grandma mcclary...

when grandma died in 2006, i wrote an essay and read it at a memorial in her honor:

as i sat at my writing desk at home, i tried to create a mental list of details about my grandmother, muriel—memories of our relationship, a significant moment that’s just for me to remember. when nothing came to mind—no quirky moment to make me laugh—i opted for momentary panic: had i squandered the impact of her contribution in this world, the value of her grandma-ness in my life? i worried: where are the memories?

of course i have an answer now or this essay would be headed nowhere.

my reminder of grandma: an 8-inch tall buddha statue. it is an abstract source of many memories, though only to me.

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several years ago, i sat on the couch in grandma’s condominium on west maple, down the hill from this church, sifting through the slides of an east asian vacation grandma and grandpa had made a decade before i was born. sitting there, my focus was partly due to having returned after a year of living and traveling in that part of the world, myself. and in part because grandma’s slides were visual confirmation, a connection, with what to me was the unknown of her life.

a few years earlier, i had sat with grandma, trying to clear up some of that unknown. i tape-recorded our conversation, me asking over and over questions that began with: what was it like…? toride into the montana prairie on a wagon, and ride out in a Ford, and to live during the historic eras lead by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, to experience the sacrifices of the depression, the unity and patriotism of World War 2, the inventions of radio and television? always sentimental and curious, trying to understand things intimately, imagining experiences that are long past, walking in people’s shoes that have long, long since run out of fashion, i kept asking, on on on… what was it like?

i didn’t get many answers. maybe newsman tom brokaw is right, members of grandma’s hardy generation typically don’t look at their lives as spectacular. life was what it was. and not worth noting in dramatic detail for future retellings to quell a grandchild’s curiosities. in all its joys and difficulties, life is what it is.

as such, she and i had never talked much of the orient. she had visited hong kong; and japan—i think. but that afternoon, as i flipped through the boxes of slides, one had implausible familiarity: a straightforward picture of a buddhist temple on the bank of a river. i knew the scene; i’d been there; i’d also made a picture similar to the 35-year-old version in my hand. bankgkok thailand was, and is, an unexpected point in common between grandma’s life and mine.

i returned there a couple of years ago and bought the buddha that sits in its rigid posture, eternally meditating by my writing desk, channeling the past…

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when i was a child, grandma sometimes seemed firm-handed. the reasons why i thought so are elusive now. i was young. perspectives mature.

as i grew up i gained appreciation for her sense of humor, her attempts at stomping on my toes while wearing her colorful foot-fitting slippers, her playful jabs into my ribs with slender fingers, the sarcasm we shared, her smile. she was not strict. she was my grandma mcclary, and she had sweet personality.

when i was old enough to better understand the why-fors of respect for grandmothers, i began doing what some may have thought demonstrated the opposite: i occasionally called her by first name, rather than predictably calling her “grandma.” to me addressing her as “muriel” had potential as respect in a more particular form, playing to grandma’s sense of humor, acknowledging her as a person in the larger world, not just my family tree…that would bring up muriel’s smile. i admit, she probably wasn’t sure why i called her that. more likely, she passed it off as “adam’s just being silly.” and i was, but with admiration for how we made each other smile. ‘silly’ was me joking, her jabbing. it was one of our things.

in recent years, i returned to tradition: on the phone i’d say, “hi, grandma, it’s your grandson—adam.” or “good bye, grandma.” “i love you, grandma.” that last line i said twice the last time i saw her, because i’d not said it much before.

by returning to tradition, i was reclaiming her as my grandma, someone particular to me, someone who gives my life context rooted in a chain of generations. she was muriel, but also a mother—grand and great grand—and a woman two generations of wise beyond me, one decades more resilient.

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as a toddler, grandma had been a genuine pioneer baby, living on a montana homestead. this past summer i went there. i stood possibly within inches of where grandma had sat with her twin sister majel, their younger brother laverne, and the oldest girl eunice, atop my great-grandfather’s horse, baldy. i stood in the tiny town shown in grandma’s nearly century-old photographs that show opheim’s false-front stores and circular horse trough in the middle of the broad wild west-looking main street made of dirt.

photographs, again, as confirmation of where grandma’s life had been. a connection with pieces of her i’d not known well.

at the end of the summer in 2006, i again brought photographs to grandma’s side for her to see, as i had in 2004. but times had changed—in montana, and in grandma; her participation was limited. my photographs of the hills, and the flax seed crop that awaited harvesting where grandma’s first home had stood, are just mine now, my memories. i can only compare them with her pictures, and ponder the rest in speculation.

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looking at my buddha, i know it’s been four decades since grandma and grandpa were in bangkok. it’s been five years since i first stood at the river’s edge there, photographing the temple of the dawn. my statue’s spiked headwear invokes the multiple spires of the buddhist shrine. that stems a longer train of recall: buddha. temple. grandma. it’s a subtle string of potential thoughts each time i sit down to write.

when i allow more time, the buddha-temple-grandma line continues: her cuckoo clock, the husker du memory board game she kept in her living room coat closet, the skip-bo card game we played at her dining table; homemade cookies, ice cream, homemade bread she’d bake with friends at this church; the ukulele in the corner, sofa bed in the back room, crossword puzzles in the drawer next to her favorite chair; her hook-over eyeglass sunshades, family photo albums and penny banks for her grandkids—how the banks lined the wooden ledge by her condo’s stairway to the basement…those penny banks, each different. mine is a red pig labeled hanky banky by his manufacturer.

grandma began dropping coins into that red pig 30 years ago. this month, i pulled out the plug, shook the money onto the carpet, and counted my riches: $16.80 in hanky banky change, plus 1 thai baht worth about 2 ½ cents. in recent years i’ve added a little, i think. but as i sorted out the specifics, occasionally lifting pennies to my nose for a closer sniff of dormant currency, i noticed the dates—as long back as the early sixties, minted not long before grandma and grandpa made the exotic tour of a lifetime.

with more thought, i can remember grandma’s voice on the telephone—for now. i think that before long, though, her voice will be gone from my mind.

somewhere in every conversation, grandma would ask:

“are you being good?”

knowing her’s and my definitions of good differed, i always spun the question, as my answer:

are you?
“well, sure.”

at the end of each conversation, when i would say, “goodbye,” she’d skip to the point, and hang up without a word. as predictable as that was, it still usually stunned me, making me want to call her back for proper closure.

as inevitable as is the reason we’re all here today, it too has still caught me off-guard a bit, the finality of it. i won’t ever ask grandma again if she’s being good. we all know i never needed to ask in the first place.

for the last time, i’m saying “goodbye,” knowing what her response will be, and still i’m not ready for it.

in the days after grandma died, i thought: she’ll never hold in her hands a book that i’ve written; she’ll never know who i become, though it will in part be based on who she’s been. i wish grandma could know—whatever things we all would want her to know. i wish i knew more about her than i do.

that is a too-sad reality for a grandson so sentimental and curious as i am.  the best i can know is: i tried, in my ways; and now must be content that buddha-temple-grandma is something, abstract though it may be.

it’s something personal, as i’ve realized all of this remembering should be.

...adamscottwilliams.com...