00:25 - Thursday, Dec. 12, 2002
Grandmotherly Scrawl
I go home to suburbia now and visit my grandmother in the nursing home that is tucked away near some condos I once got drunk in during high school. Her "house", as she likes to call it, is half a hospital room decorated with family pictures, some of the paintings she did just a year and a half or so ago, taped up pastel color-rubbed robins she drew looking out her window or from memory.

Hundreds of miles away right now I read her copies of May Sarton books and think about all her marginal notes -- doors to her past detailed in barely legible writing-- like the smell of fresh peanut butter the butcher has just placed in the bowl she brought to him from her mother, its top coated with a thick rich oil; or her thoughts on college for women, the drama and zen of solitiude.

My partner is at home and he's cooking from her hardened, peeling, distressed early edition Betty Crocker cookbook. From this she turned out thousands of cookies, a crab bisque, a midnight chocolate cake, a hundred 1960's toothpicked appetizers.

By the recipe for Lebkuchen are notes on death. Intellectual, critically minded ideas and explorations appear throughout these pages dated by pictures of Betty's Cool-Whip and Tang culinary-kitsch machinations.

Here, a thought on feminism. And here, notes on learning about her self through grieving for my grandfather who died after a prolonged battle with cancer. No recipe was safe from the pen of a wondering and wandering mind.

As I write this, I am walking to work, wondering what she thinks happened to all the scrawl of her rich inner-life?

Where are all her things? The china demitasse set? The boxes of Butterick dress patterns she never sewed? The sixty fabric roses she made to put in ceramic pots and sell someday somewhere? Yes, where are all her copies of the Lenoard Cohen books she would hide from her Republican friends when they came to visit because he was "too sexy" for them? The Maya Angelou? The Alice Walker I gave her and she cherished.

Where does she think it has all gone to? Many of these books covered in words like the comic strips she stuck to the refrigerator?

I guess I was the last to accept that something had happened to her. Everyone else seemed to be on the same page that she was slowing down, slipping here and there for a rest from reality, passing through her days just differently. How convenient for me to breeze into town, the lost friend she talked poetry, art, and politcs with.

Irene, who runs the Chinese restaurant around the corner from her house must have seen it happening. Must have been there in a way I could not.

It was probably the second hip that got me. After the first one broke, my fierce Southern grandmother sliding across the floor from her living room, down the hall, to her bedroom closet to change nightgowns before letting the paramedics and my now frantic mother in the door.

At that point, I would say she was old but awake, more perceptive than those around her gave her credit for. Convneient for me, the grandson she talked poetry, art, and politcs with, to breeze in and say she is fine. Yes, she drove the wrong way down one of our town's 4-lane Boulevards. --I drove head-on into one-way traffic just last week! And yes, she became a bit discombobulated when she untangled a story she was spinning or worked through the web of names of her grandchildren and their children. --I recently found my foot caught on a phrase and a punchline or two myself.

But the second hip got me. Crawled right out of bed with one hip already down and out and a multiply-blocked set of arteries to boot. She was ready to go, to get herself out the door, into her car, and back home where I know she would be writing and playing her organ and humming along to her records and tapes of PBS singer-songwriters and poets.

Those fucking arteries had made her life difficult for many years, caused pain and blackouts, forced her to take Nitroglycerine pills to blow through their stubborn solid walls. The doctors always said she was inoperable until it became necessary to replace her hips. They couldn't do it without clearing up her arteries. And she sailed through all the surgery physically, but it has been different ever since.

I'm not sure if this one event pushed her over some edge or what? Now I am in a state of "Is it the drugs?" "When will they wear off?" But it's been a year. Those damn arteries have been cleared for a year and I just don't see that she has gotten to enjoy it. It kept her alive, so that is wonderful, but I hoped she could have more time at home with all her wondrous notes and prose that filled evry corner and book and notepad. The phone book, the cookbooks. Nothing was safe from her pen and mind when they worked together.

I hope some part of her knows that we have her things. They are safe and being read and loved and attended to.

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