Seashells and Elephants

            A warning for the faint of heart: yet another long walk down memory lane follows.  Apparently I am currently living in the past, unless, of course, that is a complete oxymoron.

            My grandma had plenty of fire and vinegar in her.  She was known to send teenagers away with a bee in their ear on Halloween, berating them for taking the candy intended for children.  A boiled egg had to be peeled with a spoon, or you were doing it wrong.  A roast had to be cut a certain direction.  When my dad was five and faced bullying, she told him in no uncertain terms to fight back.  She was quite a tartar, really.  Particularly after having lived through WWII and the depression. 

            She was also practical and canny.  She even got the better of a slot machine.  When passing through Vegas with some friends after finishing nursing school, they walked through a casino.  She stuck a nickel in a machine just to be able to say she had done it.  “Sucker,” a man in her group taunted. 

            The machine spat out twenty dollars.

            “Now you need to put another nickel in,” the same man urged.

            She shrugged.  “I'm not that much of a sucker,” and she never gambled again.

            She had quite the sense of humor.  Like the time she told one of her nurses to “go take a long walk off a short pier,” and another nurse laughed hard.  She absolutely loved that laugh.  Her favorite stories were funny ones.  Talking about when she was a girl she said:

“I was in the kitchen making pancakes, and my uncle walked in just in time to see my throw one away.  He asked what was wrong with it, and I replied ‘I just didn’t like the shape of it.’  A few minutes later he came back in, and said ‘you know, I gave that pancake you threw away to the dog, and it just rolled over and died.’”

She told us about the time she came running into the house in a panic, yelling that the henhouse was on fire.  Her parents and uncle were ready to run out to meet the disaster when she suddenly located the source of the smell she had mistaken for a henhouse burning with all its contents.  It was her uncle’s cigar. 

Technology was never feared, but sometimes a source of mirth.  Such as the time my dad brought his laptop to her apartment to help her set something up online.  They finished what they were doing, and my dad logged off AOL.  “Goodbye,” said the computer voice.  My grandma burst out laughing, and laughed until she almost cried.  “There it was, not making any conversation, and all of a sudden it says ‘goodbye.’” 

Or when she was a child, and her father commented on what long legs she had.  Her retort was that at least she had come by them honestly.  Telling me the story her eyes still sparkled remembering how he had laughed.

When I was a child I would go stay at her apartment, and she would go through the contents of the precious china cabinet with me, telling me the stories behind each gold-filigreed plate and paper-thin teacup, almost no two alike.  But the most memorable things in her apartment were always the elephants and seashells, which were everywhere.  Seashells because they are beautiful things made by nature.  She had ones bigger than my head, small spiny ones, and two containers full of them just for her grandchildren to play with.

Why elephants?  Because once when she was young and in the hospital a visitor came by and asked what she liked.  Before she could reply, her mother said “elephants,” which was news to my grandmother.  But the woman gave her an elephant, and she collected them ever since.  Big smooth wooden ones that sat on a shelf, tiny pink quartz ones the size of a pinky finger that nestled in a tiny box, stuffed ones, and everything in between.  

Sometimes I would spend the night with her, which was mostly wonderful.  She believed a piece of chocolate before bed was as good as medicine.  We didn’t always talk a lot, but we got along splendidly.  It was only not wonderful once the light was out.  Her apartment was always warm, and I would sleep in her big queen bed with her, under her big fluffy down comforter.  Once in place, I was afraid to wiggle around too much for fear of waking her, but too warm to sleep.  So I was left to look at the looming shape of the indoor exercise bicycle, and try to reassure myself that it was still a bicycle, and hadn’t become a monster.  I never quite managed.  There was always too much of a sliver of doubt at the back of my mind that maybe tonight it really was the monster it looked like, and it really would eat us this time.

When I was twelve she got the flu.  Already in her eighties, this was no laughing matter.  My dad filled her apartment with humidifiers to help her breath.  When we went to visit, I refused to leave.  I didn’t want to leave her alone, with her breach wheezing in and out, and her face looking so odd and pale.  The second night of my stay she slipped out of bed, and was falling to the floor, her descent slowed by the clinging sheets.  I got underneath her and caught her, but I couldn’t get her back in, and was panicked.  It was the middle of the night, and she was muzzy and not quite aware of what was going on.  I called for help, and it came, and she was hoisted back into bed.

She recovered.  I was relieved she was well again, even though I hadn’t comprehended the danger she had been in. 

But she always took more care of us than we could give back to her as she got old.  She was a caretaker at heart.  When she was a nurse one of the young soldiers she was nursing regained consciousness, looked up at her, and immediately asked “will you marry me?”

Her reply?  “Lets talk about it when you feel better.”

Or when she was a young woman and nursing a Jewish girl, and urging her to eat.  The girl refused the pork chop on the menu, as not being Kosher.  My grandma asked her what she would like instead.

“Oh, a peanut butter and bacon sandwich.”

At finding my grandma surprised, the girl defended it as a favorite sandwich at her high school.  My grandma got her the sandwich, and never mentioned where bacon comes from.  We still eat peanut butter and bacon sandwiches to this day.  They are actually pretty good. 

When my dad was in high school he came home exhausted one day and flopped on the couch.  Feeling sorry for him, my grandma decided to go gather the eggs for him (his chore, and not a small one since they had hundreds of chickens).  When she got out of the henhouse the sight that met her eyes was my dad, running laps around the farm with his long leggy stride.

As a child, she would often climb a tree, but be unable to get down.  She would call her sister Beverly, and Beverly would lift her to the ground, scolding her for climbing up and getting stuck yet again.  But grandma never stopped climbing.  Not even when Beverly threatened not to help her down the next time.  Beverly was as good as her word, and my grandma eventually jumped painfully down.  But she still didn’t stop climbing. 

When I was between one and two, I tumbled down the stairs, and she reached out and caught me.  The whole episode was fortuitously caught on video.  She exclaimed “you fell right into grandma’s arms!”  I cried a little, stopped crying, and climbed up again, showing off the genes she gave me.