we lived happily forever
so the story goes
but somehow we missed out
on the pot of gold
but we'll try, best that we can
to carry on
My grandmother is dead.
When I was little, I thought that my grandma had the best life ever. She didn't have to work anymore, she didn't have to share her house with grandpa, she had a whole bunch of kids and grandkids and they always lived at her house and there was always awesome things to do, cause when you lived at her house you got to live with all of your cousins. The best times were when you got to live with all of your cousins without your parents or their parents, because they didn't live there. And everyone would sleep on the floor in sleeping bags, and you got to go hang out at the neighbors' if you were expecting a phone call. That was good, because they had He-Man and we weren't allowed to have Masters of the Universe, because the only Master of the Universe is God. It was fun to make up games, like dropoff, in which we would wait for it to get dark and line up (there were usually about ten of us) and walk around the house in a line. It was a sprawly house, and walking around it meant down two hills and up two more and through the breezeway where there was probably at least A snake. As we walked the last person in line would drop off and hide, followed by the next last, and so on until the lead person rounded the corner. He then (she, usually) had to go through the breezeway alone, in the dark, and begin a second loop of the house with the knowledge that somewhere in the dark were ten of his cousins waiting to spring/drop/pounce onto him and scare the shit out of him. Grandma would play with us, and she would be last in line but she would sneak off into the woods and then once everyone had been collected we would realize that Grandma wasn't with us, and then we'd stare at each other and then break for the door as fast as we could but it was always too late, Grandma was always either waiting to drop onto us from a tree or inside with the door locked telling us that she was making hot chocolate and she wished we'd just come inside already otherwise we'd get eaten by a bear. This was my favorite game. There were a lot of them, because it's hard to keep ten kids entertained on zero budget.
There were also really cool places to play, especially the Gully. At the NE edge of the usable property the land sloped off to what would become the side of the mountain. Right there, though, was a steep angled hill leading to a small ledge a quarter of the way down. People had been throwing their big trash there for a hundred years; not household trash, which was burned, but trash like cars and refrigerators and welding equipment and pets. You could spend days exploring down there and never get bored, but first you had to get down there and then you had to get back up. My brother has a scar on his knee the length of my hand from his downward climb once, when he laid his leg to the bone on a nail sticking out of a stump. I have a similar, smaller scar on the back of the same knee from the time we thought it would be a good idea to go down that hill in a toboggan. The grass was high and dry and slick as glass, and the toboggan was wood and we sailed through the barbed wire fence at the bottom at a speed of about, oh, gleeful panic. All of my broken bones (there were quite a few) were broken there and my grandfather blew himself up on the propane tank there and I learned to play pool in the rain under the carport, and I shingled my first roof there in the second grade. My cousin Donny went through the sliding glass door and almost died and I overheard that my cousin Rachel was not really my cousin but don't tell her dad, and Christmas in that living room revealed that with five brothers and sisters, eight cousins, a spouse, a parent, three children and nieces and nephews like the stars, not a single person had remembered to get my mother a Christmas present. She held ours while we opened more, and cleaned up during our wrapping paper fight. I rolled down the hill and broke my bones and fell off the sky and broke my bones and ran from the neighbor at the base of the hill while he went in to get his shotgun. Everyone lived there, and everyone came back there, and when I was a sophomore in high school it burned to nothing in the Evans Creek fire, which is unfair because the house was on Sardine Creek and didn't even get its own name. Me and my cousins drove up to get the animals and they had all run but the grey cat, and when we got back in the car the fire was so close you could smell your hair. Halfway down the hill the woods were on fire on both sides of us, and the cat got away because it was a Jeep. My cousin stopped the car to go after it and I had a years-long moment of wondering whether it was better to burn to death in the woods or to leave my cousin to burn to death alone, but he still hadn't actually left the car and ultimately thought better of it in the space of half a second. I had never been as sad as when I saw that house burning, and realized that a thing was gone that we could never get back, and that thing was not a house.
My grandmother did not, of course, have the most awesome life ever. She didn't have to work because she had been forced into early retirement after 26 years at 3M, and she didn't have to share a house with Grandpa because in the 25 years they were married he only came home to knock her up six times by the time she was 24 and then never came back except when he had nowhere to go. She had a village full of descendants and no way to feed them and not enough blankets and no toys, and after she scraped her way for fifteen years and bought that house all by herself on what she managed to save, it burned mercilessly without a thought for her or what she'd done to get where she was. Her husband, my grandfather who I love, lived in town with his other family and my grandma would see her in town, driving a car, while my grandma hauled five toddlers and an infant in one stroller. That town is Gold Hill, population 600, where I spent the majority of my years growing up, if you add things together. You cannot avoid people in that town no matter how you try. But I don't know who his other family is, and that's because my grandma never mentioned them, not once. It was not until I was in my thirties that my grandma started talking about her life, and that's only because I was living the same one.
Whenever I think things are rough, I realize that Grandma Bonnie has already done this. Cheating husband. Single mother. Dirt poor, with a son that I don't know what to do with. House full of lunatics sucking my time and resources, and no He-Man for miles. She told me once, when I did not know what I was going to do any more, that when she was almost thirty she told God she couldn't do it anymore. Six babies and the job and the firewood and the snakes and no heat, and going to church three times a week which was a four-mile walk WITH THE BABIES, and seeing the woman in the car and having the woman say how cute Bonnie was with all those babies, she just couldn't do it any more. And God told her (because God and my grandma are tight) that he understood, and that if she would pick two of the babies he'd take them back to ease her burden. She said she never complained after that and you know what, that is the Gospel right there. My grandmother never complained in my life. I never heard a word that was not sunshine come out of her mouth, and I never in my life heard a single other person mention anything similar. Even critique, if it came, was perfectly formed: Rachel honey, you're such a pretty girl! I think this blouse would look nice on you. You could even wear it right over that tube top and it would look really nice. And of course you wanted to look your best, and be your best, because to not would be to insult the work Grandma had put in getting us all here.
My grandma is dead now.
No one has worked harder than her to raise a family, and keep it together and keep it out of prison (well, you tried, Grandma) and encourage it to work and stay off welfare and not get the Ramseys pregnant and take in foster kids cause really, what's one more? and to save save save and be financially and morally responsible and to build up your reward in Heaven. And now she's dead and at first I thought what was all that for? My grandma worked her whole life and for what, so that we could work our whole lives so that we could watch our kids work their whole lives and on until the end of the world? And now she's dead and what are we going to do with her life? A life full of work, and the one vacation she took was to Israel to be baptized in the Jordan and walk in the footsteps of her Lord, and that will see her through her whole life, her WHOLE LIFE, and after that she'll spend the next twenty years being home when we show up, and leaving the porch light on, and answering the phone Why HOWDY, lady! every single time I call without fail, not even once in my life did she answer it differently. She had a ridiculous love of fancy knickknacks and tiny dogs and sample packets, of what it of course does not matter, teeny sample lipsticks from Avon and half-size crackers and perfume samples made out of alcohol wipes, travel shampoos and anything with a suction cup on the back. Glass bugs and Genuine Australian Crystal earrings and feather masks and portable stairs Just In Case, lawn tools and better chainsaws and rabbit hutches in case Rachel came back, hairpieces and lavender and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. And now that she's dead, I wondered what her life was for. What was Grandma's life for, God? All she wanted in the entire Universe was for her family to love God and follow his commands and to meet her in Heaven. Well I don't think that's going to happen, and that makes me angry. It makes me angry to think that my grandmother, the actual greatest woman that ever lived, will not get the one thing she ever wanted because we don't believe the same things that she believed. Because we CAN'T believe the same things she believed, because how could we? But I would, if I actually thought that there was a chance that that would happen. I would go back to church and I'd take my children with me, and I'd live that life and I'd accept whatever came my way from my friends and co-workers and from that boy that I still insist I am not in love with, if I thought that that would help. If that would help Grandma win. If I thought there was a chance that Grandma was right. And there is the conundrum, because Grandma has never been wrong.
My grandmother prayed for me every night of my life. I don't even know how many nights I've been alive, but she prayed for me every single one of them. She prayed that God would watch over me and keep me safe and help me to make good decisions during tough times, and that I would never be afraid to come home because of where I'd been or what I'd done because God didn't care and neither did she, and that God would keep my brain quiet and my heart still and that he'd help me find a good husband. Every single night. When she died I realized that no one is praying for me anymore, and whether I thought it did any good or not did not help when that realization came over me. I selfishly miss having that, that there is someone out there every...single...night that thinks of me before they go to sleep, and that was as enthusiastic on that last HOWDY as she was on the first. And I am one of 29 actual cousins and countless cousins that I did not realize were not really related, legal-like. How did she have time? I don't know, but in the Bible there is a story that is meant to relate to you that in a world filled with people, God cares about you alone. It says that God sees each sparrow that falls and aren't we more important than sparrows? How does God have time for everyone in the world? How does one woman have time for everyone in her family?
I know that I will probably always be upset that Grandma is dead. Every day that she's not not alive is a day that I'm upset, and a day that I wonder why she didn't get something more. Why she didn't win the lottery (of course she didn't gamble) and why she didn't end up with a good husband. But then I talked to my grandpa (who I love) the night before Grandma's funeral, and he said that with her gone, he had nothing left. I said You have six children, Old Man. And he said that his whole adult life, the only thing that motivated him to choose right over wrong was the hope that one day my grandma would forgive him and that even if she didn't take him back, she would recognize that he was A Good Man, and that would be worth his whole life.
The last time I saw her, in the hospital, she did not say HOWDY, lady! because that was for the phone. In fact she didn't say anything at first, because she was unconscious. But before we left she woke up and she said two things to me. She said she was glad I was losing weight because she knew it would make me happy, and she said that I was a good girl. And I know that the need to live up to that is what will keep me choosing right over wrong more than religion or the law or even self-preservation has, and even if I don't get to Heaven, maybe Grandma would accept that that might be worth a whole life as well.
but somehow we missed out
on the pot of gold
but we'll try, best that we can
to carry on
My grandmother is dead.
When I was little, I thought that my grandma had the best life ever. She didn't have to work anymore, she didn't have to share her house with grandpa, she had a whole bunch of kids and grandkids and they always lived at her house and there was always awesome things to do, cause when you lived at her house you got to live with all of your cousins. The best times were when you got to live with all of your cousins without your parents or their parents, because they didn't live there. And everyone would sleep on the floor in sleeping bags, and you got to go hang out at the neighbors' if you were expecting a phone call. That was good, because they had He-Man and we weren't allowed to have Masters of the Universe, because the only Master of the Universe is God. It was fun to make up games, like dropoff, in which we would wait for it to get dark and line up (there were usually about ten of us) and walk around the house in a line. It was a sprawly house, and walking around it meant down two hills and up two more and through the breezeway where there was probably at least A snake. As we walked the last person in line would drop off and hide, followed by the next last, and so on until the lead person rounded the corner. He then (she, usually) had to go through the breezeway alone, in the dark, and begin a second loop of the house with the knowledge that somewhere in the dark were ten of his cousins waiting to spring/drop/pounce onto him and scare the shit out of him. Grandma would play with us, and she would be last in line but she would sneak off into the woods and then once everyone had been collected we would realize that Grandma wasn't with us, and then we'd stare at each other and then break for the door as fast as we could but it was always too late, Grandma was always either waiting to drop onto us from a tree or inside with the door locked telling us that she was making hot chocolate and she wished we'd just come inside already otherwise we'd get eaten by a bear. This was my favorite game. There were a lot of them, because it's hard to keep ten kids entertained on zero budget.
There were also really cool places to play, especially the Gully. At the NE edge of the usable property the land sloped off to what would become the side of the mountain. Right there, though, was a steep angled hill leading to a small ledge a quarter of the way down. People had been throwing their big trash there for a hundred years; not household trash, which was burned, but trash like cars and refrigerators and welding equipment and pets. You could spend days exploring down there and never get bored, but first you had to get down there and then you had to get back up. My brother has a scar on his knee the length of my hand from his downward climb once, when he laid his leg to the bone on a nail sticking out of a stump. I have a similar, smaller scar on the back of the same knee from the time we thought it would be a good idea to go down that hill in a toboggan. The grass was high and dry and slick as glass, and the toboggan was wood and we sailed through the barbed wire fence at the bottom at a speed of about, oh, gleeful panic. All of my broken bones (there were quite a few) were broken there and my grandfather blew himself up on the propane tank there and I learned to play pool in the rain under the carport, and I shingled my first roof there in the second grade. My cousin Donny went through the sliding glass door and almost died and I overheard that my cousin Rachel was not really my cousin but don't tell her dad, and Christmas in that living room revealed that with five brothers and sisters, eight cousins, a spouse, a parent, three children and nieces and nephews like the stars, not a single person had remembered to get my mother a Christmas present. She held ours while we opened more, and cleaned up during our wrapping paper fight. I rolled down the hill and broke my bones and fell off the sky and broke my bones and ran from the neighbor at the base of the hill while he went in to get his shotgun. Everyone lived there, and everyone came back there, and when I was a sophomore in high school it burned to nothing in the Evans Creek fire, which is unfair because the house was on Sardine Creek and didn't even get its own name. Me and my cousins drove up to get the animals and they had all run but the grey cat, and when we got back in the car the fire was so close you could smell your hair. Halfway down the hill the woods were on fire on both sides of us, and the cat got away because it was a Jeep. My cousin stopped the car to go after it and I had a years-long moment of wondering whether it was better to burn to death in the woods or to leave my cousin to burn to death alone, but he still hadn't actually left the car and ultimately thought better of it in the space of half a second. I had never been as sad as when I saw that house burning, and realized that a thing was gone that we could never get back, and that thing was not a house.
My grandmother did not, of course, have the most awesome life ever. She didn't have to work because she had been forced into early retirement after 26 years at 3M, and she didn't have to share a house with Grandpa because in the 25 years they were married he only came home to knock her up six times by the time she was 24 and then never came back except when he had nowhere to go. She had a village full of descendants and no way to feed them and not enough blankets and no toys, and after she scraped her way for fifteen years and bought that house all by herself on what she managed to save, it burned mercilessly without a thought for her or what she'd done to get where she was. Her husband, my grandfather who I love, lived in town with his other family and my grandma would see her in town, driving a car, while my grandma hauled five toddlers and an infant in one stroller. That town is Gold Hill, population 600, where I spent the majority of my years growing up, if you add things together. You cannot avoid people in that town no matter how you try. But I don't know who his other family is, and that's because my grandma never mentioned them, not once. It was not until I was in my thirties that my grandma started talking about her life, and that's only because I was living the same one.
Whenever I think things are rough, I realize that Grandma Bonnie has already done this. Cheating husband. Single mother. Dirt poor, with a son that I don't know what to do with. House full of lunatics sucking my time and resources, and no He-Man for miles. She told me once, when I did not know what I was going to do any more, that when she was almost thirty she told God she couldn't do it anymore. Six babies and the job and the firewood and the snakes and no heat, and going to church three times a week which was a four-mile walk WITH THE BABIES, and seeing the woman in the car and having the woman say how cute Bonnie was with all those babies, she just couldn't do it any more. And God told her (because God and my grandma are tight) that he understood, and that if she would pick two of the babies he'd take them back to ease her burden. She said she never complained after that and you know what, that is the Gospel right there. My grandmother never complained in my life. I never heard a word that was not sunshine come out of her mouth, and I never in my life heard a single other person mention anything similar. Even critique, if it came, was perfectly formed: Rachel honey, you're such a pretty girl! I think this blouse would look nice on you. You could even wear it right over that tube top and it would look really nice. And of course you wanted to look your best, and be your best, because to not would be to insult the work Grandma had put in getting us all here.
My grandma is dead now.
No one has worked harder than her to raise a family, and keep it together and keep it out of prison (well, you tried, Grandma) and encourage it to work and stay off welfare and not get the Ramseys pregnant and take in foster kids cause really, what's one more? and to save save save and be financially and morally responsible and to build up your reward in Heaven. And now she's dead and at first I thought what was all that for? My grandma worked her whole life and for what, so that we could work our whole lives so that we could watch our kids work their whole lives and on until the end of the world? And now she's dead and what are we going to do with her life? A life full of work, and the one vacation she took was to Israel to be baptized in the Jordan and walk in the footsteps of her Lord, and that will see her through her whole life, her WHOLE LIFE, and after that she'll spend the next twenty years being home when we show up, and leaving the porch light on, and answering the phone Why HOWDY, lady! every single time I call without fail, not even once in my life did she answer it differently. She had a ridiculous love of fancy knickknacks and tiny dogs and sample packets, of what it of course does not matter, teeny sample lipsticks from Avon and half-size crackers and perfume samples made out of alcohol wipes, travel shampoos and anything with a suction cup on the back. Glass bugs and Genuine Australian Crystal earrings and feather masks and portable stairs Just In Case, lawn tools and better chainsaws and rabbit hutches in case Rachel came back, hairpieces and lavender and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. And now that she's dead, I wondered what her life was for. What was Grandma's life for, God? All she wanted in the entire Universe was for her family to love God and follow his commands and to meet her in Heaven. Well I don't think that's going to happen, and that makes me angry. It makes me angry to think that my grandmother, the actual greatest woman that ever lived, will not get the one thing she ever wanted because we don't believe the same things that she believed. Because we CAN'T believe the same things she believed, because how could we? But I would, if I actually thought that there was a chance that that would happen. I would go back to church and I'd take my children with me, and I'd live that life and I'd accept whatever came my way from my friends and co-workers and from that boy that I still insist I am not in love with, if I thought that that would help. If that would help Grandma win. If I thought there was a chance that Grandma was right. And there is the conundrum, because Grandma has never been wrong.
My grandmother prayed for me every night of my life. I don't even know how many nights I've been alive, but she prayed for me every single one of them. She prayed that God would watch over me and keep me safe and help me to make good decisions during tough times, and that I would never be afraid to come home because of where I'd been or what I'd done because God didn't care and neither did she, and that God would keep my brain quiet and my heart still and that he'd help me find a good husband. Every single night. When she died I realized that no one is praying for me anymore, and whether I thought it did any good or not did not help when that realization came over me. I selfishly miss having that, that there is someone out there every...single...night that thinks of me before they go to sleep, and that was as enthusiastic on that last HOWDY as she was on the first. And I am one of 29 actual cousins and countless cousins that I did not realize were not really related, legal-like. How did she have time? I don't know, but in the Bible there is a story that is meant to relate to you that in a world filled with people, God cares about you alone. It says that God sees each sparrow that falls and aren't we more important than sparrows? How does God have time for everyone in the world? How does one woman have time for everyone in her family?
I know that I will probably always be upset that Grandma is dead. Every day that she's not not alive is a day that I'm upset, and a day that I wonder why she didn't get something more. Why she didn't win the lottery (of course she didn't gamble) and why she didn't end up with a good husband. But then I talked to my grandpa (who I love) the night before Grandma's funeral, and he said that with her gone, he had nothing left. I said You have six children, Old Man. And he said that his whole adult life, the only thing that motivated him to choose right over wrong was the hope that one day my grandma would forgive him and that even if she didn't take him back, she would recognize that he was A Good Man, and that would be worth his whole life.
The last time I saw her, in the hospital, she did not say HOWDY, lady! because that was for the phone. In fact she didn't say anything at first, because she was unconscious. But before we left she woke up and she said two things to me. She said she was glad I was losing weight because she knew it would make me happy, and she said that I was a good girl. And I know that the need to live up to that is what will keep me choosing right over wrong more than religion or the law or even self-preservation has, and even if I don't get to Heaven, maybe Grandma would accept that that might be worth a whole life as well.
posted by machine central at 7:43 PM
4 Comments:
this is the most beautiful thing i have ever read. my life is lucky because you are in it and so grandma bonny. these are the inspirations that mean anything. thank you. mj.
1. Your Grandma would be pleased with the tribute. It's perfect.
2. It's so perfect that it says as much about how amazing you are as it says about how amazing she is.
3. We, the rest of the people who are still alive, might not pray for you in the way your Grandma did, but we want all the good things for you. We make those pleas in our own way, but we want them all the same.
4. Why do we insist on pretending we are not in that love thing? Especially when we are so no-nonsense about everything else?
This was so beautiful and you are beautiful and I cried.
You. Are amazing.
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