Small things, with a slightly melancholy turn in the middle

1. A friend of mine (who is pregnant, is planning on moving across the continent while her baby is still small, and is trying to downsize her possessions right now) asked me if I wanted to try on some clothes before they were donated to the thrift shop.  It turns out that "some clothes" means "a giant bin full of nice clothes, all of which fit me better than my own clothing."  I ended up keeping everything, and now it's my old clothes that are going to the thrift shop.  I'm so thankful, because I was seriously short on clothes that fit me properly.  However, it's a strange feeling to wear all these clothes that I didn't individually pick out and purchase; I distinctly feel like I'm borrowing my sister's entire wardrobe.

2. I took a day off, in celebration of Chris's first day of Spring Break, and we cleaned and organized our bedroom.  I ended up sorting through boxes of sentimental trinkets, plus the shoebox full of old letters that I saved from my teen years.  It's strange going through things that you once deliberately saved and now don't remember at all. 

3. I found a bunch of letters that my Little Grandma sent me through the years.  It was so special to find them, because she was a wonderful letter-writer, and wrote to me like I was a grown-up, even when I was only eight.  Two of the letters started with the words "I'm writing to tell you how much I love you."  That made my eyes fill with tears.  

In one letter, she said that, in herself she only saw faults and constant mistakes, and felt like she was getting more irritable as she aged.  But then people kept telling her that her little granddaughter was just like her, and since Maryanne was a little ray of sunshine, she must see virtues in herself, too. 

I miss her so much.

4. Quiet evening at home, with my until-today-lost Joni Mitchell CD playing on the stereo. 

5. And my room is clean and dust-free.  I'm even breathing more easily in the living room. 

Precious Pat

On Tuesday, we loaded up into the car and drove to Comox (taking the scenic route) to visit Precious Pat.

Pat is the most energetic 87 year old I've ever met. She sleeps in a fifth-wheeler (so that she still has space of her own), hauls chairs up the stairs, and the last time we tried to visit her, she was away to Costa Rica. And she's a wildly good story-teller (which should not be a surprise, since that's pretty common on that Irish side of the family): she started off one of her best stories with the words: "Mr. Humphries (he owned the sugar factory)..." I wanted to have a video camera set up all the time, so as to capture the brilliance of it all.

She's surrounded by a big and cheerful family, all of whom love and dote on her. She calls everyone in her family cute nicknames, referring to her 60-year-old contractor son as "Cy-boy," and her bearded father-of-four grandson as "Jo Jo." When we drove away from their house, we looked back to see the whole extended family standing on the porch and waving at us.

Pat loves everyone around her, calling us "precious," and informing everyone that my Dad's a genius and a "big shot." (We started calling her "Precious Pat" because she walked up to my brother at a church camp -- at a time when he didn't know who she was -- and said to him, "Michael [Ourlastname]. Precious.")

And, from certain angles, and with certain inflections of her voice, she reminds me so much of my Little Grandma. (Which shouldn't be entirely a surprise, since Pat is Grandma's cousin.) Being around her made me miss Grandma, and I had to give Pat extra hugs because of it.

Highlight of last week

Sign of the sort of history nerd I am: last week, while I was on vacation, I got all excited about going to the North Battleford archives with my Dad. I'd run up to different friends and announce "Dad and I are going to the archives!" and they'd sort of back away and then say, "That sounds...fun?"

We were there to get these pictures:


They're of my grandpa*, from when he was the last milkman in the area to use a horse for milk delivery! He apparently ended up having his picture taken by Saskatoon's newspaper (the archives also gave us a digital image of the article), and the top picture is the one that ended up in the paper. But the newspaper gave their negatives to the archives, and so we have high resolution digital copies of the whole photo shoot. (The picture that ended up in the newspaper is particularly huge -- I had to resize it just so that Blogger would let me upload it.)

(Would you believe that we had no idea that such pictures of Grandpa even existed until this Spring? Mom happened upon the first picture by chance, when she ran across a display from the NB archives that included a big print of it, identifying the horse but not the milkman. It was included in the city archive's photo gallery online, as you can see here, even though you have to click on the picture of the horse to see Grandpa.)

* This is my father's father, husband of Little Grandma.

Story 7: Little Things

We would sometimes tease Grandma about the following:

1. Grandma treasured most some of her least valuable possessions. Valuable antiques would be sitting in the basement, hiding in a back corner, or holding tools and paint cans. A little ceramic cat which she found at some garage sale, on the other hand, got a place of honour on top of the piano and was very specifically willed to me. She told me solemnly that the ceramic cat would someday be mine, because I was the only one in the family who would not sell the cat for a quarter at a garage sale. She wrote my name on the bottom of the cat, and ended up giving it to me when she moved to Regina. You know, just to make sure I really got the cat. I also got all of her 1975 Eatons catalogues (the last year that Eatons put out a catalogue) as well, because I was a historian and therefore would not discard these items as junk.

2. As I mentioned in a previous story, dishes in Grandma's house were only used for their assigned purposes. Do not even think about setting a pie fork out for a regular meal. (I still can't use a pie fork for anything but dessert.) She had a lot of dishes.

3. Grandma, while babysitting us kids one time, once made us dress up to go visit the family of May-B, Ky and LynnieC. They were in t-shirts and jeans (because we were over all the time! We were extras in their household! I had chores at their home!), and we were in dresses and dress pants. Because we were "going visiting."

4. When my grandparents had a garage sale before they sold the house, one customer made the unfortunate mistake of presuming that he could take two 25-cents-each items and inform her, "I'll pay a quarter for both of these." The presumption! Grandma, full of righteous indignation, responded, "You most certainly will not!" In my aunt's version of the story, the customer then drops the items, runs to his truck, and speeds away.

5. My Grandma's immediate response to the discovery that my (very young) brother had somehow locked himself into the bathroom was to shriek, "Call the fire department!" The door had one of those handles that you could unlock with a nail. (Which is what my mom's cousin, who was boarding with us at the time, did immediately after that.)

These stories were especially funny to us because, in situations where I would expect her to be somehow shocked, she could be very stable and accepting. (I loved how she shut down other old women who were scandalised about a young man showing up at church with his hair in a spiked mohawk by saying how glad she was to see him at church.)

Story 6: "Prayer Warrior"

When I was small, I would frequently spend hours reading a book in this little armchair that was tucked away in a corner of my Grandma's kitchen. It was the best place in the house, right between her washing machine and china cabinet. My favourite part about the kitchen was all of its comforting noises: the whirring of the clock on the wall, the hum of the dryer, and the sound of Grandma praying. When Grandma was alone (or practically alone) in her kitchen, she would talk out loud to God.

I'm always reminded of Grandma when I read the Biblical instruction to "pray without ceasing." It really seemed like Grandma was in a constant state of prayer. When we slept in the spare room in her basement, I'd wake up in the middle of night to the sound of someone walking around upstairs. If I was in anyone else's house, I would have been alarmed by the sound of someone walking around in the small hours of the morning. At Grandma's house, that sound was comforting, because I knew that Grandma was pacing around praying. She would regularly wake up in the middle of the night and think of someone who needed prayer. When that has happened to me, I've mumbled a prayer and fallen back asleep. Not my Grandma; she'd get out of bed and pace around so that she wouldn't fall asleep until after she'd really prayed.

A lot of people referred to my Grandma as a "prayer warrior." She took prayer seriously and prayed frequently. She loved dwelling in God's presence.

You know, it was always a comforting feeling to me, whenever I was sick or somehow distressed, to know that there were very good odds that my Grandma was praying for me. That made me feel so safe.

Story 5: Priorities

When I was young, my aunt told me about a trick that she would sometimes use when she was a child: if she knew that Grandma was going to want her to wash the dishes, she would start practising the piano. Grandma would never stop anyone from playing the piano and make them do housework. (I may have tried that trick a few times myself.)

Grandma took housework very seriously (never mind the tiny handprints on the mirror and the Depression-era mentality that dictated that she hoard such things as jars and jars full of buttons). She cooked huge meals and asserted that pie forks should only be used for pies (or pie-related desserts). She ran a pretty tight ship.

However, Grandma also believed that certain things were just more important than housework. Such as music.

Story 4: Grandma Saw the King and Queen

Even from a young age, I could tell that my Grandma was a bit of a sentimental royal-watcher. She tended to have books about the royal family kicking about. She particularly seemed to take pride in her resemblance to the Queen. The best compliment that each my grandfather and I (at a young age, because of a fur hat she was wearing) ever paid her was to tell her that she looked like the Queen. She lived off of those compliments for ages.

(In fact, my Grandma stopped dyeing her hair dark brown when the Queen let hers go grey. If white hair was good enough for the Queen...)

A few years ago, I discovered what I suspect were some of the roots of this particular feeling of closeness. We were all in a waiting room at my grandfather's nursing home, about a week before he died. We were all waiting to be able to see him, and to pass the time and to distract ourselves from our worry, I told my Grandma about the course I was taking on Canada in the Depression and the Second World War. She was really excited that I would take such a course, and started related to me many of her reminiscenses of living on the prairies during the Dirty Thirties (where Saskatchewan was hit not only with stock market collapse and unemployment, but severe drought and plagues of grasshoppers). I got telling Grandma about the paper I was writing for the course, about the 1939 Royal Visit when George VI and Elizabeth (whom I knew as the Queen Mother) travelled by train across Canada to huge crowds along the way. Their reception in the prairies was particularly enthusiastic, with thousands even showing up at train stations along the line where there were not planned stops. I had been sorting through newspaper reports about the visit at that time, and had been astounded by all the purple press, and especially by the number of times the Queen had been called "radiant."

Grandma got really excited when I started telling her about my project. She informed me that she had travelled to the town of Unity for that day, because it had a station along the line. There had not been a stop planned there, but a huge crowd gathered (a newspaper report I later read claimed that there were 5000 people at that stop). Grandma's memories of that day were even clearer and more detailed than most of her stories, even though I'd never heard her tell of this before. She got to the station early and managed to get pretty close. She wore something pretty. And, fortunately, the King and Queen ended up stopping there, unlike many towns where bands were playing "God Save the King" as the train sped through. In fact, they ended up spending nearly half an hour, which was quite a long stop for that trip. The royal couple were very kind and Grandma got a good look at them.

"The King looked tired, but of course he was not well. But the Queen!" Grandma's eyes lit up. "The Queen was radiant."

Story 3: Less of a Story, More of a List

And it's also my 800th post! (And Monday's my second blogaversary.)

We had a hugely attentive Grandma. After we would leave her house, she would avoid cleaning the bottom part of the living room mirror because she didn't want to wipe away our little handprints. She only had four grandchildren (and the fourth one -- our only cousin on that side of the family -- didn't come around until we were teenagers) and she liked it that way. She got a lot of time to play with each us. In fact, one of my last conversations with my grandma was about how she couldn't imagine having forty grandchildren, as Chris's grandma had. How would you ever find the time to spend with them all?

My Favourite Ways that Grandma Would Entertain Us Kids:

• Taking walks to the big rock that was in the yard of the nearby high school. That thing was huge when I was a kid, and we would climb all over it.
• Playing Junior Scrabble
• Playing the fishing game that she rigged up; she attached a magnet to a piece of string and we would use it to fish for paper fishes that had paper clips on their mouths. (She invented this game as an incentive for us to leave The Rock. If we went home, we could play a fishing game she invented!)
• Bowling in the basement with the plastic bowling pins she bought, using the secret baseball that she kept hidden in a toy babycarriage. (My grandfather was a very cautious man, and would not have liked the idea of us kids having such a hard baseball around.)
• Playing with the flannelgraph board that she would borrow from her friends every Christmas.
• Having slide shows (always the same ones: Dad and Auntie Darlene as kids; their trip to the United States to visit Grandpa's side of the family) and then making shadow puppets afterward.
• Treating me as a grown-up and letting me drink peppermint tea with honey in it when her sisters would come over for a visit.
• When we didn't eat our crusts, singing us a song about a child who hid his crusts under his plate and then the crusts grew all big and scolded him after he went to bed. We liked the song so much that my brother would purposely leave a bit of crust on his plate so that she'd sing the song. (She would alternately tell us how children in Korea would love to eat those crusts. In fact, they would pick them out of the garbage and eat them with relish! Somehow, that didn't help my appetite.)

Hm. This list seems like it could also be entitled "How Nerdy I Was, Even As A Tiny Child."

Story 2: Chocolates and Red

When I was young, my grandmother was on a quest against refined sugar. She feared developing diabetes in her old age, and so she used honey instead of sugar and raisins instead of chocolate chips.

She kept this up until somewhere around the time that Grandpa's Alzheimers got worse and he went into a home. Somehow, she decided that life was too short and she embraced her love of Oh Henry bars and all things chocolate. By the time she moved in with my parents, we had learned one simple rule about buying presents for Grandma: she didn't want any more possessions (especially while she was giving so many of her things away), but she would always welcome a box of chocolates. This Christmas, my brother and his girlfriend bought my Grandma a big box of chocolates. She kept forgetting who gave them to her, and so my Mom attached a big note on the lid that said, in big black letters, "Michael and Nicole." She wheeled that box around on her walker, offering people chocolate and telling them that her grandson gave her them: "Such a big box! So generous!"

As she aged, my grandmother started admitting many of her hidden loves beyond just chocolate. She also started letting everyone know that her favourite colour was red. I first learned the extent of it when I was in North Battleford for a girls' weekend (back when Ky lived there) and had dyed my hair bright red. I'd never done anything like that before and was nervous about what my grandma would say when she saw it at church.

I was surprised by her reaction: "I love it! I always wanted the courage to dye my hair red! I even bought red hair dye once but never went through with it." After that, it seemed like she was always talking about her love of the colour red, and her previous reservations about it. She'd always wanted to buy a red coat but hadn't had the courage. She loved Janice's car best because it was red.

I think that was my favourite part of my grandmother's aging process.

Story 1: Grandma didn't go to India

Grandma told me this story while we washed dishes together, at my parents' house during some holiday. I think it started off with us playing the "What were you doing in this year" game. She realised that I didn't know the whole story of how she ended up a teacher and then in Bible College, and then getting married. Here was her story (some of the details may be fuzzy, because this is as filtered through two storytellers who love effect more than precision):

When Grandma was a young woman, she went to Bible College. After she had attended for a while, she panicked. Everything in her life seemed to be aimed toward being some missionary in India, never getting married, and probably dying of some exotic illness. What she wanted out of life was a "normal" life: a husband, a house, some kids, and stability. And she wasn't going to find it where she was. (Don't ask me how she decided this, as the joke about "Bridal College" was going around as much then as it is now.) And so she decided for herself that she was going to go and find herself a husband and stability. The best way she knew how to do that was to become a teacher and be posted in some small Saskatchewan town.

And so my Grandma went off to Teacher's College. She had a student loan arranged, which had the provision that it would go into effect after she'd been in college for three months. After it went into effect, she was bound to stay in for the full two years. Shortly after she started, some people from the school board came and talked to her class. As the war was going on, there was a teacher shortage, and they needed volunteers who were willing to start teaching right away and to get a temporary teaching certificate.

And that's how my Grandma ended up not going to Teacher's College, but teaching right away. She was thrilled that she got to skip that whole process and get started immediately on her quest for stability.

She taught for a few years. It was both good and bad. She collected a lifetime worth of stories about teaching in a one-room school, and in that time she also made an impact on one young student who would grow up to be a significant scholar and writer, who would write over and over about his teacher. There were also bad times along with that, and she frequently felt troubled.

But, one day, as she was walking home from school, God spoke audibly to her. His message was simple: "Frances, weren't you happier when you were following me?" And her reply was simple: "Yes, Lord, I was." And so she quit her job and went back to the last point where she knew she was following God: she went back to Bible school.

At this point of the story, she told me, "That was the point where I gave up all my own plans for my life. I gave up hope of living a normal life. I gave up my plan of getting married, of having children. But none of that mattered, if it wasn't what God wanted for my life."

She finished Bible College and became a deaconess with the Pentecostal Church. One day, a friend of hers wrote to her from India; she had been teaching there, and they had an opening for another teacher. Would she like to teach in India? Everything seemed to be falling into place just as she had always sensed it would. Grandma accepted, and was instructed to go up to North Battleford, where there was a camp going on where they would raise funds for her to go.

After Grandma left for that camp, another letter arrived at her home: her friend had lost her job, and the people in India told her not to send her friend there, either. The letter missed Grandma at home, but the people at the camp in North Battleford did get the news. When Grandma got to NB, she found that no one mentioned any fundraising. She went home and found out why.

And so Grandma made a decision. Obviously God wanted her to go to India. And the only people she knew who could send her were those people at that camp in North Battleford. "And so I decided that I would go back to that camp, and I would wait there until they could help but send me to India." And so Grandma returned to North Battleford.

And that's where she met a man named Daniel. He was nice and he was balding, which Grandma took as a sign that he was actually older than her. (She was in her mid-thirties by that time.) She decided that he was the sort that she would like to marry. She only found out later that he was actually a year younger than her, but was just balding. (It wasn't until later that she also found out that the first time he saw her, she was scolding people in the kitchen and he remarked to someone, "I wouldn't want a wife like that!" He apparently changed his mind later.)

She and Daniel got married in North Battleford, bought a house and had two children, and lived there for the next half century. Interestingly, she also always had close contacts with people in India, and blessed many through her letters.

"It turned out that God had the same plan for my life that I had," Grandma told me. "But he wanted me to to give my plans to Him, so that He could give them back to me in His time."

Remembering Grandma

Kissing Grandma C
Originally uploaded by Maryanne, Queen of Procrastination.

Today, I'm easing up and taking care of myself. I've drunk a lot of tea. I've done that "hold your head over a bowl of steaming water, covering your head with a towel" trick for my sinuses. I'm using my SAD lamp, which is doing wonders for me. I've e-mailed my supervisor and told him not to expect any productive work out of me for the next few days.

And now I've been remembering Grandma. I went through my wedding photos and found the really cute one of Chris and me kissing her. I think that, for the next few days, I'm going to start collecting stories about her here. Both silly and serious. Because she would want it that way. Grandma told me as many stories as possible, both because she was Irish and loved telling a good story (and would sometimes confess that it was really difficult to keep to the exact facts), and because she was so proud that her granddaughter is a historian.

We even used to make a game of her good memory and her love of story-telling. We kids would take turns picking either a year or an age. Then she would tell us everything that happened that year. The year she got a red coat. The year she saw the King and Queen. The year she started teaching. The year she started Bible College. The year she had a nervous breakdown. The year she thought she was going to move to India, but met Grandpa instead.

And I'll try to relate a few of those stories.

Because this week couldn't get any crazier

And so, in the midst of all the craziness of my father being in the hospital, my grandmother died this morning. As in my Little Grandma, the one who was living with my parents in my old bedroom. I'm still in shock right now, but mostly I'm doing better than I expected, especially because when I got a phone call from my sister at 6:30 this morning, it was a relief to hear that the news was about my 90-year-old grandmother (we've been preparing ourselves for this for a long time) than about my father.

And so now I'm weighing everything differently. I'm taking advantage of the shock (when I go into shock I become very businesslike and busy and matter-of-fact) and get this conference paper edited for publication, as it's due on Monday and so I can't leave it at all. Then, I'm going to start e-mailing professors, to notify them that things are going to be in upheaval for me for a while. I won't be flying back to Saskatchewan yet; we'll need to know when Dad's going to be out of the hospital before we can start planning when the funeral will be. It'll probably be a couple weeks (Dad's thinking three weeks). But I know that I won't be able to do anything for the next few days, and that I need to allow myself that space. (I've learned a lot about what I need when I'm mourning, thanks to the past several years. I especially know what to expect, after Grandpa died. I know that I'll try to keep working, and then get frustrated that I'm not getting enough done. I will then surprise myself by how hard I'm taking things, and finally start taking care of myself. I'm getting a head start this time by planning on taking care of myself.)

So, for those who are praying, please continue to pray for my father, as they figure out the best way to get his body to expel carbon dioxide. Please pray that they don't have to do anything too drastic. And that he recovers quickly. Other than that, please pray for the rest of my family, and especially my mother, who takes care of everyone and everything. I have a very good family, and they have been amazing me this week.

And I'm sorry to anyone who found out through my blog. We're trying to notify everyone quickly.