Monday, September 12, 2005|
There was something so familiar about this date. September 12. What's up with that? I wondered. Then just now it surfaced--Grandma's birthday. She would have been 95 if she were alive now. This is not the grandmother of "Grandma's House." This is my mother's mother, who never liked me so much. It was no secret. She had her reasons. I was a smarty-pants, for one thing. And inside I knew even as a kid--we both knew, I think--that we were too much alike.  Her father there was Lair Van Scoy; his parents were Joseph Van Scoy and Arah Jane O'Neil. He died not too long after the time of this photo, I think, at 46, from a burst appendix. Her mother, now--she was a pip. Elizabeth Swiger, her birth name. (Her mother was Mary Grubb. Her father's name is missing here in the record.) At the time of the picture they were Methodists. When her husband died, Elizabeth became a nurse to support her girls, and started a hospital, a small Methodist hospital in some small Iowa town. She was mean and strict, I was always told. At some point she married a Seventh-day Adventist farmer with the surname of Aldridge. He died too. She raised my mom and my mom's brother. Sent them to Seventh-day Adventist boarding schools. I can remember her from when I was three or four. She had a cane and couldn't walk very well. I stayed near her all the time and helped her walk, helped her up and down the front steps. Mom always said she cringed whenever she watched me doing that, Grandma Aldridge leaning on the tiny little girl I was to come down the stairs. She was a mean great-grandma, and I stayed close and felt every bit as strong as she was big. But this is about her little girl, about Erma, who didn't like me so much. Her older sister Ila on the left there was fat and bossy and grew up and married a railroad man name Virgil who worshipped her and bought her a new Cadillac every year. Erma was skinny and sickly. Once she had five diseases at the same time and everyone knew she was going to die. She was 7 or 8, maybe. The diseases were measles, mumps, polio, meningitis... and something else. When she was on the verge of death the whole Methodist congregation gathered around her bed and prayed all one night, the story went, to keep her alive. And she lived.  When she was eighteen she married the hired hand, a half-Indian boy named Wayne, and he bought a truck to become a long-haul truck driver, and they moved to Seattle. She used to tell about stepping off the back porch and grabbing a salmon out of the river with her hands, there were so many during the salmon runs. She gave birth to my uncle Paul there. They returned to Iowa then and later she had my mom in Lake City. Grandma was almost as mean as her own mother, though, and there was a divorce, and Gramps moved north to be a farmer and start a new family. He was a small gentle man, my one true father-figure; I can't remember him ever once being angry, or even annoyed. But he told my mom once that Erma was the only person in his life who could drive him into a homicidal rage. He tried to get the kids--even kidnapped them once--but he lost them in the end. Erma tried to support them by working as a proofreader for Life Magazine in Des Moines, but her disapproving mother made her go to nursing school and took the two children to raise herself. Grandma Erma became an LVN, married a local farmer named Johnny Cook who used to be a sheepherder in Montana and in fact still did talk to himself a lot, and who wasn't a very good farmer, and she had three blonde children. And kept working. She was nervous, high-strung, demanding. A defiant fire raged in her pale blue eyes, if you can imagine it. Everyone feared her. When I was three or four and my mother was looking around for a relative to dump me on, her first choice was this grandmother. It didn't work out between us. I spent a lot of time screaming. I can remember being held down on an ironing board to have my hair washed. I was hysterical. My aunts Judi and Jane, who were 11 and 12, held me while Grandma washed my hair and fumed. I screamed if a bug got on my foot. I screamed if it rained--stood at the screen and screamed. So I went to live with the other grandmother, instead, my mother's stepmother, on a different farm 100 miles to the north, and she rocked me on her lap, and when it was hairwashing time I was plopped in the galvanized tub with one of those aunts, and the only time I ever screamed again was when a very small spider crawled all the way into my ear once. So Erma worked hard and eventually took her three Cook kids and her Siamese cat Wee-wan (who was very much like Greta, I realize, now that I think of it) and left Iowa and the farmer and drove them all to California, where her two grown children (and I) lived by then. She worked and worked at nursing homes everywhere. Every shift she could get. Holidays, especially. Never saw her on a holiday--never saw her, period, really. She worked all night long. Slept briefly during the day and then ffft--gone again. She didn't eat; sustained herself with coffee and cigarettes. Kept her kids fairly feral, but very dependant. Aunt Judi married a Marine and ran away to Baton Rouge to be a Cajun. Aunt Jane eventually married, too, and got out of there. Bobby though died by his own hand, another story for another time. And Grandma worked and worked. Until finally she broke her hip and my mother took her in. Mom kept her until she couldn't cope with it anymore, mid-'97, and then I got her. Irony of ironies--the only relative who would have her was me. And she wasn't scary anymore. She hadn't been scary for years. But nobody knew that. Old hurts, maybe. But I think too they loved her and wanted to remember her being angry and sharp; they wouldn't have been able to stand to see her just barely there, with emphysema and heart failure. She died on my watch--a lung collapsed, and we finally got her into a hospital, and it was every bit as horrific as she'd feared it would be, having been one of those nurses herself most of her life. She had strokes, became aphasic. The last things she ever said were shouts of "Twelve! Twelve!" because, I'm pretty sure, she was trying to call for "help." She couldn't find the right words. Anyway, I think she probably loved me somewhere way down deep, down where I loved her back. She was strong and angry and independent and always did everything right. And she wanted to do everything for everybody--not out of helpfulness, but because if she didn't they'd only get it wrong.
But that's why I'm so glad to have these two photos. I can see she was a sweetheart once. And probably great fun. And so smart. I wonder if she had dreams for herself--plans and ideas. I look at her face here and I would just bet that she did. |
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Gorgeous autumn day. Clouds everywhere but just for picturesque effect, apparently. The sun mostly shines around them. Just in from hanging out the whites (it amazes me how much money and energy I save by drying laundry this way). Next wash scheduled for tomorrow morning. We were without water for two days in a row last week because I pushed the envelope over the weekend, and so I'll take greater care now. We inch along toward the store: After loading three sets of shelves into the van, we drove into town and finally signed the lease for 109 W. Modoc Street. Alas, the manager could find no keys for it, and the previous tenants still haven't turned in their set. So we drove there anyway and I measured the windows. Odd how much smaller and dirtier a place can seem after you've signed a lease. But we'll make it work. I did register with the county clerk and get a post office box in the name of the store, though, and buy some cheap paper blinds to cover the windows when we're fixing it up--once we get in. As I say, inching along. And that's a good thing, probably. Los Angeles is without power right now--as in The City of, not the surrounding areas served by PG&E. I hope my friend who works in a downtown highrise is coping; She has a lot of stairs to negotiate in the dark.
I'll make shortcake now, for peaches and cream later. We should celebrate a little bit, even while the world is falling down around everyone's ears. Love. |
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Last update: 10/1/05; 2:57:55 AM .
Last update: 10/1/05; 2:57:55 AM .
