GRANDMA

My grandmother saved my life when I was a child. My parents were alcoholic and there was violence. The front room was forbidden territory, for Big People only, where voices started out happy and excited, and escalated to shouts and bumps and crashes in the night.

I remember when I was about four, standing outside my grandparents’ back door as dusk was falling, looking in at them sitting in the comfort and warmth and light within. I couldn’t open the door into that warmth and safety – it had to be opened to me, and I had to be invited in, out of the falling dark. I lioved in a different world, one I already knew had to be kept hidden, and I didn’t belong there either.

My Grandma’s house was so silent you could hear the metal clock ticking and tocking on the kitchen windowsill. A little yellow cottage on Christleton Avenue, surrounded by flowers and blooming bushes, it had a picket fence with a white trellis covered with pink roses arched over the gate. I would stand and swing back and forth on that gate, gazing out at a world stupefied with summertime heat. Bees scarcely had the energy to buzz; the only excitement was the tinkle of the ice cream truck coming down the street, followed by chattering children clutching shiny dimes.

I woke to the slap of the hose hitting the side of the house in the mornings, as Grandma wet everything down against the coming heat, then pulled the awnings down like sleepy eyelids over the front windows.

We could smell the freshness of the lake two blocks away, the scent of bulrushes and tall grasses in the fields behind Grandma’s house. Everywhere in Kelowna where there are condominiums today, there were orchards in those days. Almost every yard sprouted a profusion of flowers; the air was scented with lilac, sweet pea, snapdragon, peonies and pinks. It was a small town then, postcard pretty, sleepy and provincial in its ways. It was another era, the 50’s, and though my life with my parents felt like one long bad dream, life itself held an innocence and goodness as fresh as the special way the air smelled before the summer thunderstorms Grandma and I listened to in her back porch. The sky turned dark and the reverberations shook our little cottage, sounding as if the heavens were splitting in two. And then the sizzle of rain came, the fresh scent wafting through the screened-in porch where we sat for so many hours of my childhood.

My Grandma looked after me when I was a child, and when I got older I spent summers with her, and this is how she saved my life, by showing me existence could be other than it was in my house. She is the one who baked me cookies, told me stories, pointed out fairy folk dancing in the blue flames of her small gas fireplace. She took me to church and gave me standards to live by. Grandma developed conscience in me; I was more afraid of her than of God. She never raised her voice to me, but her quiet words of caution and her sorrowful disappointment when I behaved badly felt like hot lava pouring over my head.

“I have magic glasses,” she would tell me, “and I can see you even when you’re far away.” So I knew when I went back to Vancouver to my parents, she was still watching over me, which scared and reassured me at the same time.

When all her adult children were visiting in the front parlour, she would retreat to the back porch and I would join her there. I knew what was wrong. The tinkle of ice in tall tumblers of amber liquid was a sound we both hated.

My grandparents lived simply. My grandfather made a modest living selling herbal remedies in his little shop, Health Products, on Ellis Street. The shop had an exotic smell, from the shelf upon shelf of round cardboard tubs of herbs three decades before we began hearing about them in the media. Sometimes I was given the job of counting out the pills, filling the bottles and sticking the labels on.

My Grandpa was thin, silent and gruff, but he had a twinkle in his eyes and a soft heart for children. In years when men didn’t cry, as he got older, he would often be silently overcome with emotion; small things touched him deeply. “It’s the French in him,” the women of the family whispered to each other. The aunts and uncles adored Grandpa, and were in agreement that “Mother runs him ragged.” They thought it unfair that he had to go into the pantry to snort back  “a little nip”. He did it out of deference to Grandma, but they thought he should be able to sit in his own parlour and braveky down glasses of amber like they did. They encouraged him to, when they visited. But when company was not present, he’d retreat into the pantry for little sips she pretended not to notice. It was their arrangement. I remember wandering into the pantry and finding him there, bottle in hand, looking like a thief startled at his work. We both pretended the bottle was invisible.

An often-told tale was how Grandma gave away Grandpa’s best suit to a hobo during the Depression. They said the house must have had a mark on it, so many hobos came knocking. Grandma could never turn away anyone who was hungry, even though feeding her own five children in those years was a challenge. One man needed clothing and Grandma figured Grandpa didn’t need the suit, since he didn’t wear it very often. Turns out, it was his best suit, the only other suit he owned being the one he wore every day. Another time Grandma found a roll of bills in the dresser drawer and merrily spent it, thinking it was extra money. It was the rent money.

In her seventies, my mother would tell us about the time she trudged home in the cold of a Prairie winter, after a long day on her feet as a hairdresser, looking forward to the pork chop she knew was waiting for her at home. She remembered with some outrage coming in the door to find a hobo sitting at the table sopping up the last bite dripping with gravy of her pork chop.

Grandpa got his family through the Depression by doing accounting for folks in exchange for whatever they could give him: a sack of coal, a bag of flour, potatoes, trudging from house to house and business to business for the bits and pieces that would keep his family fed. Grandma washed the family laundry – dresses and pinafores and sheets for five children – by hand in the bathtub for years. Sje walked miles to the railroad tracks to buy bruised bananas to make dessert for her children. My mom often said her best Christmas was the year each child received one orange and a small toy car hand made by Grandpa, and how they played with the cars all Christmas Day.

Through my childhood, when I was in Vancouver with my parents, he would often enclose a small envelope in letters to my mother. In it would be a shiny dime for me. In those days, a dime would buy a popsicle, some penny candy and some Dubble Bubble, with a penny or two left over.

I lived with my grandparents during the final months of high school, and I remember Grandpa, who wore a suit and tie every day of his adult life, skinny and vulnerable in his longjohns, stealthily padding from the bathroom to his bedroom in the morning. He was so much the head of the house, so respected, that it felt strange to see him frail and powerless in his underwear. Our eyes would meet; he’d smile and shake his head, with his customary twinkle, and we would both studiously ignore his state of undress.

Grandpa obligingly went along most of the time with Grandma’s plans. Her children jokingly called her The Brigadier. She was generous in offering his assistance to her widowed or single women friends, if they needed to be driven or picked up somewhere. He silently chauffeured everyone on endless drives in the country on long dusty Sunday afternoons.

His one small rebellion was at mealtime. He never sat down at the table without “playing checkers” with the salt and pepper shakers and the condiments. He always moved them a few inches to the left orright. They were never just right where they were. If he was feeling extra put-upon, he would thump them down more loudly. Thump! Thump! Thump! And the salt and pepper would go three inches to the left and the sugar bowl two inches forward. Sometimes the women would try to set everything just exactly perfect, to see what he would do. And then fall into fits of giggles when he sat down, surveyed them, and moved one item one inch, just on general principles.

My Grandma was Irish and proud of it. Her favouite song was Galway Bay which she played over and over. When she got older and began to think of death, another favourite was Beyond the Reef. She told me many stories, of relatives who had had supernatural things happen to them, of ghosts and fairies, and a perfect little girl called Vivian, who had impeccable manners and was set as a model of deportment for we grandchildren. “Vivian would never do that!” she would say, with smug conviction. We all hated Vivian!

Grandma would have tea parties in the afternoons, with trays of dainties, and fancy flowered cups and saucers. Ladies wore housedresses and aprons to do their housework then. For tea parties, they took off their aprons, and donned nicer dresses, and often wore  impeccably white gloves to the wrist. And hats! Going to Church on Sunday was an occasion for finery, and on Easter Sunday everyone sported new spring dresses and hats and shiny black patent shoes.

Grandma tried to teach me manners. I remember her amusement when, at one afternoon tea, I got mixed up and responded to a question I hadn’t heard with a bemused, “Huh, Miss Hicks?” How she teased me on the way home! “HAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH, Miss Hicks?” she chortled, fairly chomping with amusement. (She and her friends called each other “Mrs. Marr” and “Mrs. Goodfriend” even after fifteen years of friendship. And when speaking of her spouse to her friends, she always referred to him as “Mr. Marr.”)

Grandma had a wild and zany sense of humour all of her descendants have inherited. She loved to play practical jokes, especially on her poor cat, a big fluffy Persian called Big Boy, who had a distinctive kink at the end of his tail.  He got the kink from getting his tail caught in the screen door, with some assistance from my Grandma. When he wanted to go out, he was a torturous mass of conflicted desire. Grandma would stand, arms akimbo, holding the door open invitingly. Big Boy would assess the situation: the open door, the inviting scent of the outdoors, the needs of his bladder. Finally, no options left, he’d streak for the open door. Grandma, timing honed to perfection, would let it slam in time to connect with his tail. An enraged howl, my Grandma’s cackle, then Grandma serenely returned to her housework, while the cat sulked under the house. Grandma kept him supremely confused because, most times, she would let him out without incident. But each time, looking through the door, you could see him calculating: would this be the time the door let fly? Eventually Big Boy would come back inside, till bladder needs put him in the same predicament again.

Grandma cleaned the house in the mornings. Sometimes while she was busy in the kitchen, I would be allowed to listen to radio programs, while I rocked back and forth in the rocking chair. This was very special, especially my favourite show, “Maggie Muggins”, which always ended with the line, “And we don’t know what will happen tomorrow!” which about summed up the story of my life (and the cat’s!)

In the long, silent afternoons, everything tidy, wash on the line and the sweet peas watered, Grandma rested, to the peaceful and comforting ticking of the clock. I remember her climbing into the bunk beside me, when I was little, settling me for my nap, her soft womanly grandmother’s body providing me a safety and comfort I never knew anywhere else. It was with my grandparents that I went for drives, had regular meals, went visiting, saw life as normal people lived it. Home was a battleground, strewn with corpses that got up the next morning to fight again, where I retreated into silence and watched, with frightened eyes.

I got to pay Grandma back for those early years when she was old and in a nursing home. I saw with her through many hours and paid her back with time and love for the time and love she so generously gave to me when I was small.

Her life as she had known it ended when my Grandpa died, but she lived fifteen more years without him. Her spirit utterly rejected the nursing home. “There are so many old people in here!” she, in her eighties, declared. She was unable to adjust to where life had landed her. Grandma felt trapped for too long in a life she no longer wanted.

She would walk down Ethel Street to my little cottage full of children, and sit out under the grape arbor and chat with me while I weeded the garden. Then I would walk her home, her cane tap tap tapping, tears rolling down her cheeks, back to her room at the Lloyd Jones.

“I’m still here,” she’d say disgustedly, when I popped my head through the door, the next day or the next.  “Just too damned healthy!”

But sometimes she would talk about the Old Days, the stories of her time, when life was vital and whole around her. One day she music on the record player, and started dancing lightly, a few steps, smiling, and I saw straight inside her, to the light, bright shining self inside the body that was failing; the self that she had been as a young girl so full of dreams was still there inside her.

Once she told me, “I wanted to raise you, especially after your father died, but your mom wouldn’t allow it. She thought people would think she was a bad mother if she let you go. But I wish I could have – you never had a chance.”

When she was moved to the extended care unit and could no longer leave her chair, she retreated increasingly into silent rekection of her outer world. Her friend was the talking clock she held in her hands and tapped every few minutes, to hear the mechanical voice tell her the time. On the hour, it crowed, a fact that at first we didn’t understand, so we were confused when she kept insisting “There’s a rooster in here.” This rooster was her constant companion, her final friend. Often in those last years, we would simply sit, after our initial conversation. I bicycled across town after work, before going home to the kids. I was tired, exhausted. But I could never set aside the thought, the many times I would have rather gone straight home, of her sitting in her chair, lonely and forlorn, her only bearable moments those when family members were present. I would wearily hop on my bike and pedal across town, our eyes would meet, we’d smile and then just sit, being together as the colours of the day faded away. One night we watched through the window as the sky turned purple and the sun went down behind the hills. Perhaps it is the last sunset she ever saw.

She didn’t want anything but to be gone from her body in those last years, but sometimes I would talk her into coming outside under the trees with me. I’d wheel her to where green branches arched overhead and we’d sit and listen, to the wind rustling through the branches, the birds chirping overhead.

It was under those trees that I told her I was moving away to the west coast, the move that had been my dream for twenty years. It was hard to tell her that her most frequent visitor and supporter was going away. I was full of inner tears, but also knew that I must go. I knew if I did not leave now, perhaps I never would. With characteristic generosity, Grandma gave me her blessing. “It’s your dream, and you have had a hard time. You deserve some happiness.”

We sat in silence some more. I watched her turning her ring around and around on her finger. Her engagement ring and wedding band were welded together, symbolizing the love she and my Grandpa had shared for the sixty odd years they were together. She was deep in thought, turning and turning the ring. The air grew electric and still.

Suddenly she pulled it off and handed it to me. I demurred, shook my head, but “No,” Grandma said, “I want to be sure that you have this. It has never been off my finger, but I want to be sure that it goes to you.”

I knew when I left that I would carry her with me, that she was so much a part of me that I could never really lose her. I went back for a visit later and found her much changed, not as aware of who I was or that I was there. She had retreated as far inside herself as possible, was more in the next world than this one. But when I spoke of the ocean and the eagles and the beauty of where I lived, she smiled.

I went back to help her make the transition from this world to the next, and spent a week at her bedside, listening to her laboured breathing, wetting her lips with moist Q-tops, when she lifted her hand and pointed at the glass of water with her long boney finger. In a moment when she was still aware, I leaned close beside her ear and told her “thanks for all the love” and watched a single tear slide down her cheek. I knew she wanted nothing more than to be released from her body and that hospital bed, to be with my grandfather, and her oldest son once more, so I supported her with love in her dying, as she had supported me with love in times when living had seemed too hard for me.

My mother broke down at the end of the funeral, when the strains of Galway Bay wafted through the church. And on the bus, heading home through the pass toward the beaches and wilderness I love, I was looking out the window, remembering that the real parting had been when I moved away, but how I knew then that I would carry Grandma with me inside my heart forever. She was a part of me like the air and the sky and the trees and the wind, and so we would never really be apart. Suddenly the strains of Galway Bay tinkled through my mind. I was not thinking of the music; it was playing, in my mind. Instantly, I thought “Hi, Grandma, I love you,” and the music drifted out the other side and away. And I knew that it was Grandma, passing through.