Granny

Granny

My grandmother was a maid for a while - a maid-nanny. In New York City, for a Jewish family. She never really encountered difference, springing from her slave-holding, Southern Methodist culture in central Texas. To add to things, she was from a sundowner town where all people who weren't or didn't pass as white were chased out of town with metal chains and horses. Even Granny, segregationism pounded into her by her abusive father, would open her eyes wide when she told me about that Coleman in hushed tones. Granny was good, and had struggled for that goodness in the face of evil.

I imagine Coleman to be like the little town in Huck Finn, where the miscreants are literally tarred and feathered before being run out of that small-minded piece of civilization. I used to feel romantic about Coleman and The South, and how couldn’t I? Granny was born there, and my Grandpa came from somewhere not too far away from her, also in Texas. I could taste the gentility of Southern Culture in them, even though they were born miles away from the old Planters’ homes. Gentility is like the star jasmine flowers that I grew up smelling outside of my dad’s apartment in Stockton - sweet on its own, but sickly-sweet when it’s planted to cover the stench of sewage, of violence, below the pavement or the sidewalk. Granny and Grandpa had that Southern gentility, and gentleness, when I knew them. Did they soften and turn sweet in the face of violence? Or did they, like all of us, take what they could from their culture, their religion, that was good and discard the rest?

Granny spent exactly one year in the Big Apple. That was enough for her. In her time there, she stared down a gang of rapists and threatened them so bad with prison that they didn't take away the choice that she fought so hard to preserve. Thanks be to God, the Methodists and their ilk would clap with their tongues - cue Sunday morning church and dust suspended in sunlight.

Granny ran and ran, like Hedwig - both the owl and the restless songwriter in John Cameron Mitchell's movie. When describing that film - and I do often - I segregate the plot from the story. The plot is complex, about an erstwhile East German slip of a girly boy (Hedwig's words) who married a cabronish GI and got stranded in the bland military outpost of Junction City, Kansas. Then she fell in love with an underage Evangelical musician, eventually dubbing him Tommy Gnosis.

Tommy was doe-eyed and dopey; obsessed with Jesus and the Fall. His take was rebellious, and Hedwig's hands, wet with clay and bathwater, sculpted Tommy into a kind of Nine-Inch-Nails lookalike with heartbreaker tendencies. Her creature became a heartthrob and took the credit for all of the songs that she wrote. Ouch.

Hedwig finally catches up with Tommy when she’s down on her luck, trying to turn tricks in a seedy corner of New York City. They drink, they drive a limo, they wreck it, Hedwig rises to fame and crashes hard from it, and then meets Tommy at his last-ever concert. There, dreamlike, Tommy finally acknowledges Hedwig’s pain - and her resilience. She’s able to sing a new song, to quote U2 who themselves were quoting Psalm 21. Tommy’s song goes, “When everything starts breaking down / you pick the pieces off the ground / and show this wicked town something beautiful and new.”

Hedwig’s ending is something I don’t want to spoil for you, but it’s worthy of its circuitous plot. In the end, Hedwig is whole, which means that we are, too. And that we have been all along.

Granny, like Hedwig, never settled down until she landed in Stockton. She was married by now, also to a GI, like Hedwig; she had tenuous ties to an uncle twice-removed who lived in the better part of town, the part with parks and brick-built schoolyards. She and Grandpa hunkered down on the South side of Eighth street, and Granny became settled. There, where gauzy strips of redwood are embedded in the dirt, the old carriageways that I always imagined lining Eighth Street. There was an article about the sidewalkless ways south of Charter Way / MLK Avenue: the city’s message seemed to be that we had far more pressing issues to paint into color than building sidewalks for South-Side families. I didn’t live there, so the sidwalkless ways and the redwood strips took hold of my imagination. If I lived there, I might clap my hands, silently cursing the city and its loose-ended history as I dodged swerving cars between the gravel and the wire fences.

In South Stockton, and in its strips of history embedded in the carriageways, Granny’s mind wandered like Hedwig’s. She was a student of culture, which is where my own globetrotting fantasies come from. More about them later. Granny went to Delta College in her 50's - like the 1970's - after her last bickerment with Grandpa. He moved into a sunny loft-style house just behind Oak Park and stayed there til my aunt Betty moved in to take care of him a few months before he died. I imagine Grandpa like a barn owl, perched high above the scurrying things of the earth, yearning to fly high like the eagles, so high that he could almost touch God for a second. That was his great yearning.

So, Granny took her avocado-green Datsun(?) past Charter Way up to Delta in the 1970’s. She studied history, anthropology, sociology and multiple Associate of Arts degrees. Her finest achievement was writing several papers about the Miwuk and the Yokuts, who are the indigenous peoples who live here now and who populated the Stockton area before the bear-slaughtering white settlers and the indigenous-people enslaving Spaniards. Somehow I didn’t learn too much about the reality of those groups until well after I graduated from high school. Granny’s connection to indigenous folks was from an old Texas / Oklahoma story: her name was said to have derived from a Cherokee girl’s name. The research that I’ve done on the name Era, though, doesn’t bear this out. Still, a connection is a connection, and she had a lifelong fascination if dated, with the people who were here before the Europeans / white folks. She even pronounced my cousin Vanessa to “look just like an Indian papoose!” when my aunt Betty brought Vanessa, a newborn, to her a few weeks after she had been born.

I know how memory, and interest, stray during life. Sometimes the things that you’re engrossed in during college are like fond memories after you’ve embarked on your life after you’ve graduated, clutching your cap and certificate of completion. That was true for Granny, as well. Twenty years after her Delta excursions, she didn’t say much about her studies of Miwuk and Yokuts cultures. Tragically, her papers were stolen in a break-in of the house on Eighth Street that she never recovered from. Family photos, historical artifacts from her Southwest travels, and her beloved Anthropology papers all disappeared like smoke from a cauldron in an evil spell one night. After the break-in, she’d occasionally bemoan the things that she lost, but she never spoke in detail about her studies of indigenous Americans, even though she speculated that her professor had stolen her work and used it in a book.

Decades later, I would at last earn my degree: a Bachelor’s in Anthropology from Stanislaus State. I took exactly two classes about Indigenous American folks, and for some reason, I never thought much about Granny’s and my affinity for exploring cultures, just landscapes. Now I see how much we are alike.

Grandpa once bought my mom a dutch oven. In its heaping box, wrapped carefully, bottom and all, I thought it was a late birthday present for me. His face was ashen, and he interrupted the silence in a good Texas drawl. “This one’s for your mom, youngin’, but I’ll see what I can do for you.” A week later, Grandpa appeared at mom’s door again, asking me to help him take something out of the trunk. It was my dutch oven. Not wrapped, but still beautiful in its 20-pound glory. He beamed a bit more when he gave Mom hers.

Like I said earlier, Grandma and Grandpa fought. They also divided boys between them. My aunt Betty was left alone in the deal. She remembered that, like you do, when she moved in to take care of Grandpa. “Junk,” she said. “So much Junk!” Among it, an old gramophone that he played 40's swing dance on. So much dance, I’d counter in my head.

Grandpa had a Bible that Betty still has. Notes spilling from the silver-rimmed tips onto the margins, snippets of hymns, everything that he held dear, centered mainly on Jesus. I remember Grandpa’s warbling voice, singing the deep-South church songs to me while I crunched on butter made into a batter with tiny crystals of table sugar. His blue Formica tabletop was reminiscent of a 1950’s diner, and his hair was always slicked to the side like a gentle/genteel greaser. Like Brandon Flowers - or Bruce Springsteen - in The Killers’ A Dustland Fairytale video.

Whenever I came Grandpa’s to spend the night, I’d want to cuddle with him up in his sunny loft and gradually fall asleep while gazing sleepily at the curvy branches of his old oak tree in the back yard. His loft was so high - so high to a kid like me, grounded in a single-story Ranch house and an ordinary two-story l apartment at Dad’s - that looking out his bedroom window I felt like I could jump out and sail like a particle of dust down onto his Doberman, Lady’s, handmade doghouse - which was 20 feet away from the tree.

But he’d say it. He had to say it. So, gently as he could, he’d tell me that I was a little girl and, besides, that older people couldn’t fall asleep with younger people. It just was, even though we both knew that he was incapable of hurting me in that way.

In the mornings at Grandpa’s house, I’d rush up the stairs to cuddle with him anyway. Or sometimes he’d already be up, brewing his percolator coffee and slapping thick ham slices on his griddle. They’d sizzle and burn black, and we’d eat their crunchy slivers, salt mingling with fat and cast iron to luscious delight. He had what felt like Formica plates, too, although they were probably just Melmac. Those were brown and green and cream-colored with flowers on them. Grandpa would make a spread and pile vegetables and homemade ranch dip on them during the afternoon. He’d wash up the Melmac from the morning in a tiny kitchen sink, setting them aside for a later meal.

Granny, I went with her to an appointment as she was getting older. I stayed the night before to take care that she made it, her old toilet was acting up again as always. I remember the cardboard look of the walls in her hallway and her small windowless bedroom. It had lost its awe. At night, I stood there, and she teasingly asked me to sleep with her. “Where else are you gonna sleep, girl???” “On the couch,” I said. I said no again, and then desperation pierced her face. I could tell how lonely she was, how she had been looking forward to sleeping beside someone after so many years alone. I changed my words.

Granny and I bundled that night, sleeping side-by-side in her little full-sized bed, chatting about this and that. At one point, our conversation shifted to the Culture Wars and, like a 20-year-old, I interjected her lecture by defending evolution. She was aghast. “Are you a …. Communist?” Her Little Bit - my pet name - had grown in that moment for her. Had I lost my way? I said I wasn’t one, and we drifted to a more comfy topic. For her part, there was oatmeal with butter, brown sugar, and plump raisins waiting on the kitchen table for me in the morning.

A few years later, Granny developed dementia. My Aunt Betty, not knowing then what she’d get into as the family’s first caregiver, moved her up to Redding. The cousins and I and my brother came down to the eighth-street house to clean it out for selling.

There was so much stuff in her house, like her curio cabinet, displaying unopened toys, frozen in time. As children, we were never allowed to touch those dollies and Ninja Turtle villains. My cousin Rachel and I avoided the task of dismantling her cabinet, holding onto that last thread of childhood awe for her while we could. The “adults” of our moving party - Dad and Aunt Betty - took care of that task. Later they’d learn that her house, and her treasures inside it, was in fact quite ordinary. The antiques amounted to less than $20,000. Betty found a buyer for most of them, including the 1940’s-style stove that always beguiled me, her forties-style jewelry (mainly plastic beads and tin-spoon silver). The housing bubble of the late 2000’s inflated her house's price and afforded Betty a nice truck soon after and my dad a house of his own, several years later. A blue house that he’d visit me from in a dream after he died, talking, walking, and gesturing along a levee until he said that I couldn’t come with him anymore because I couldn’t go barefoot.

We kept her letters. I found them first, in her narrow, dark bedroom closet. Were they on the top shelf above her clothing? I think so, because that’s where everyone stores their treasures. Granny’s handwriting was small and a little cramped, her blotted pencil fitting as much as she could on each sheet of precious paper.

I kept one of her letters. In that one, she admonished Aunt Betty to turn to God and pray to Him for help when she needed it. Betty had run away to San Francisco by that time. Later, she’d tell me that she had been in the Anti crowd in the City and, later, in Davis. She and her friends were rudimentarily dismantling all oppressions - Western colonialism, American arrogance, and soul-piercing religion. They didn’t quite know what to mouth after their tirades, and, perhaps given totalitarianism’s enthusiasm in jumping into alternate histories, I think that was probably good. Her friends weren’t fascists, by any means. Intellectuals, readers of Proust, artists who doubled as Baby Boomers is more like it.

Granny’s letter to Betty repeated the Jesus formula to her - the prayer that makes you Saved, in her and my corner of the Christian world. Even though 20-year-olds are mostly self-absorbed and I was no exception, I could tell Aunt Betty was struggling in a letter that had asked for Granny’s response.

I still have two music boxes, one that plays Somewhere Over the Rainbow. In days past, there was a plastic bluebird that circuited a track on the mirror that served as that music box’s focal point. It took strange little tracks, here and there and hairpin turns that I’ve never seen a bird in real life take. Circle around the mirror, circle around its little dark mirror.

The other music box was a pounded copper-brass piano, with a player perched on a metal bench, that spun The Entertainer as its tune.

I remember crying a lot that day; feeling as though Granny was already gone, memories being taken away right in front of me and with my own hands. And we were saying goodbye in a way - to the days of struggle for her, to her autonomy, to her infectious cackle that forever drew a grin out of me. She was sad and had hard times, and now it was time for someone to take care of her. My stalwart Granny, the one who cut her giant yard with a butcher knife, was preparing to come

home. This time, a truck took her there instead of her knobby worn feet.