knowledge of her background to realize it until I was an adult, but it's because of Grandmama that I learned to value people who do the best with what they have without making excuses for their mistakes or blaming their difficulties on others. 

One afternoon, I got into trouble because I'd gone out to play and had wandered out of the agreed on range of the neighborhood - I was never to go where I couldn't hear her call me from the porch, no matter what.  When I came back, Grandmama tore me a new one.  Apparently my mom had come over for the afternoon, to visit both of us I guess (she was living in her own apartment I think?  I'm not really sure), and both of them were frantic - but eventually I guess my mom had to leave without knowing where I was.  Grandmama told me that I'd scared them both nearly to death - and she let me know that day that I'd hurt both of them, and that as much as she loved me, she loved my mother more than anyone else, and that I was never to do anything like that again to hurt her.  She told me that I was important, but my mother was more so, and that she would always come first.

I know that Grandmama couldn't have intended for me to take it this way, but in retrospect I think this is the first time something in my head told me that my own safety and well-being would only be a priority to me and not to anyone else.  That there wasn't anyone to whom I was the most important person in the world.  This could be something that I could feel sorry for myself about, but I'd rather think that this was what eventually helped me to become an independent and self-sufficient person.  If I didn't take care of myself, there wasn't anyone else who was able or willing to do so.  The subconcious seed was planted - look out for yourself - you're the only one around to do the job.  I think this saved my life on more than one occasion.

In grade school, when I'd finally had a chance to make tentative friends - when I'd finally been in one school longer than a year and had been to the homes of some of my classmates and seen what their families were like - I started to realize that something wasn't quite right in mine.  One night when Grandmama and Ted got into one of their many drunk shouting matches, loud enough to be heard around the neighborhood and so loud that even in the camper I couldn't sleep through it - that night, I got dressed and walked, probably two miles to a payphone and called one of my classmates' mother's.  I think I asked them if they could take me home with them.  I don't remember what she said.  Nothing ever came directly came of the incident except I think that, because it was a small, private school, there may have been an awareness after that that I was a 'different' kid.  I don't really know.

I think I was 9? 10? years old when I finally told my mother that she couldn't leave me to live with Grandmama anymore.  My mother had a two bedroom apartment by then, but if I remember right, I only stayed with her part-time, infrequently.  One night, after Grandmama had been drinking even a little more heavily than usual, I called my mother and told her that she could either come pick me up in the next hour or I would call a cab and she could pay for the cab fare when I arrived.  My mother came and picked me up.  After that, I only stayed with Grandmama on the weekends.  Grandmama still drank, but I think she must have at least tried to keep it to whatever she was able to manage as a minimum.

Grandmama and Ted would sometimes take me on camping trips after that.  I think my real love of reading may have started here, because I remember first reading Call of the Wild by the light of an actual campfire.  Grandmama told me that I always loved books more than any other toy or game.  She said once that when I was just a toddler, instead of putting me to sleep with a stuffed animal at night, she'd give me a Golden Years book that I would hold up and coo at, babbling and turning the pages as if I could actually read it.  I think the camping trips really cemented that love of reading though, because I remember being so desparate for the printed word that I read the cereal boxes and the labels on the cans of food and even the ingredients on the toothpaste after finishing whatever books I'd brought with me.  Even in a forest, I was more at one with the nature in Jack London's prose, and the ability to read, anything and everything I could get my hands on, was what I needed more than anything else from that time forward.

According to my other grandmother, Alma, the story goes that when my mother and father were married - a shotgun marriage as they say; my mother was pregnant - at the reception, my grandmother caught my dad away from the other guests.  She took my dad by the collar of his suit jacket, lifted him off his feet and shoved him against the wall and told him that he'd better never hurt my mother or he'd have her to answer to.  My dad hated Grandmama.  I think I love her all the more because of it.

Grandmama.  As witty and as intellectually cruel as Dorothy Parker.  A woman who made as many strong choices as she made weak ones.  Tall and proud and nobody's woman except her own.  A survivor.
 My grandmother.

I love you, Grandmama.

Comments

great post for Memorial Day

[hillbillie.livejournal.com]

So many think it's just another party-weekend..

you painted a beautiful portrait here, I think.

Thanks for sharing it with us.

Re: great post for Memorial Day

[my-window-seat.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought about that - timing, is funny. no?

[excommunique.livejournal.com]

D, I really thank you for sharing this. You words always come out so beautifully. I think it's incredibly important to record things that are remembered - my mother's side of the family has kept track of the family since 1800s France so I cherish my history and the history of others like you wouldn't believe.
So thank you for this. These pictures are wonderful.

[my-window-seat.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

What's funny - even though you and I haven't met IRL, I know Grandmama would have liked you, and I'm betting vice versa. She had a way of collecting the best kind of unique people.

[excommunique.livejournal.com]

I am honored by this. Thank you :)