A tribute to my grandma . . .

I was asked to give a tribute to my grandma, recently, at an event where they were honoring several women, age 80 and older. Here is what I said:

My grandma became the grandma that she had always hoped for as a child. I realized this, while chatting with my grandma a few weeks ago. We were sitting in her living room, me sinking next to my sister in the comfy leather couch, my grandma perched in her usual chair, and my mom across the room in an armchair.

My grandma mentioned spending time with some of my cousins, and how they had told her that they had always called her the NICE grandma. She seemed a bit surprised by this, and, in her characteristic way, didn’t focus on it, instead moving on to a snippet of story about how, growing up, she had always wanted a grandma. She had always pictured a grandma as being grey-haired, a little plump, and nice. And when she got to high school, she had an English teacher that fit this description.

When I heard this story, two pieces of my grandma’s life snapped into place in my mind, making my sense of Grandma more complete. First of all, I saw this English teacher, who my grandma had always described as encouraging her to learn and love literature, as more than a teacher; I saw her as a grandma. And then I understood that my grandma had deliberately chosen to become the grandma she had always wanted in her own life.

It was a choice. A choice that influenced not only her five children’s lives, her 24 grandchildren’s lives, and her more than 44 great-grand children’s lives, but which also influenced those in her ward, in the places she worked, the hospitals she volunteered in, her friends at dialysis, and those who knew her as Mom H--, because she cooked the food in the RV kitchen for everyone (and “everyone” is no exaggeration) at the dog shows she and my aunt traveled to.

My Aunt J-- says that my grandma has all of the attributes of the ideal job candidate: she’s dependable, loyal, and dedicated. She’s one of those rare people that goes above and beyond, without drawing attention to the fact that she’s doing it. For the many years that my Grandma volunteered at L-- and A-- hospitals she earned award after award for volunteering the most hours. When they asked for 4 hours of service, my grandma gave at least 8.

I know that for years my grandma always signed up to make food for ward functions or to deliver to someone who had had a baby or wasn’t well. And, like in all aspects of my grandma’s life, she offered quiet service in her various church callings, including the nursery, where she worked alongside my grandpa, for so many years that when my grandparents were released, President K-- said that they had taught all of his children, up to that point.

My Aunt J-- is a lot like my grandma in that she can cook a mean meal, full of flavor that makes you wish she were your personal chef. Don’t try to make any of my grandma’s famous recipes like chicken and noodles from the recipe card itself. It won’t work. You have to watch my grandma add in the extra amounts of the best tasting stuff like butter and cheese.

When my sister, J--, had to write a college essay about her experience with learning, she wrote about Grandma. My grandma has always loved to read, and the rows of books that lined the built in bookshelves in the kitchen, showed us kids how important books were. Often we would walk across the street and borrow encyclopedias or books on Ancient Egypt to complete our elementary school reports. That was until we got our own encyclopedia set, which was never as exciting as borrowing from Grandma. And grandma shared with us whatever she was learning, too. Like the time she learned that it was important to hug people, so she started hugging us every time we left from a visit.

For me, my grandma is a woman of immense generosity. Generosity of goods and of spirit—those qualities to an eleven-year-old kid meant the world. When I needed someone to talk to, I would visit my grandma. I’d sit on one of the red bar stools at the kitchen counter, with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream in front of me. The ice cream was usually served in a heavy brown wide-rimmed mug, and the serving was always generous. My grandma would listen to me, without offering advice or trying to fix things. She’d just hear me, and talk to me. She’d let me be me.

My family sometimes jokes that it’s my sister’s 13 year old tiny toy poodle, Z--, that takes the most after my grandma—in that even though she’s lost most of her eye sight, she continues to live as someone who sees everything; in that she loves everybody, individually, and wants them to just be themselves; and in that she has this amazing zest for life, this joy for living, that makes her wear happy ladybug shoes and fun socks to her various doctor’s appointments, that makes her care about those around her, even through the pain, the dialysis, the days.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to understand how a person can be that strong. When life gets difficult, and I think that maybe I’m not going to make it this time, I think about my grandma.

She’s made it through over 91 years in a most beautiful way, and so maybe I can too.

Thoughts on snake grass . . .

Do they call it snake grass--those hollow, pull-apart reeds that you can section off, pinch the more rigid ends free and then flatten the softer ends to whistle through? The grasses used to grow along the ditch banks, and we would make whistles of different sizes and pitches, blowing them until they wore out or we did.

Now they grow in a small clump in my aunt's front yard, where she planted them. I picked a stem yesterday and made a sharp sounding whistle, which I blew until I reached the front door, only then reluctantly discarding my treasure to the earth.

Today, I found the rest of the grass stem--seven sections long of decreasing lengths and widths up to the minuscule tip. I separated off one of the sections, tore the thick end free, and compressed the other end in preparation for whistling. But the barrel collapsed into a flat green thing, having lost too much water to hold its walls rigid and make the sound I so wanted to hear.

Through their eyes . . .

We've finished the personal essay section of the creative writing course I am teaching and have plunged into plot and character and story, but I keep thinking I need to rewind. I need to tell my students to think about posting some of their shorter personal essays to their blogs--their essays being more carefully thought out and layered than blog entries usually have the luxury of being. Wouldn't it be great if some blog-hopper found a kernel of philosophical truth, related through specific details and story, and structured so that somewhere in the essay's ending the blog-hopper had a true aha! moment.

(This blog isn't going to be such a read. Sorry.)

In Shadowlands, one of C.S. Lewis's students tells his teacher that his father used to say, "We read to know that we are not alone." I think that's true. We read for connection and validation. But we also read because we want to be taken through the landscape of a different mind, we want to experience connections that we never would have made on our own, and we want moments of epiphany or utter delight that help us better understand the world we live in, the people we associate with (and maybe those we don't associate with), and even aspects of the universe.

I guess that's the real reason I want my students to post their essays to their blogs. I want others to see what they see, understand what they understand, feel, if only for a moment, what they have felt. We all have something to contribute to someone else's understanding of the universe. My students have each contributed to mine.

Lessons on Biscuit-Making . . .

I thought I had made the perfect biscuits. I had mixed all of the dry ingredients--flour, salt, and baking powder together--before adding the shortening and milk. And then, I blended it all, just enough, so that it held together. (You don't want to over-mix biscuit or pie dough, or it becomes tough.)

I announced that I had made the perfect biscuits. And I had, from my vantage point. (My biscuit dough was wrapped around little sausages; the dough puffed up just enough that the sausages appeared to be wearing pillow collared down coats. They were lovely. And the layers of the dough, created by the shortening, was lovely too.)

The only problem was that I rolled the dough out to the perfect thickness for my sausages in a blanket. And I used that same thickness to make my vegetarian brunch-mate ordinary biscuits, cut round with a silver one cup measuring cup. Her verdict? They couldn't be called the perfect biscuits, because they were too thin. The flakey layers, in my brunch-mate's biscuits were practically nonexistent, since there wasn't much distance between the crunchy bottom and top crusts.

Conclusion: Next time I make biscuits, I am going to roll them out to the approximate thickness that I want the final baked biscuits to be. Maybe then, I will find perfection. :-)

(I would like to try this recipe sometime. It's probably more buttery tasting than my family recipe, which I'll list below.)

_________________

Biscuits, from the Family's Favorites Recipe Book

2 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup shortening
3/4 cup milk

Bake at 450 degrees.

Since my sister, who put together the family favorites, never uses a timer for baking, there is no bake for ___ minutes line. I discovered, today, that you'll likely bake them for 12 - 14 minutes, or until the biscuits are a lovely, golden brown.

Sensical nosense starts here . . .

Meal sell, riddle hello.

Set hum test.

Ewe-barrow Q hill real letter.

________________________

Writing is metallic

readings are too

tin can be dented

text already has dings

who knew?

(this is not a poem--it's more of an obvious riddle (yes, that's a contradiction))

________________________

Megapixel-lexicon-nocturne (and this is where this word-train ends)

________________________

Faint Q tour seeding!

Could become . . .

When a person has a foot amputated, I've heard that the mind continues to think that the appendage is there. It's so used to what was that it keeps mistaking it as being there. Eventually, I suspect, like any loss, the mind slowly accepts that what once was is now gone. Although, I'm not sure, the mind ever heals completely.

I understand loss, a little.

What I don't understand, though, is absence (for lack of a better term): how is it that we can mourn for things we never had? Loss hurts because there was once a gain. But absence (absence that we're aware of and feel so palpably by some mysterious force) has no prerequisite, unless the missing of something one never had is inculcated in us by society, or, perhaps, there is force--call it desire, call it knowledge, call it perspective--that resides in us from a time long before we came to earth. Maybe absence is a form of loss, after all; a loss of climbing the peaks we knew we needed to climb, swimming the oceans we needed to swim, and becoming strong like we saw--if only in a vision viewed before mortality--we could become.

Sometimes . . .

. . . I want to teach my class whatever is left on the whiteboard from the class before us, even if I have no idea what the terms, diagrams, or scrawls means.

. . . I want to buy the items off a found grocery list (lost by someone else) and do something with those items.


Today . . .

. . . I found a list in the deli, and I actually picked it up. The list was on a heavy piece of rectangular paper, about 3 inches wide and 5 inches tall. It listed the following in block letters (with weird capitalization) in heavy black marker:

PARSlEY - frEsh
ICEberG - LettucE
MAJic SizinG - Light
CAlAmARi - Frozen
DOVE BARS - Choc

(Unfortunately, I can't reproduce the underlining here.)

Then on a Super-Sticky Post-it Note (the real expensive thing!) that was positioned perfectly on the paper so that it touched the bottom and side margins (by the way, this part was in cursive and in pencil):

Spray Sizing (light)
2 Large Dove Bars
IceBerg LETTuce

When I flipped the list-card over, there was a printed line drawing of an Old Spice cologne bottle. I figured this must be one of those papers you get when you're testing out scents. I sniffed the paper. It smelled like the sharpie, the marker used to write the first part of the list.


Observations: 1) the owner of this list likely bought something (something from the deli) not on his/her list; 2) Dove Bars, Iceberg Lettuce, and Spray Sizing were important enough to be written down more than once; 3) if I were to buy the items on this shopping list, I could have nicely pressed shirts, skirts, and handkerchiefs; I could give friends candy bars (I'm not too fond of plain chocolate; although Dove is pretty good) or make Texas Chocolate Chip Cookies (this looks similar to the recipe I have); I have no idea what I would do with the calamari; and lettuce and parsley are easy enough to find something to do with.