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Grandma 外婆
The role of a grandmother has never been really defined. Some sit in rockers, some sky dive3, some have careers. Others clean ovens. Some have white hair. Others wear wigs. Some see their grandchildren once a day (and it's not enough). Others, once a year (and that's too much). Once I conducted an interesting survey among a group of eight-year-olds on grandmas. I asked them three questions. One, what is a grandmother? Two, what does she do? And three, what is the difference between a grandmother and a mother? To the first question, the answers were rather
predictable. "She's old (about eighty), helps around the house,
is nice and kind, and is Mother's mother or Father's mother, depending
on the one who is around the most4." It was the third question that stimulated the most reaction from them. Here is their composite of the differences between a mother and a grandmother. "Grandma has gray hair, lives alone, takes me to places and lets me go into her attic. She can't swim. Grandma doesn't spank6 you and stops Mother when she does. Mothers scold better and more. Mothers are married. Grandmas aren't. "Grandma goes to work and my mother doesn't do anything. Mom gives me shots7, but Grandma gives me frogs. Grandma lives faraway. A mother you're born from. A grandmother gets married to a grandfather first, a mother to a father last. "Grandma always says, 'Stay in, it's cold outside,' and my mother says, 'Go out, it's good for you.'" And here's the clincher8. Out of thirty-nine children queried, a total of thirty-three associated the word "love" with Grandma. One summed up the total very well with "Grandma loves me all the time." Actually this doesn't surprise me one small bit. On rare occasions when I have had my mother baby-sit for me, it often takes a snake whip and a chair to restore discipline when I get them home.9 "Grandma sure is a neat10 sitter," they yawn openly at the breakfast table. "We had pizza and cola and caramel popcorn. Then we watched Lola Brooklynbridgida11 on the late show. After that we played Monopoly12 till you came home. She said when you were a kid you never went to bed. One night you even heard them play 'The Star-Spangled Banner'13 before the station went off." "Did Grandma tell you I was twenty-eight at the time?" I snapped. "Grandma said twenty-five cents a week isn't very much money for an allowance. She said we could make money for an allowance. She said we could make more by running away and joining the Peace Corps14. She said you used to blow that much a week on jawbreakers15." "Well, actually," I said grimacing16,
"Grandma's memory isn't as good as it used to be. She was quite
strict and as I recall my income was more like ten cents a week and
I bought all my own school clothes with it." "It's Grandma telling her grandchildren where their mother hid the skateboard." "Mama, did you really give a live chicken to one of your teachers on class day? And did you really play barbershop once and cut off aunt Thelma's hair for real? Boy, you're neat!" They looked at me in a way I had never seen before. Naturally I brought Mother to task for her indiscretion.18 "Grandma," I said, "you have a forked tongue and a rotten memory. You've got my kids believing I'm 'neat'. Now I ask you , what kind of an image is that for a mother?"19 "The same image your grandmother gave me," she said. Then I remembered Grandma. What a character20. In fact, I never see a Japanese war picture depicting kamikaze pilots standing erect in their helmets and goggles, their white scarfs flying behind them, toasting their last hour on earth, with a glass of sake, that I don't think of riding to town with my grandma on Saturdays.21 We would climb into her red and yellow Chevy coupe and jerk in first gear over to the streetcar loop where Grandma would take her place in line between the trolley cars. Due to the rigorous concentration it took to stay on the tracks and the innumerable stops we had to make, conversation was kept to a minimum. A few times a rattled shopper would tap on the window for entrance, to which Grandma would shout angrily, "if I wanted passengers, I'd dingle a bell!"22 Once, when I dared to ask why we didn't travel in the same flow of traffic as the other cars, Grandma shot back, "Laws, child, you could get killed out there."23 Our first stop in town was always a tire center. I could never figure this out24. We'd park in the "For Customers Only" lot and Grandma would walk through the cool building. She'd kick a few tires, but she never purchased one. One day she explained, "The day I gain a new tire is the day I lose the best free parking spot a woman ever had." I don't have Grandma's guts in the traffic or her cunning.25 But I thought about her the other day as I sat bumper to bumper26 in the hot downtown traffic. "Hey, lady," yelled a voice from the next car, "wanta get in our pool27? Only cost a quarter. We're putting odds on the exact minute your radiator is going to blow.28 You can have your choice of two minutes or fifteen seconds." Boy, Grandma would have shut his sassy29 mouth in a hurry. We had an understanding, Grandma and I. She didn't treat me like a child and I didn't treat her like a mother. We played the game by rules. If I didn't slam her doors and sass, then she didn't spank and lecture me.30 Grandma treated me like a person already grown up. She let me bake cookies with dirty hands ... pound31 on the piano just because I wanted to ... pick the tomatoes when they were green ... use her clothespins to dig in the yard ... pick her flowers to make a necklace chain. Grandma lived in a "fun" house. The rooms were so big you could skate in them. There were a hundred thousand steps to play upon, a big eave32 that invited cool summer breezes and where you could remain "lost" for hours. And around it all was a black, iron fence. I liked Grandma the best, though, when she told me about my Mama, because it was a part of Mama I had never seen or been close to. I didn't know that when Mama was a little girl a photographer came one day to take a picture of her and her sister in a pony cart. I couldn't imagine they had to bribe33 them into good behavior by giving them each a coin. In the picture Mama is crying and biting her coin in half. It was a dime and she wanted the bigger coin - the nickel - given to her sister. Somehow, I thought Mama was born knowing the difference between a nickel and a dime. Grandma told me Mama was once caught by the principal for writing in the front of her book, "In Case of Fire, Throw This in First." I had never had so much respect for Mama as the day I heard this. From Grandma I learned that Mama had been a child and had traveled the same route I was traveling now. I thought Mom was "neat." (And what kind of an image is that for a mother?) If I had it to do all over again, I would never return to Grandma's house after she had left it. No one should. For that grand, spacious house tended to shrink with the years34. Those wonderful steps that I played upon for hours were broken down and rather pathetic. There was a sadness to the tangled vines, the peeling paint, and the iron fence that listed under the burden of time.35 Grandmas defy36
description. They really do. They occupy such a unique place in the
life of a child. They can shed the yoke of responsibility,37
relax, and enjoy their grandchildren in a way that was not possible
when they were raising their own children. And they can glow in the
realization that here is their seed of life that will harvest generations
to come.38°? |