My GRANDmother

MJC and I called Dee yesterday on the fly hoping she would be available for dinner. Generally, waiting for the last minute to make plans with my 85 year-old grandmother is unadvised because of her active social calendar. Fortunately for us, she was without dinner plans for tonight so we were in luck.

MJC and I made our first trip to the Container Store seeking closet organization solutions and we found them. I am happy to have the bigger of our two available closets, but as the week progresses, sometimes it looks like a tornado hit mine. I have a particular knack for messing up spaces. My mom used to call me her little blond storm when I was little because of it. A slave to fashion since before I was even in school, I remember my parents being irked by my habit of wearing multiple outfits in one day and leaving a lot of laundry piles in my wake.

In any event, we purchased the necessary materials to keep us both organized and headed to my dear grand mother's house to pick her up for our date.

The thing about Dee is she has been living alone for along time. She likes things just so, which is not atypical for a Senior. What is atypical is that she very rarely asks for or is willing to accept polite young people to old people assistance. Offer her a hand when she steps down a curb and she'll politely turn you down. Yesterday, she was complaining about a leak in her refrigerator. MJC offered, several times actually, to investigate it's source and clean things up. She declined. MJC even clarified his intention was not to be polite but rather to impress us with his manly industriousness - still no.

The reason I mention it is spending time with Dee is not like spending time with anyone else's grandmother I know. It's more like spending time with a terrifically wise and insightful, roll with the punches woman who has a million and one interesting stories but is just as interested to hear what boring thing is going on with you.

She shows flashes of her age mostly in things like her expectation of customer service and her adherence to basic politeness. For example, she called for a reservation at a place I am fairly confident it's not required on a Sunday evening. Then when we were certain to be late because she was showing us an email of cats exercising on a treadmill she'd received as a forward, she called again to let them know we would be later than anticipated and she hoped it would not be a problem. I imagine the pimply-faced hostess on the other side of that telephone conversation probably smacked her gum and said "Okay, whatever - see you." But that was not the point.

When I mentioned that I'd cleaned my leather chairs with a leather wipe and it had left a weird streak she suggested I call Crate and Barrel, where I'd purchased the chairs and ask what they suggested I clean them with. I said I would but I only thought of the juggernaut of customer service professionals I would have to filter through to likely reach the friend of the pimply-faced hostess who would say something like - "Uh, I don't really know"and put me on hold while she asked her supervisor who also would not know.

What makes her grand is the way she defies ordinary old people ways of being. As we drank a kir at her house and she worked on her knitting, she told us about a male couple with triplets she'd seen at church. She asked to peek into their stroller (very grandmotherly) but was not at all shocked to learn they'd involved a surrogate and were now fathering these three lovely little babies.

Dee has a way of making you aware of a bigger picture. MJC and I discussed it on the way home. After a long, not so relaxing weekend we were both feeling weary about the impending Monday and all of our little right now things. Spending time with Dee makes you feel like all of those things are trivial, but not in the pejorative. Rather, it makes you aware of how much road you have left to walk.

I know people half her age and half again who are far less open-minded and aware. Dee's dynamism comes in the fact that at 85, she has all the right to be set in her ways and skeptical of things with which she is not comfortable or familiar. All the right to be that way, but none of the desire. She is a perpetual student.

I told her how I'd experienced a cessation of stomach troubles while trying the South Beach diet and avoided grains. She told me about my cousin Arlo and how she'd recently begun to avoid gluten. She was curious and not at all judgemental.

I find out little treats of details about her now and in her youth, all equally interesting, when she mentions them easily in conversation. She smoked as a teenager and into college, which I don't think I knew before - and said her doctor recently told her she did not have to bring that up at doctors appointments anymore as her lungs had likely healed themselves completely decades ago.

All of these little tidbits are things I get distracted with as she is telling them. I am listening and nodding and thinking to myself - please let me etch this into my brain so I can keep her with me forever even after she is gone. I am scared of losing her. She would tell me it is a natural process and not to let it hurt my big tender heart- it's just the way of things - but I am just desperate to soak her up.

Here are some more facts I know -

She started driving when she was 13.

She googles information about her mother(Jeanette) to try to find out the church in Chicago in which she might have been confirmed.

Tony's side of the family was all Catholics and Jeanette's was Episcopal. Jeanette discovered the church through her friends and was confirmed at the appropriate time of her own volition, not because it was necessarily something her family encouraged.

She told us she was married despite her parents advice, but that they also did not forbid it. She got married before my grandfather went back to war in a small ceremony in Virginia with her best friend Barbara and her husband who was stationed nearby - no family. She knew it was a mistake not long after.

Albert had been her high school beau. She dated a man who ended up being a doctor while she was in college and I think she thinks she should have stuck with him.

I think of all the stories I have left to hear and I am mad at myself for not seeing her more often. Even as we drove home last night MJC and I said to each other - that was so easy and so worth it - why don't we just get it together to see her every week?

I am going to do a better job of it- I adore her and I hope she knows it.