The Life in Her Years

My grandmother recently celebrated her 103rd birthday, and as long as she’s still here, I will never not celebrate it. This year, like most years, she is separated from the bulk of my family—she lives with my sister in Brooklyn—but that didn’t stop us from watching her blow out her candles. And no, I’m not going to share pics or video of her, just know that she looks great at her age.

Anyway, as her birthday came and went, I started thinking about some stuff. I recalled my memories of her and her presence in my life and the lives of so many people close to me. I realized how very lucky I was to have her so involved in my upbringing. It’s the kind of realization that can only come after the flood of teenage hormones have subsided, after turbulent decades of figuring yourself out, after learning to deal with failed relationships and discovering how to be stable on your own. It’s only then that you understand what has imprinted itself in you and how.

I learned how to operate in a kitchen by watching her do it (for better or worse, I still don’t know how to make food for just me and my wife). I learned how to interact with young children by being there while she babysat for the neighborhood. And I learned respect by haptic feedback from her whenever I was completely out of pocket. However, for as much as I learned from her, it shocked me how much I don't know about her.

Of course, certain topics were so very off-limits when I was a kid that I never even thought to question them, such as why she wore a gold wedding band while seemingly unmarried, and why I never knew my grandfather. But even outside the most salacious family secrets (most of which I’m still not privy to, so don’t ask), it’s amazing how little I knew about this woman. I only recently learned that she was, by trade, a seamstress in Jamaica before coming to the United States. That does explain a lot about the ever-present, high-end Singer sewing machine, as well as the Royal Dansk cookie tin full of needle and thread (if you know, you know).

I’m not one to stew in a vat of my own regret, but if there is one that persists, it’s that I didn’t take the opportunity to find out more about her, to inquire about her memories of Jamaica and her youth while there was still a lot of memory to draw from. Of particular note was a class assignment I had when I was 15 for my AP English class. We had just read The Grapes of Wrath and as a mid-term assignment, we had to find and interview someone who lived through the Great Depression to see how their experience compared with the Joads experience in the book. I asked my English teacher, Mrs. Katz, if I could use my grandmother; the Depression lasted through her teen years, between her 10th and 18th birthdays. My teacher’s response was that, due to her youth at the time and the fact that she was in Jamaica, she wouldn’t have been an ideal candidate for a comparable experience. I wound up doing the interview with a friend’s grandmother, older than mine by a decade, and born and raised in the US. While the interview was a fascinating experience (the perspective of a Black family in Depression America, still dealing with the legacy of slavery and the joke of Reconstruction), I missed an opportunity to find out about my grandmother’s childhood that I took for granted.

I’m going back home for a few days during this coming holiday season, and one of my missions for this trip is to get that interview from my grandmother. Granted, at 103, her memory isn’t what it used to be, so I’m not sure what I’ll be getting. She may wind up being a somewhat unreliable narrator, but the number of chances I’m going to have to pull wisdom from her life shrinks by the day.

My grandmother just turned 103, and this year, and every day I have with her going forward, I’m going to learn from her.