99.09.28
 

Oh Yeah… I forgot, my grandmother died tonight.

Please don’t say you’re sorry or feel bad in any way, this is mentioned as a milestone only. I had absolutley no affection for her and she had none for me. I wrote a piece about her a couple of years ago that explains things very well

Here it is:

Many people have memories of their grandmothers that give rise to warm feelings, or recollections of inspiration or admiration. They remember a woman or women that held them or talked to them or that in some way they loved or admired, a woman who played with them, had time for them or that showed them how important and special they were. My children are enormously fortunate two have two such grandmothers. women who are quite different yet perfect counterpoints in life, women who each treat and teach my children differently yet in harmony with what they and we believe.

My maternal grandmother was like that in her own way. A very nice lady who could read to me and laugh with me and who held me on her lap, the sting of her cigarette smoke making my eyes squint. Unfortunately she died when I was six, yet to this day I remember her half-smile and a little matchbox locomotive she brought me once. .

My Paternal grandmother is nothing like that.

My father was raised by my grandmother, a very cold woman. My father spent his life doing everything he could to be worthy of her, to get her approval, searching to somehow find her love. We, of course were raised to believe that we needed to somehow be worthy of her too.

Every Friday night, after mother had done the grocery shopping, my father, dutiful son that he was, would take my family to visit the grandparents, he and mother would sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee while grandmother would talk to my dad, and pointedly ignore my mother. Grandfather would sit in his rocking chair and alternately smoke, or with his yellow fingers and nails, roll cigarettes from Sportsman tobacco . I watched so much of that, that as a teenager I never smoked, but I could roll a good cigarette. If grandmother ignored my mother, then we were invisible, just an unpleasant odor wafting through the room.  Before we were old enough to just not go anymore we would do what we could to amuse ourselves for the hour or so we all endured. In the summer it wasn't so bad, there was plenty to do in the field or in the neighborhood, but winter was torture. We'd be stuck in a house that was too hot and not allowed to change the channel on the TV, forbidden to touch anything other than the floor. I've never before or since been in a place where I was expected to ask permission to sit on a chair. Once, when she was three, my sister, a toddler, fell on grandmother's dog, the dog bit her, and grandmother promptly spanked my sister for teasing the dog.

For my first thirty-five years I watched this matriarchal Hitler rule my father's life.

My sister Charlotte has achieved great things in the medical field, having gotten her Master's degree along with numerous Nursing qualifications and great respect from her colleagues. When, in the old folks home that she lives in, an aide that had known Charlotte as a youth asked after her, grandmother replied "She's fat". My sister Heather , as near as I can recall, ceased to exist about twenty years ago when she became pregnant out of wedlock. The fact that she raised two Intelligent, respectful, polite, self-assured and just plain great kids who have since become productive witty, friendly and loving adults  notwithstanding. My elder brother Tony , being the nearest thing to my dad, is tolerated, and so was I, my only saving grace being that I'm in the Fire Department like my grandfather was.

My mother was the first, near as I can tell, to finally just say "Screw it".

Grandmother would lie in her bed in the home and bark orders at everyone who would visit, never having a thing pleasant to say to or about anyone. One day my mother simply decided that she had had enough, and told my father that she was done visiting that woman having been treated like shit for forty years.
My father was horrified. Among the rest of us it seemed that the floodgates opened, one by one we all stopped visiting. Each one of us feeling like we had awoken suddenly and realized that we didn't need to take that crap anymore either.

The only one who never realized it was my dad.

He faithfully visited her till cancer kept him from it. Every day he'd rush through dinner so he could be there on time and see to whatever needs of hers he could. He'd sit there with her for an hour or so and talk to her, get ordered around, and try his damnedest to be worthy of her, to somehow get her to love him. She had never been any more warm to him than she had been to us.

My dad tried every day of his life to be worthy of her.

We were lucky. It only took us thirty or so years to realize that she wasn't worthy of us.
 
 

There you have it, in so many words

See you Ladder

~Smoky