March 19, 2012 - The Third Anniversary of My Grandmother’s Departure

My maternal grandmother bought me a manicure kit when I was ten years old to try and get me to stop biting my fingernails. Her nails were perfect and long and she had pale skin and freckled hands, hands she would always say looked old, but they never looked old to me. I would watch her file her nails, then paint them, as we sat together on her bright orange floral davenport (as she would call it) in her duplex in Alameda.

            She had three children and five grandchildren, two sisters, Gertrude and Helen, and a brother, Al, who died tragically in an accident when they were both teenagers. Al had gone on a motorcycle ride with a friend, and he had invited my grandmother to go with them, and she had said no, and when the two young men arrived on the scene (a field or wherever it was), there was an accident with a gun (they were to go shooting), and when the gun went off, Al got shot. She kept his dark flannel shirt in her dresser drawer (the dresser that now holds my clothes and my husband’s clothes), and she would take it out and show me the bullet hole in the shirt, the hole that had killed him, and I would place my finger over it, and I would miss him, although I had never met him.

Aunt Gert and Aunt Helen came to visit for my grandmother’s 80^th birthday some years ago (my grandmother was the middle daughter, the other two sisters are still alive), and one afternoon during their stay, we had gathered at my parents’ house and I sat on the bed in the guest room off the garage, where they kept the piano (that has since been sold), listening as my grandmother and her sisters played songs from the hymnal my mother kept there, so sure of themselves and the harmonies they belted that it seemed nothing in our lives could ever change.

Back in California, when I was young, I would sit alone in the front row of First Baptist Church and listen to her sing in the choir. She would hand me a sandwich baggie filled with marshmallows and chocolate chips and tell me to sit quietly while she sang, and that she would come for me soon. There were so many people in the choir, so many faces, wearing robes that rippled with every movement of the arm, like the current of a wave when they turned the pages of their hymnals, my grandmother casting a look of love out to me, a young girl dangling her legs from a long wooden pew, waiting to see what was next.