Monday, September 10, 2007

A Name for Grandmother

Finding a Name for Grandmother
Anne Knight Watson
September 12, 2007

Nina was two years old and she’d never called her grandmother anything. My mother came to visit often, even though she lived a couple of hundred miles away and taught school all during the week. She wore sensible shoes and socks that folded down neatly, beige slacks, a sweater over a neatly pressed blouse.
She lived alone after my daddy died and my sister ventured through high school and left. She always seemed purposive and content as a mother. But as a grandmother with Nina she was happier and more playful. I’d never seen my sedate teacher mother sitting on the floor, but she brought Nina toys to explore, and sat with her on the floor, laughing as Nina picked up a shape and popped it into the ball with matching holes. The rest of us would sit and watch the two of them. They played a game, “If I name the shape, can you find it?” And Nina learned to discriminate between a hexagon and pentagon, playing shapes on the floor with my mother, learning the beginnings of geometry.
And Mama’s house was different, too. Whenever we came to visit, there’d be a new book, or an art project, or a clever toy on the bookshelf in my brother’s old room, which was a way of saying, “I’ve been thinking about you. I was wondering what you’d enjoy doing.” Some of them toys unseen by us as children. Fingernail polish that might be spilled on the furniture. Right there for grandchildren with lots of time spent around the kitchen table with a laughing grandmother, painting nails and talking. And barrettes and ribbons for a little girl’s hair. Dressing up and being silly, walking all over town with hair festooned with ribbons that didn’t match anything.
When my mother was with Nina, her granddaughter always had her undivided attention. I watched how she did that, concentrating her attention. I wanted to be as good a mother as she had been to me and was to Nina. Nobody really had noticed that, for Nina, her grandmother was unnamed, just a loving presence. Nina didn’t need to call her anything because her grandmother was right there; they were just talking all the time.
But when baby Frances was born, Nina became unsettled and restless. She fussed about things that hadn’t mattered before. She stomped her foot and pouted and seemed at sixes and sevens a lot of the time. She followed me around and whenever there was half a chance, she asked to have a story read to her. She loved listening to stories, and I loved reading them to her. But it was hard with two centers to the universe now. When Frances went to sleep, Nina was waking up. I sometimes wondered, when do mothers of two even go to the grocery store?
Nina began her part of understanding how to deal with it all when I read her a new book about a little boy named Alan. He found himself becoming a knee baby when a new lap baby arrived. Alan followed his mother around as she changed his baby sister’s diaper or fed her or did one more one-minute thing for Little Bee. He kept asking his mother about his grandmother, “What is Mam-mommie doing?”
His mother would answer, “She’s doing her knee bends maybe,” or “She’s putting her smell-sweet behind her ears,” or “She’s giving Sweet Potatoes and Marshmallow a bowl of milk.”
Finally Alan’s mother got it. She could see why Alan was asking about his Mam-mommie. He needed a lap to sit in. When Alan’s Mam-mommie was visiting, there were laps enough to go around. So Alan’s mama took him in her lap and hugged him and they rocked and sang and rocked and sang and rocked and sang.
And when the story finished, Nina said, “I have a mam-mommie, too.”

9 comments:

Tara said...

I think this one would be a good choice to submit to Chicken Soup for the Soul or Cup of Comfort- very heartwarming :) -Tara Mande

Amy Hudock said...

As I said in our writing conference -- you have a great topic here! Looking forward to seeing what you do with it!

Village Writer said...

Thanks Tara. I'll look into both of those.

Tracey said...

Anne Knight,
Are you going to post your second piece? I'm anxious to read it!

MyDaisy said...

Your story is wonderful.I could feel the love for your children in your words. Daisy Parker

Village Writer said...

Review: An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
There may be somewhere, someone who is a better writer than Annie Dillard, but when I’m in the midst of reading something of hers, I can never think of who it might be. She makes me slow down and think about what being a person really is. And she dares to judge.
Telling about playing football with the boys in her Pittsburgh neighborhood: “Some boys taught me to play football. This was fine sport. You thought up a new strategy for every play and whispered it to the others. You went out for a pass, fooling everyone. Best, you got to throw yourself mightily at someone’s running legs. Either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat out on your chin, with your arms empty before you. It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees –if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly -- then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball. Your fate, and your team’s score, depended on your concentration and courage. Nothing girls did could compare with it.”
The shock of understanding something all of sudden is thrilling.
And when the driver of a black Buick, stopped his car, and chased them because he was angry they’d thrown snowballs at his car, he chased them across yards and through alleys and all over. She says: “if in that snowy backyard the driver of the black Buick had cut off our heads, Mikey’s and mine, I would have died happy, for nothing has required so much of me since as being chased all over Pittsburgh in the middle of winter--running terrified, exhausted—by this sainted, skinny, furious red-headed man who wished to have a word with us. I don’t know how he found his way back to his car.”
And at the country club: the country-club pool drew a society as complex and constraining, if not as entertaining, as any European capital’s drawing room did. You forgot an old woman’s name at some peril to your entire family.”
Another Annie adventure. If you run really fast and flap your arms, you might fly. That’s what birds do, isn’t it? But you look silly. You have to free yourself from feeling silly. Annie tells about a man who stared at her and jumped back against the building when she went soaring past, trying to take flight. But there was a lady in a linen suit who looked at her with a “warm, intelligent glance,” suggesting to Annie that the lady herself likely “took a few aerial turns around her apartment every night for the hell of it.” And then Annie’s comment, after rhapsodic descriptions of her flying: “I had not seen a great deal accomplished in the name of dignity, ever.”


Things I noticed about memoir that might be useful:
Just start a new chapter when you want to go to something else. It doesn’t have to be connected.
It’s better to be scathingly honest about yourself than about other people, though being merciless with your own foibles some of the time might buy you a bit of room to strike a few glancing blows around you.
Chapters can be pretty short.
So can sentences. “I walked. My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number. I walked and memorized the neighborhood.”
Remembering what it’s like for a child is the biggest clue: after Annie went walking, “What joy, what relief, eased me as I pushed open the heavy front door! – joy and relief because, from the very trackless waste, I had located home, family, and the dinner table once again.”
Something is important to write about not just because it is important to me, but because the observation has some intrinsic depth, has some depth that I can find as I write, even if I don’t know what it is when I start out. Trying to memorialize someone is probably a good thing only for funerals. That’s the only time other people want to hear what you think about someone. My list of what to write about needs to range more like Annie Dillard’s, all over the landscape of my childhood.

Village Writer said...

Finding a Name for Grandmother
Anne Knight Watson
September 20007

Nina was two years old and she’d never called her grandmother anything.
My mother came to visit often, even though she lived a couple of hundred miles away and taught high school all during the week. She had lived alone after my daddy died and my sister ventured through high school and left. She wore sensible shoes and socks that folded down in place, slacks, a sweater over a neatly pressed blouse. She went out to supper with her friend Camille and they took up tickets at the football games.
As a grandmother, though, she was more playful than she had been as a mother. Maybe I was just more observant. I’d never seen my sedate teacher mother sitting on the floor, but she brought Nina toys to explore, laughing as Nina picked up a shape and popped it into the ball with matching holes. One time, noticing that Nina always picked up the circle and the oval first, Mama asked her, “If I name the shape, can you find it?”
Nina was delighted. She had put the shapes in the ball over and over with me; this was a new game. “Oh, yes, I can find them.” And they both chuckled when, after hearing the name only once, Nina knew which was the hexagon and which was the pentagon, and all the other shapes to fit in the ball. She was playing Shapes on the Floor with my mother, learning the beginnings of geometry. And whenever they finished a game, Nina sat in my mother’s lap in the old rocking chair in the kitchen and read a book. Mama always had time for a book and a good time rocking.
And Mama’s house was different, too, when we went to visit. A new book, or an art project, or a clever toy would be on the bookshelf in my brother’s old room, which was her way of saying, “I’ve been thinking about you. I was wondering what you’d enjoy doing.” Sometimes it would be a game we’d played as children, and sometimes it would be toys new to our experience.
One time, Nina found fingernail polish on the shelf. I’d always known that fingernail polish got spilled on the furniture, and besides, WE don’t use fingernail polish, other people do. But now, for Nina, polishing nails sitting around the kitchen table was great fun, a chance for laughing and talking. And another time, Nina found barrettes and ribbons for a little girl’s hair. Dressing up and being silly, walking all over town with hair festooned with ribbons that didn’t match anything, Nina happily played with my mother. “If my grand-baby wants to put all those ribbons in her hair at one time, she can do exactly that,” Mama said.
When my mother was with Nina, her granddaughter always had her undivided attention. I watched how she did that, concentrating her attention. I wanted to be as good a mother as she had been to me and was to Nina. Nobody really had noticed that, for Nina, her grandmother was unnamed, just a loving presence. Nina didn’t need to call her anything because her grandmother was right there; they were just talking all the time.
Once, years later, when there were two of them and we were spending Christmas with their grandmother, Nina and her sister were uneasy about going to the church Christmas Eve service, “Nobody’ll know us,” Nina told her grandmother. “We’re strangers here.” My mama just smiled knowingly and sure enough, when we got there, and Santa came into to the room with a present for every child, there was a present for a certain Nina and for Frances. She made sure they were included. They felt like princesses in a strange land.
But when baby Frances had been first born, Nina became unsettled and restless. One day after she had fussed about things that hadn’t mattered before, Nina stomped her foot and pouted and seemed at sixes and sevens over what we were having for lunch. “I don’t want to eat hot dogs anymore. I want fried chicken.”
She followed me around and whenever there was half a chance, she asked to have a story read to her. She loved listening to stories, and I loved reading them to her. We always sat in the rocking chair that her daddy and I had bought at a farm auction in Iowa, when we were finishing graduate school and starting our family. We knew we wanted a rocking chair for the nursery. And we wanted lots of books to choose from.
But it was hard with two centers to the universe now. When Frances went to sleep, Nina was waking up. I sometimes wondered, when do mothers of two even go to the grocery store?
One day I read Nina a new book about a little boy named Alan. He found himself becoming a knee baby when a new lap baby arrived. Alan followed his mother around as she changed his baby sister’s diaper or fed her or did one more one-minute thing for Little Bee. He kept asking his mother about his grandmother, “What is Mam-mommie doing?”
His mother would answer, “She’s doing her knee bends maybe,” or “She’s putting her smell-sweet behind her ears,” or “She’s giving Sweet Potatoes and Marshmallow a bowl of milk.”
Finally Alan’s mother understood. She could see why Alan was asking about his Mam-mommie. He needed a lap to sit in. When Alan’s Mam-mommie was visiting, there were laps enough to go around. So Alan’s mama took him in her lap and hugged him and they rocked and sang and rocked and sang and rocked and sang.
And when the story finished, Nina said, “I have a mam-mommie, too.”

Village Writer said...

Fixing Breakfast
Anne Knight Watson
October 10, 2007
My mama was not a morning person, which is not good for a high school math teacher. She had to make herself get out of bed every morning of the school year. I know that not because she whined and complained, but because she told me that a couple of times. And because when my sister wanted to sleep late too, Mama would go into her bedroom, reach under the covers, and pull her legs out from under that warmth and let her feet fall gently to the floor. Then, talking quietly to my sister, Mama would help her stand up and get her walking toward the bathroom. Mama understood someone longing for a long morning sleep, but she also quietly meant for all three of us children and herself to make our way across the street and down the one block to the school we all attended and we were on time.
I’ve known my mama to sleep until noon on a Saturday filled with shouting about who’d finished cleaning their room, and who had a quarter to go to the picture show after lunch, and whose turn it was to practice the piano in the room right next to Mama and Daddy’s bedroom. She did love to sleep late.
So, the summer I was home from my second year in college and got a job in the mill, we were both sad to learn that they’d changed the 8:00-4:00-12:00 shift change times we’d always known about to an hour earlier. I would have to eat breakfast by 6:30 to be there by 7:00.
Every morning of that summer I awoke to the smell of bacon frying. It hadn’t occurred to us yet that cereal is actually a healthier breakfast. We still got raw whole milk with four inches of cream on top out of glass milk bottles that Mr. Owens delivered to our door every morning. We worried about people who didn’t have bacon and eggs and toast and grits for breakfast.
Mama never said whether she went back to bed after I left to go inspect stadium blankets in the mill, and she never complained or told me how grateful I should be that she was fixing breakfast for me, or how summer was her only time to sleep late. I knew all that, and even as a teenager, I accepted it as a sacred gift that she got up and fixed my breakfast. I don’t think I ever thanked her, either, because that would have diminished her gesture. But I learned a lot about quiet love that summer.

Village Writer said...

Lost in the Marsh
Anne Knight Watson
November 7, 2007

Not much rattled my mama, but sometimes we came close.
The first time Sam took her out for a ride in his newly purchased boat was one. My careful husband always bought used stuff but this was a good boat and he was eager to show my seventy-year-old Mama around the creek he’d been exploring that afternoon. He’d checked the homemade stainless steel gas tank to see if there was enough fuel, and it seemed to be half full. They left in late afternoon for a sunset ride and since we were all were new to the village, they didn’t tell anyone where they were headed. The rest of the family had returned to North Carolina, but Sam had another day of holiday left.
He and Mama had a pleasant trip out to the last island at the far edge of the marsh, even seeing a couple of dolphin lazily ambling along the edge of the creek bank. But when they turned to make the seven mile trip back to the village, the motor started coughing and Sam slowly realized that they were almost completely out of gas. In addition, the tide had come to full flood and all the landmarks looked different from his first trip. No others boats were out that late. They missed a turn in the creeks and dusk caught them wandering up one creek after another. Sam finally brought the boat to rest, lost in the winding maze of creeks, stopping and starting as he cajoled the last dregs of gas from the tank.
He stepped off the bow of the boat to pull it firmly into what he thought was grass growing on the shore. It was marsh grass, however, with just the tops showing above eight feet of water. He never touched bottom, and Mama thought for a moment that she was alone in the boat. He struggled back into the boat and, soaking wet with no blankets or towels, tried to fall asleep, grateful for enough breeze to keep the insects at bay.
They slept fitfully, each hearing the other snore, their only evidence of sleep. Each thought they’d lain there awake all night, listening to all the night sounds magnified by the fix they were in. The next day, when I talked to Mama on the phone, I said, “Mama, I’ve just got one question.”
“Over the side,” she answered.
Morning found them stuck on the mud bank. They watched as the tide slowly returned, making the slurping sounds filling holes and swirling eddies that had sounded so ominous in the dark of night. They could see the tops of boats going up and down the inland waterway, but they couldn’t make anyone hear them.
Finally, when no solutions were developing, Mama told Sam, “Now, Sam, I don’t want to spend a second night out here.” It was the closest she came to complaining on the whole adventure. They could see an oyster boat approaching them and Sam drug his boat over the shallow stretch of water, scraping his legs on the oysters in the mud, and they called to the oysterman to rescue them. His name, they learned, was Moses, and Moses pulled them from the marsh grass back to the village.