When my sister, soon after her fiftieth birthday, lost a tooth to an abscess, she couldn’t understand why her sixteen year-old daughter didn’t share the grief and sense of loss. I think my sister suddenly realized she was no longer young. The possibility of losing all her teeth loomed in the future. Her young daughter knew her mom wasn’t young and who cares about losing one tooth when you have thirty-one more?
Now I’m a grandparent, I wonder sometimes how my grandchildren see me. When I was a small kid, I saw clearly all the signs of aging in relatives and neighbors and just accepted the physical changes 
My dad resisted all technical advances as encroachments on our basic humanity so my family was the last to acquire a television. Most of my childhood, I was intimately involved in the lives of the people who lived on my street.
The oldest people I knew lived on each side of my house. Mr. and Mrs. Geary were in their nineties and Mr. and Mrs. Neighbor (that was their real name) were in their eighties. Neither couple had kids. After living through WWII and the bombing, Mr. and Mrs. Geary took an interest in children and the future generation and asked my mom if I could visit them. My mom came with me because she was afraid I’d damage one of the knickknacks in their house.
They sat me on a foot stool and asked me a lot of questions. I didn’t want to be friends with them but I really wanted one of Mrs. Geary’s huge fans that she used when she had an asthma attack. Mom wouldn’t let them give me a fan.
One day, Mrs. Neighbor took care of me over lunch. I would have thought she was normal except she kept hovering over me while I was eating and she put cloves in the apple pie so the apples were pink instead of being the right color.
When, at the age of four, I met my great-grandmother for the first time (a family dispute kept us apart), she was so old that I thought she was already dead. By one of those miracles of childhood imagination, she could still speak. Maybe the death thing had something to do with the cold, dark basement apartment where she lived and her saying to me, “Go tell your mother that George is dead.” I can’t imagine ever asking a four year-old to do that.
I suspect my grandkids, more familiar with digital toys, are not so intimately involved in the lives of adults around them. The older adults that were part of my early years have remained with me always. Maybe I should be more careful about the impression I leave with my grandkids.
The ancients I remember belong in stories, Gothic or crime—they seemed so fragile and somehow innocent. I’m not sure my siblings saw older adults the way I did. One time, on the television, an announcer said, “In parts of southern England, signs of prehistoric life remain.
“Sure,” my brother said, “there’s Grandma.”
Do you have characters that have haunted your imagination since childhood?
I have memories of my great grandfather who smelled strongly of tobacco and cursed with great frequencies and variety. My mother said as a small child I told him he didn't need to say so many bad words and he tried to clean up his language.
ReplyDeleteI remember visiting my aunt and uncle in Alabama and finding their teeth in a glass. That was a scary yet intriguing find for a 4 year old.
ReplyDeleteIt always amazed me how much small children can influence senior citizens, Warren.
ReplyDeleteKara, one of my sisters became obsessional about taking care of her teeth after she saw our dad's teeth in a glass mug.
I always liked my grandmother although I found her elusive. She was a reader--her favorite, Dickens. She's been gone for years, but I find that I become more like her as the years go by. I found a childhood photo of her. Not surprisingly, we looked very much alike. I was too young to ask the right questions when she lived. I would have trusted her opinions.
ReplyDeleteParents discipline and grandparents spoil. It's a generalization but it's true often enough for many kids to remember grandparents with a lot of affection, I think, Elaine.
ReplyDeleteI adored my grandparents, who were Kansas farmers. My grandpas built barns and welded machinery and dug ponds. My grandmas canned and quilted and took care of chickens and milked cows and chopped the egg-thieving snakes in half. They all loved books and had great respect for education. It wasn't until a visitor asked about how my grandpa dammed up the river and built a waterfall that I realized how unusual he was. I try to keep this wonderful "can do" independence alive through the characters in my books.
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