We took
my grandmother to a Mexican restaurant last January to celebrate her 92nd
birthday. An enormous sombrero was placed on her head and our table was
suddenly surrounded by a circle of wait staff singing Happy Birthday in Spanish,
an indistinguishable birthday dessert topped with a cloud of whipped cream and
a candle placed before her. My grandmother has been mostly deaf for as long as
I can remember, relying on a pair of hearing aids, and in the midst of all this
commotion in her honor, she sat reading one of her birthday cards and didn’t
look up once.
She now
lives in a place where the aids call her Millie, a nickname she always hated,
and I suppose it’s for the best she can’t hear them. Mildred, a California bred
mother of three sons who lived in the same house on 2812 Windsor Drive in
Alameda with my grandfather for close to fifty years, was the kind of woman who
had always been petite, and in the black and white photos that are now framed
(almost obsessively) all over my house, wore cardigan sweaters and button up
suits and crisp collars, and had broken her nose one evening after leaving a
restaurant, taking a spill while holding hands and skipping down the sidewalk
with me when I was four.
My
grandparents had always been older, even when my brother and I were quite
small. Our family moved up to Bellingham in 1991, and my grandparents came to
visit us often during those initial years. I can’t remember if we were still
living in California or if we had moved to Washington when my grandparents
stayed with us and our Cocker Spaniel, Midge, was found chewing one of my
grandmother’s hearing aids under the bed. It was a visit down to California, when
I tried on one of my grandmother’s rings and couldn’t get it back over my
knuckle, my Uncle Don attempting to slide it off with a stick of butter, and my
father eventually had to take me to a jeweler to saw the thing apart. I
remember sitting with her in department store fitting rooms, my brother and I
small kids amidst piles of clothing and Grandma in her undies. I remember the
Nutcracker Ballet in San Francisco and how I had complained of the crashing cymbals being too loud. The BART train, and how she had explained to me that part
of the tunnel ran under the Estuary. My grandfather’s coffee mug that had
looked like a blue jean pocket with his name “Bob” stitched on it. When I went
to visit my grandmother recently, I asked her if she remembered that mug, and
told her we had both married men named Robert, and she looked at me and said “your
hair is so black.”
She
moved to Bellingham several months ago after living in California all her life,
after doing Meals on Wheels every week with her sister, Wilda, after years of
telling us all she wanted was for everyone to be together again. When she first
moved, the family had gathered in her room and she had interrupted someone to
say, “Anne’s skin hasn’t seen the light of day.” We told her that same day I
was pregnant, that her first great-grandchild would be born in June.
These
days, she talks about “Tommy being in an accident,” while my Uncle Tom is at
home in California doing just fine, and about how she had a hard time finding a
parking spot at 2812, and I keep thinking about how my Grandpa Bob used to say “home
again, home again, jiggity jig” every time he pulled that station wagon into their
driveway, and how I now sit in my grandmother’s room and watch the aids, two
girls much younger than me, as they strap something around her back and lift
her from her wheelchair by a machine I’ve never seen before, wheeling her into
the other room in order to lower her down to use the toilet, and how I’m no
longer pregnant because four months in my baby didn’t make it, we recently
received his ashes in a cardboard box in the mail, and that I just want to return
to 2812 with her and Grandpa Bob, on that autumn day when we collected the
reddest leaves in a single plastic bag.
