Grandma

 

My eight-year-old eyes wondered how anything moving that fast could create something so pretty. I watched my grandma’s hands as they made knitting needles and yarn dance. Row by row she built a stocking cap from remnants of yarn leftover from afghans she made for friends, relatives, or county fair entries. When it was done, she showed me how to make a pom-pom for the top. She completed the hat while getting her daily dose of General Hospital.

I was too young to care much about who was sleeping with whom on the daily soap opera, but I was intensely interested in my grandmother. Her day was dictated by routine. Washing the breakfast dishes was followed by watching The Galloping Gourmet. After Grandpa returned to work from his lunch break, when she fed him tomato soup and a toasted cheese sandwich, she washed dishes then watched General Hospital while knitting.  Then she started dinner so it would be on the table at precisely 5:30 when Grandpa got home from work. 5:35 was unacceptable. After dinner, she washed the dinner dishes while he read the newspaper. When he slept in his recliner, she typed invoices for the jobs he completed that day.

Grandma Katie had a routine for food, too. When I stayed with her during the week, when school was out for the summer and my parents had travel plans, breakfast was cold cereal. Special K tasted okay if I added enough sugar. Lunch was only a toasted cheese sandwich because I hated tomato soup. Hostess Ho-Ho’s were a mid-afternoon snack. Dinner depended on the day of the week. Mondays were meatloaf. I hated Mondays. Weekend visits meant dollar size pancakes for breakfast. I’d stand at the stove and watch her pour perfectly shaped pancakes, slightly smaller than a silver dollar. I stood ready with my fork and plate. As soon as she’d plop the golden rounds on my plate, I’d smother them with butter and warm maple syrup. Often I’d eat them standing by the stove so I’d be ready for the second batch hot from the skillet.

Weekend visits also meant Catholic church.  The extent of my religious upbringing was hearing my dad’s take on grace before dinner. “Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub. Yay God.” Only someone raised in the church could have as much disdain for it as my dad did, much to the chagrin of my oh-so-Catholic grandmother, who did her best to raise a good Catholic boy. She’d dress me and my brother in the best clothes my parents packed for us and she’d pack us off to 10:00 mass. It always seemed unfair to me that my grandpa got to stay home and watch sports on TV while we had to go to church.

It was in the nave of our small town’s Catholic church where I got my first distaste of religion. At eight years old, I was a good kid. I got good grades, I didn’t get into trouble, and I respected my parents. As I sat on the rock hard pew with my grandmother on my left and my brother on my right, I felt a chill I couldn’t shake. To take my mind off it, I picked a fight with my brother, which was met with a quick “Ssshhh” and admonishing look from Grandma.

I listened as the priest proceeded with his scripted rhetoric, and I made no sense of any of it. But when he called us all sinners, I paid closer attention. I remember it like I remember where I was when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, or where I was when, nearly forty years later, I got the call Grandma passed away. How could a total stranger, someone who never met me, stand up on his holy horse and proclaim I was a sinner? Even at eight, I wasn’t willing to give a man wearing a dress the power to make me feel bad about myself.

My mom made a weak attempt at introducing me to religion by way of vacation bible school at our community church. Or it might have simply been free daycare for two weeks during the summer. The three women who ran the summer program looked like they were classmates with Moses. My anxiety built as I stood outside the tiny church with 29 other kids waiting to get religion.

As I took my crayons to my desk to color Jesus or the Last Supper, I watched the crones out of the corner of my eye. One, in particular, wore a scowl that made me want to hide in a closet. I’d heard people say they felt safe in church, peaceful even. What was I doing wrong? Church made my stomach hurt and the church ladies scared me.

“My stomach hurts,” I said when I raised my hand.

“What do you mean your stomach hurts?” the scowling one said.

“It hurts like I’m going to puke.”

She ushered me to the kitchen where she gave me a ten year old saltine and a glass of warm water. I heard her on the phone with my mother. “She says she’s nauseous. Yes, we can’t keep her here if she’s sick. You’ll need to come get her.”

Mom had to take the day off work to drive from town to pick me up, and she was mad when I got in the car. “Are you really sick” she asked.

“Yeah, Mom, my tummy really hurts.”

I felt a huge sense of relief at being granted parole from coloring bible pictures and being scowled at by old church ladies.

The next day I made it to the morning snack break before my stomach started to churn.

“Well, your mother shouldn’t have let you come if you’re sick.”

“I felt better this morning, really.  But now I wanna puke.”

Mom was spitting fire after taking a second day off to rescue me from vacation bible school.

“You were fine this morning. What’s going on?”

“Church makes me sick. The ladies are mean. I don’t like how I feel when I’m there.”

My mom dropped her head over the steering wheel and sighed. But when she looked up at me, I knew she wouldn’t make me go back.

There was a new understanding with my grandma too. After that, I got to stay home with Grandpa on the Sundays I spent there. We watched football or I watched him work in his shop. Sometimes he’d take me out in his van with “See Pete for Heat” painted on the side and he’d buy me a candy bar at the neighborhood market. “Don’t tell Grandma,” he always said when he handed me the Willy Wonka bar.

As an adult, I learned to forgive her for hurtful things she did when I was a child. I was sixteen and a newly licensed driver when Mom allowed me to drive the fifteen miles from our country home into town to Grandma’s house. I knocked on her door, excited to tell her I’d passed my driver’s test. She said her Garden Club was meeting and she couldn’t let me in. What I expected was she’d bring me in the house and brag to her fellow club members about her granddaughter passing her driver’s test and driving into town solo. What I got was rejection. But time and age forgives and I discovered Grandma and I had a lot in common.

In almost everything but religion, Grandma and I “got” each other. Grandma had a way of letting things roll off her back, and with a wave of her hand and a “pfftt,” things were forgiven and often forgotten. It was how she survived.

She was 24 when she married in 1934, probably considered an old maid in that era. She had a job at a lumber mill where she met my grandfather, but once she married, she had to relinquish her job. Jobs were still scarce and were reserved for men or single women. Grandma was an intelligent woman with an active mind and being forced out of a job she excelled at was one of the first things she had to wave off.

My grandfather wasn’t an easy man to live with. He was a good provider, but he was also verbally abusive. My grandmother was kept in her place by his sharp tongue.

 “Let me tell this story, you’re not telling it right,” he barked at her more times than I could count. “Shut up, just shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She’d clamp her mouth shut and wring her hands in frustration.

When Grandpa was in his mid-70’s he lost his eyesight to macular degeneration and was dependent on my grandmother for everything from filling the wood stove with pellets to cutting his steak.  As he mellowed and became dependent, Grandma grew wings.

She rolled her eyes in response to something he said. She waved her hand in dismissiveness when he demanded something of her. She never showed it, but I saw delight in her eyes. After 55 years of marriage, she was getting her revenge, one eye roll at a time.

Grandma was famous for feeding ten people on one can of Campbell’s soup and a half loaf of bread. Living through the depression fed her innate frugality. She and Grandpa were approaching 90 when I stopped in for a visit with my brother, my nephew and his girlfriend. Grandma insisted on making lunch. Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and bologna sandwiches were the menu.

After Grandpa finished his soup and sandwich, he said, “I’d like another sandwich.”

“They’re gone, eat a saltine,” Grandma said, as she handed the last two sandwiches to my brother and his son. I silently cheered as I watched her slight turned up grin. She put up with a lot in her 74 year marriage to my grandfather, and denying him a sandwich made her feel like she gained some of her power back.

She resisted the idea of moving to an assisted living facility, but she realized it afforded her some freedom from Grandpa. She could break away to play Bingo or work jigsaw puzzles without worrying about him firing up his riding lawnmower and driving into a ditch. One of her first activities was entering a watermelon seed spitting contest at the Fourth of July party. She won. She claimed she won because she was the only one who had real teeth. “Everyone else spit out their dentures,” she said.

When she was 95, a group of bikers came to her assisted care home and offered motorcycle rides to anyone who was able. Grandma was the first to sign up. Her only complaint after the ride was that it wasn’t long enough.

The next time I set foot in my hometown Catholic Church was at her funeral. On the program I saw the name of the priest who had called me a sinner 37 years ago. I knew Grandma had been very fond of him and I was happy he was at her funeral. Unfortunately, he was retired and simply sat on the sidelines in his frock, silent. The officiating priest didn’t know my grandmother, had never met her. In the last years of her life, she and Grandpa had moved out of town to live near my aunt, so her ties to the church she had attended for fifty years had been lost. I was sure it was some Catholic rule, but why couldn’t Father McLaughlin, who knew her, who had gone fishing with her and Grandpa, say something during the service?

When I walked into the foyer of the church, the knots in my stomach started to build. I willed them away. Grandma deserved for me to set aside my prejudices about religion to honor her life. I half expected a scrunch-faced church lady to offer me a saltine and warm water.

The priest offered religious rhetoric about casting her soul to God, eternal life, yada yada. He could have inserted the name Jane Doe into the service and nothing would have changed. In a Catholic funeral, only one eulogy is permitted by family or friend, and it was my honor to be chosen. God forbid they should open up the service to let others speak about the deceased.

I told stories of Grandma beating me at Scrabble, of how she laughed at subtle jokes, and of her adventurous spirit. It wasn’t until the service became personal that I heard my cousins laugh, then cry. We shared some of the same memories of Grandma. We were the grandchildren who adored her pancakes, played in her barn, and carried her genes, her strength, and her love. We were the ones who gave meaning to her passing through our grief and memories. Yet only one of us was allowed to speak at her funeral

As the priest carried on with his rituals, I stifled a laugh as he kept sprinkling holy water on her casket. He sprinkled it on her casket as it sat in the church; he sprinkled it on the casket as it was placed in the hearse. My grandmother was the most frugal person I knew. I pictured her yelling, “You’re wasting water. Enough already.”

I’ve visited my grandmother’s grave only one since her death. I felt no connection to her by looking at a headstone engraved with her name and date of death. I feel connected to her when I crochet a hat and donate it to charity under the name Katie Kaps, as she used to do. When I sell a Katie Kap on eBay, I know she’d be fascinated by the online marketplace. The only pancakes I’ll eat are dollar size, fresh from the skillet, smothered in butter and maple syrup. I feel my connection with her every time I use toenail clippers to trim the ultra-thick fingernails I inherited from her. I feel her presence when I wave my hand, say “pffftt” and let something go. I hold on to her youthful attitude as I grow older. And when I’m 95, I’ll complain the ride wasn’t long enough.