Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (30 page)
Read Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul Online
Authors: Jack Canfield
I cried then. Loud, aching sobs that I had hidden inside came tumbling out as I realized for the first time how final death is. How real and how wrong that Nana, my best and often only friend in the whole world, was gone forever.
Everyone made a big fuss over me then and sent all sorts of cards and gifts trying, I guessed, to fill the giant empty space in my heart. Time did ease the pain, but sometimes all it took was a whiff of perfume or the sight of an old white head in a church pew, and I would feel an aching tug in my heart.
I forgot about the angel until the next Christmas. As I slowly unwrapped the tissue inside her box, I began to imagine that if the angel was healed, I would be too; maybe all those tugs on my heart had been Nana sewing it back together up in heaven. Just as she had mended my torn clothes, she had been mending my broken heart with those memories and signs, telling me she wasn’t gone and never would be.
I don’t know who fixed the angel, and I never tried to find out, because it would have stolen the precious wonder and peace I felt when I held the mended figure in my hand. It was my first glimpse of the tremendous power of love and faith that is so much stronger than death.
Many Christmases have passed since then, and many stages of my life: from child to woman to mother to grandmother, and my belief in that power has never dimmed, but strengthened, just as surely as the angel’s beauty has never dulled, but brightened.
I have seen Nana’s eyes in each new baby I’ve held, felt her touch in each gentle embrace I’ve shared, and spoken to her and been answered in every prayer I’ve whispered. I feel her hand on mine every year as I unwrap the angel. And when I tell the story, I know that she’s listening and watching and smiling with me.
Anne S. Cook
A
child can ask questions that a wise man cannot
answer.
Source Unknown
Last weekend my grandson noticed for the first time the cow skull I have hanging on the living-room wall. As a longtime admirer of Georgia O’Keeffe, painter-laureate of the Southwest, I came home from Santa Fe several years ago with one of those bleached skulls that have become a trademark, of sorts, for her and her desert art. It hangs on the wall just to the left of my front door, and I use its horns as a hat rack.
One day I walked into the room and found four-year-old Bennett standing stock-still beneath it, a dead-serious expression letting me know his little mind was whirling. So I stood by him, not saying a word, just to give him moral support wherever he was going with this new discovery.
It was a full minute before he turned to me and asked:
“Did you kill it?”
Before I could say a word, he shot a mouthload of more questions: “Did you shoot it with a gun or stab it with a knife?”
“How did you get the skin off?” And, finally: “Why do you have dead things on your wall?”
I tried to explain, going into way too much detail, about Georgia O’Keeffe and how she painted pictures of the desert; and because deserts are so dry, lots of cows and other animals die in the heat; and the sun beats down on the bones and turns them white and blah blah blah.
Bennett didn’t get it.
“Did a cow die in your yard and turn white, and so you picked it up and hung it on your wall, so you could think about O’Creep?”
One of the things Bennett and I like to do together is drive over to the pasture about half a mile from my house and visit the cows. Occasionally one of the cows in that pasture gets loose and wanders around in the neighborhood. He and I had found one in the middle of the road and had to go knock on the owner’s door to tell him to come get his cow before somebody ran over it. Bennett’s question was not all that far-fetched.
I explained that actually I’d bought the cow skull at a flea market, that out West there are lots of cows, and people sell their skulls to tourists as a kind of souvenir of the desert. We then made a short detour in the conversation while I explained what a flea market was. He wanted to know why there were no fleas at a flea market, but there were cows. Why wasn’t it a cow market?
“Good question,” I said.
“I live in the West,” says Bennett when we got back on the subject of skulls, “and we don’t have cows.”
“Well,” said I, “Houston is not the desert. The cows I was talking about were desert cows that died in the sun and a famous artist painted them as a symbol for her part of the country—its austerity and its beauty.”
“I don’t think a dead cow is very beautiful,” Bennett says. “I think it’s really sad. ”He looked up at me, such a mournful expression in the drop-dead beautiful eyes he got from his mother and grandfather. “I think you should take it down and bury it in the backyard and put a nice sign over it so God can take it up to heaven with all the other cows.”
I was stumped. What’s a grandmother to do? Should I rip it off the wall and have a cow funeral? I hate to admit it, but the skull cost me eighty dollars. It makes a great hat rack, and to me it really does represent a part of the country I love for its hard edges and sun-baked magic. To me that landscape is about life, its challenges and sacrifices. I think of it as the workshop of creation, with its blazing lights and fearful clouds, its muscular, bone-bare mesas and flowers that surprise with their audacity to bloom where they are planted, no matter what. That skull means a lot to me. Besides it makes a great conversation piece.
Except in this case.
“When you get a little older, you’ll understand,” I said, wanting to kick myself the minute I said it. I had hated that phrase when I was a kid. “When you grow up you’ll understand” was a cop-out for adults too lazy or too dumb to explain things properly. But leave it to Bennett to get the last word. “My daddy’s a grown-up and he wouldn’t like dead cow heads hanging on the wall. . . .”
If you’re curious as to how this situation worked itself out, well, I don’t know if I did the right thing, but I didn’t take it down. He and I met several more times under the hat rack to chat about it—like where the eyeballs were and what happened to all its teeth, and is that why his mom puts sunscreen all over him when he goes to the beach— so he won’t get bleached and his skin dry up and fall off?
But the only thing I convinced Bennett of in all my explanations was this: his grandmother is slightly crazy.
Ina Hughs
A
grandmother is a babysitter who watches the
kids instead of the television.
Author Unknown
When I was a young mother my grandmother, who was lonely after my grandfather’s death, visited me every month for a few days. We’d cook together and talk, and she’d always babysit, so I could have time to myself.
By the time she was ninety-five, practically deaf and very frail, I was working part-time, and two of my three children were in school. Gran would come to our home on days when I wasn’t working. Once when she was visiting, my older children were in school, my eighteen-month-old was sleeping, and Gran and I were having coffee. I always felt protected and relaxed when we were together. Then I got a telephone call that there was a crisis in my office— would I please come in for an hour or two. Gran assured me that she and Jeff, the eighteen-month-old, would be fine, and I left.
As I drove to work, I panicked. I’d left my deaf, elderly grandmother with an eighteen-month-old she was not strong enough to pick up and could not hear if he cried. But Gran inspired so much confidence that I felt it would be all right. And perhaps, if I was lucky, my son would sleep the whole time I was gone.
I returned two hours later and heard happy sounds coming from Jeff’s room. He’d awakened, she’d dragged a chair next to his crib, and she was reading him a story. He sat there, enchanted by her voice, unperturbed by the bars of the crib that separated them. And our German shepherd lay at her feet, also completely content.
The drama of that day did affect Gran, who later admitted that communicating with an eighteen-month-old presented some problems. Unlike adults, if he’d needed something and wanted her to know about it, of course he couldn’t write it down. The next week she enrolled in a lip-reading course at a local college. The teacher was a young intern, and Gran was her only student. After the first session, the teacher made the trip to Gran’s apartment each week, so Gran wouldn’t have to travel to the college, changing buses twice. By the end of the semester, Gran’s ability to lip-read had greatly improved, and she felt infinitely more comfortable with Jeff and with the rest of the world.
Gran continued to communicate with Jeff in this way until she died, a few days before her hundredth birthday— leaving an unbearable void in my life.
Mary Ann Horenstein
I sit at the picnic table on an early morning visit to my grandma’s farm. From here I can see most of her twenty acres, lowland pasture cut by the muddy waters of the Snohomish River, and the barn, red paint long since faded into rough wood siding. The wind rushes up from the river and sends me deep into the wool lining of my coat. It carries on its swirling back the sounds saved up from all the years: laughter of children running through the corn and Grandma’s chuckle as she accepts another fistful of field flowers. Her presence echoes across this land—but Grandma isn’t here. The heart of this farm is now in a “home” in town.
It has been four years since Grandma’s stroke, four years of visits to the home and quiet conversations while Oprah keeps the others company. The sudden grasp of illness, added to long years working her farm has used up Grandma’s legs. In the afternoon I find her in bed, propped up with pillows to keep the weight off her bottom. The cushion of her wheelchair aggravates a sore that won’t heal. She pulls her sweater around her shoulders and assures me, “I’m doing fine. Just have to lie down awhile.” I wipe a tear and make a comment about a darned summer cold.
Grandma’s family settled here more than eighty years ago. They made their first home on Mill Street, across the railroad tracks from a German family with two daughters about the same age as Grandma and her sister Margit. Gram tells me about Norma and Alice. “They were the first friends we met. We walked right past their house on our way to school.” Now Norma and Alice reside in the corner room, down the hall, two more old women confined to chairs with wide spoke wheels.
I imagine them climbing School House Hill together. Grandma in a plaid dropped-waist dress, black socks stretched to the hem, her thick, dark hair pulled back with a wide cloth bow. “One, two, buckle my shoe . . .” skipping songs in mixed notes fill the air as the girls swing their book straps.
Grandma sips her tea and talks about Grandpa. “We found a justice of the peace in Montesano, and that’s where we got married. We lived at Copalis by the ocean.”
I’ve got a postcard that Gram sent home to her folks. Old growth evergreens tower in the background. Two dogs are pictured by the new road to Pacific Beach; Grandpa was on the construction crew.
She looks at the collage of family pictures arranged on the nightstand. “He had a cold, so he told me to sleep upstairs.” There is loneliness in Grandma’s voice. “I should have stayed with him. That’s when he died.” Thirty-five years disappear in a sigh.
Grandma was a gardener. Rows of sweet corn and snap beans were harvested and preserved in clear Ball jars. Her peonies, like fancy ladies in ruffled bonnets, danced beneath the lilac hedge. In October, Grandma’s homemade ladder leaned into the apple trees that lined her driveway.
Peonies brighten the walk to my back door. Gram gave me a start one spring for my new home. “Plant them where they can stay, they don’t like to be transplanted.” Her back was straight as she dug around the tender shoots.
Grandma smoothes the satin edge of her blanket. “When I get home, you and your daughter will have to come, and we’ll sew a quilt. We can clear the dining-room table and spread out the layers. We’ll pin it with those nice, big safety pins you brought me.”
“I bought those at Sprouse.” Small talk seems to help my cold symptoms.
I hold my grandma’s warm hand, tracing the wrinkles that testify to her long life. I want to gather her up, go back to the farm, pick apples, pin quilts. But the yards of oxygen hose and the emergency call button around her neck ground me in reality. Gram is safe and comfortable. She squeezes my hand and smiles. My eyes are dry now. I know my tears are just little bits of letting go, as frame by frame, I recount our good times. My heart is full. I wear my grandma’s love like a golden locket, and I am rich. For I have loved her too.
Lynda Van Wyk
A
grandmother is a mother who has a second
chance.
Anonymous
This is not one of those “when Grandma was alive she used to . . .” stories you often read. No, my grandmother is alive and well and kicking at eighty-four and so, I guess you could call this one of those “let’s see if
my
memory is as good as hers” stories:
When I was growing up, my parents went out on Saturday nights and my grandmother babysat for me. For their big night out, Dad always wore a shirt with a very 1960s ruffled collar and puffy sleeves and had neatly trimmed sideburns. Mom dressed in a miniskirt and shiny white go-go boots. It was the only night my parents were free to go out and have some fun for themselves, but I knew I had just as much fun as they did.