Remembering Grandma

This is the memoir story, submitted to the Arrowhead Regional Arts Board in January, 1997, that helped me to win an artist's grant.

Remembering Grandma

By Laura Erickson

My Grandma loved me, but she's dead.

She didn't used to be dead--for a while she was just sick. She told me she was too sick for even doctors to know what to do, so the hospital sent her home. Before that, the doctors tried to make her better by cutting off her breasts and lots of muscles. She couldn't lift her arms anymore. All I can remember her doing is lying in bed, propped up with pillows but still sunken in, as if she'd been stepped on by an evil giant. I'd climb the front porch, scraping my knees on the concrete steps, and run as quietly as I could through the living room into her bedroom. She usually had her eyes closed and I would stand on tiptoe to sneak a peek at her sleeping, but she always woke up. The moment she saw me her eyes got shiny bright.

My Grandma was the only person I ever knew whose eyes lighted up just to see me. And her name was Laura Farley, too, exactly like mine. Perhaps that's why my memories of her are so vivid, even though she died on January 21, 1953, when I was only fourteen months old. She couldn't hug me herself, or even roll over onto her side. I would climb into the bed and pick up her arms for her and put them around me. This was our secret ritual, and I was very, very careful not to hurt her. Her arms were heavy and limp, as if they had died already, but her hands were warm and alive, nourishing me with love. Our family learned after she died that her home care nurse had been stealing her morphine, leaving her nothing to cushion the pain. Nothing but me, and I didn't know what to do except pick up her arms and help her hug me.

We three children were too little to go to the funeral, so I made pictures in my mind of what it must have been like, mixing them up with holy card images of the Assumption of Mary. Angels with big feathered wings carried her up on a cottony cloud, her arms fully raised, those muscles the doctors had chopped off miraculously back in place. She nodded beatifically at everyone and then looked straight at me, smiling her real smile. A single tear ran down her cheek, and I knew she missed me as much as I missed her. And then she was gone. I never looked for my Grandma in the glittery, cold night sky--I searched for her in the sunny blue heaven filled with billowy clouds and birds with feathered wings.

After the funeral, while Daddy was still wearing his suit and tie, he packed away Grandma's pictures and told us that no one must ever talk about her again--it would make Grandpa too sad. Then Daddy started to cry. Mommy said, and I still remember her exact words, "Now you can't run crying to your mama anymore, you motherless bastard."

When Mommy was sad, she always said mean things. She was twenty-one years old, way too young to have three such naughty children, and even when I hated her I felt sorry for her, too, because her own father was really, really mean--a frightening, unshaven man with angry eyes who sat in his dark, smoky living room pouring brown liquid into his mouth, getting up only to walk heavily to the front porch to leak it out again in full view of his neighbors and us mortified children. He never zipped himself back up, and I spent most of our visits concentrating on not looking at his crotch. His wife, my other grandmother, seemed to concentrate on not looking at anything at all as she handed him his pipe tobacco and bottle after bottle.

Daddy was a twenty-three-year-old Chicago firefighter who drove a semi-tractor trailer truck for Marshall Field's on his days off and stopped in a tavern before he came home. He was a sleepy, affable beer drinker who held us high in the air and sang songs about Popeye the Sailor Man until Mommy's inevitable explosions sent him running back to the tavern. As we got older, Daddy came home later and later, and left earlier in the morning. Sometimes we children went a week or two without seeing him at all.

Jimmy was almost four, too big to take me seriously, and Patty was just a new baby, so there was no one to talk to about Grandma. I used my imagination. By the time I turned three and was a flower girl in my Aunt Pat's wedding, Grandma had turned into my bride paper doll--well, actually, the maid-of-honor. The real bride was blonde, but the maid-of-honor was much more beautiful, with brown hair like Grandma's. The lovely white bridal gown faced the wrong way and one of its arms stuck out funny if I put it on her, but she had some pretty dresses that did fit, and I never let the real bride wear the bride dress so she couldn't look more beautiful than Grandma. I took her everywhere, sandwiched between pieces of cardboard when I wasn't looking at her so she wouldn't get creased too bad, and slept with her under my pillow. I dreamed that she and I had a picnic among bright flowers at the cemetery, eating ice cream as birds sang in leafy trees under the shining sun. After the picnic, she went back into the clouds. Every morning, first thing I'd do when I woke up was open the cardboard to give her some air, and she always wore a big smile to see me. It wasn't the same smile, and her eyes weren't the same eyes, as my real Grandma's--she never even seemed to be quite looking at me--but she was all I had. Sometimes in bed at night I closed my eyes tight, trying to squeeze a picture of Grandma's face out of my memory, but it faded and faded, and eventually the paper doll was all I had left of her. Then she got bent and Mommy threw her in the garbage.

One summer, I think the summer before I started school, I found a dead robin on the gravel roadside in front of our house. I called Jimmy, who flipped it over with his shoe. The underside was covered with maggots and, showing off, he explained how they eat dead things. I started crying and Mommy came out. She was crabbier now, what with two more yelling babies underfoot and another under her belt who would die without even getting born, and she told me to stop bawling in the street. We showed her the dead bird, and she snatched it up with her bare fingers and threw it in the garbage. Now I dreamed of maggots writhing about, devouring angel wings and paper dolls. Once I mustered the courage to ask her whether they could eat dead people in their caskets. She said of course, that their bodies form right out of garbage and dead things.

That summer, one of my weekly jobs was to lug the empty garbage can back to the garage after the truck came, and, sure enough, there were always maggots squirming in the mucky bottom. As soon as Patty was big enough, I bribed her into taking that job. I noticed that Jimmy's bait bucket never had maggots even when there were dead worms in it and, reasoning that worms somehow protect their fallen comrades from them, I started keeping pet worms in a leaky plastic dishpan I found in the garage. I didn't want to kidnap happy worms from their safe underground homes, but figured those washed up on sidewalks after rainstorms must be sad and uncomfortable in the blinding sunlight, what with their fragile skin and tiny eyes. I'd pull my wagon around the block after every rain and bring them home. Some were in perfect health, some were starting to dry out, and some were hopelessly squished. Some squirmed even though they were partly smashed or broken, and those I carefully placed in my worm hospital bucket. I didn't know what else to do with them, but sometimes I found healthy ones in that bucket, so I knew at least some really did get better. Worms are hardly the ideal pets--they never smile at you, you can't look into their eyes unless you have a bigger imagination than I had, and they don't like being petted--but no matter what happens they never get angry or mean, and if you put them in a dishpan and take good care of them, they'll stay with you forever. I tried to be a person they could count on in return, and went out as early in the morning as possible after it rained so the sun wouldn't dry anybody out.

One day in fifth grade, Mr. Borkowski told us that the next week we'd be starting a new unit: "Dissection of the Earthworm." Mr. Borkowski was the tallest, handsomest man we fifth graders had ever seen, and the only male grammar school teacher we'd ever heard of. All the teachers at St. John Vianney School were safely predictable even at their sternest, and threats of a mythical "Paddle" were nothing to the stinging ferocity of my mother's pancake turner, but Mr. Borkowski, in his first year of teaching, (I vaguely remember that he was an aspiring actor) was uniquely warm and gentle. When he talked to us one-on-one, he got down on his knee to face us at eye level. All the girls, and probably most of the boys, were in love with him. I was enthralled by the idea of him teaching me what was inside these benevolent, dark creatures of the underworld who knew how to keep maggots at bay, and had visions of learning earthworm medicine and one day becoming an earthworm veterinarian.

He told us that we each had to bring in an earthworm for the dissection, alive in a paper cup, and he would put them in formaldehyde to keep their bodies fresh. I knew I couldn't bring in any of my worms, but hoped I could muster up enough scientific detachment to take one from the wild. I dug around in the back of the yard and found dozens, but every one I picked up wanted to stay alive, and I didn't feel nearly wise enough, or important enough, to single out one to die, even for Mr. Borkowski. So, one by one, I'd set them free and try again, but I couldn't find an earthworm anywhere that didn't need to be alive. I tried closing my eyes so I couldn't be absolutely positive, but just touching their cool, wiggly bodies I felt their life force and took pity. I finally poured out my dilemma to Mr. Borkowski, telling him I didn't know how to choose one earthworm who'd have to die just for me. He studied me thoughtfully for a moment and said, "You know what I'll do, Laura? I'll find you a worm that's already dead."

Professors in the College of Education at Michigan State University tried to teach me how to be a teacher, but I learned a lot more from Mr. Borkowski, though I don't think he was even licensed. He took us to the Goodman Theater in downtown Chicago to see Florence Henderson in The Sound of Music (and magically produced a free ticket so I could go), taught us silly plays and funny songs, tried to explain farting without using the word, and told us the truth about spontaneous generation. I believed pretty much every word he ever said, though after listening to Cindy Hartzell spin fantastic tales about sex and where babies come from, I still thought spontaneous generation was a more plausible explanation for the existence of us Farley children.

Memories are as fragile yet enduring as gossamer, but unlike a spider's weaving, they lack order and method. Snatches of images of two or three events get tangled into a jumbled cobweb, or a vividly remembered experience turns out to have happened in an impossible time or place. Like spider silk that comes in and out of view as we shift angles, some of my clearest, most treasured or most terrifying memories are invisible to my brothers and sisters, and they have memories I can't see from where I stand no matter how hard I search. Jimmy, two-and-a-half years older than I, can't remember Grandma at all. My aunts didn't believe I could, either--I was too little when she died--but knowing that no one had ever talked about her in my presence, they were astonished that I knew which room she died in.

My memories of Grandma are an unexpected and mysterious gift--strands of dew-covered lace glistening in a sunbeam piercing the dark forest of my mind. Sometimes I've wished I could sweep away my bad memories for good, but clearing out the decaying branches and broken twigs would destroy the delicate threads anchored to them. My memories invest maggots with darker but richer meaning for me than for other ornithologists, who consider them nothing more than fly larvae: repulsive but effective wound cleaners for wild birds and a minor protein source for some corvids, vultures, and even chickadees. I envy other ornithologists their reasoned acceptance of predation as a simple, basic element of regeneration and renewal in the natural world when I can't help but shudder to watch a peregrine falcon bolt in out of the blue to seize and devour a golden plover. Other scientists pull all-nighters to finish research papers with no more lasting effects than a sleepy, maybe cranky day to follow. Last time I struggled with a journal report at three in the morning, a dark memory from when I was sixteen reared up, unbidden, in the amber glow of the computer screen. My mother's icy talons, wielding a lighted Pall Mall, seared into my flesh all over again, plunging me into an ocean of sadness, and all I could do was flail helplessly, out of reach of those warm, alive hands I can only remember. This morning, while rushing home to finish work with a pressing deadline, my own hands bade me stop once again, as they always urge me to do after a rain, to pick up worms from the sidewalk and gently set them in the grass so they can stay alive. My Grandma loved me, but she's dead.

This page was designed by ME!! Not that it was all that hard, but I'm sort of proud of it because I'm technologically challenged. It only took a weekend, using software I found just lying around the house--well, on my computer--and it was lots of fun. After I designed it, one of my friends said she had to pay $300 to someone to design her business page. No way could I have afforded THAT! Let me know what you think! Send me an e-mail.

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