Musings on Death and Cleveland

It was her son that said it best, as she lay there in the last days of her life and the people who loved her and whom she loved gathered around, as they talked and told stories, someone said that when asked to describe her they said her vocation was grandmother, he elaborated by saying that while she was good to her kids there was a whole different level when it came to her grandchildren... oddly enough not hours before as i stood in my father's apartment drinking coffee he had mentioned that he hadn't been particularly close to his mother, his father either for that matter, and the world just opens up, histories unknown, glimpses into a father and a mother, and another father, and the dynamics of family and the humor and cruelty and love there within...

So her vocation was grandmother... as i sat there in my suit and tie, in a shirt borrowed from my father, i smiled and thought to myself, how fucking cool is that, as i sat and looked around the room at her four children, eight of her grandchildren, and even a few of her seven great-grandchildren, i thought that's much better than doctor or lawyer or senator, she was a grandmother, she took care of people, and though she once remarked that out of all her grandchildren i was the once she had spent the least time watching, as i grew up she used to laugh at my antics, she was much wiser and smarter than her poorsouthernchildhood led you to believe... at some family gathering one time, i was giving her the business about all the other grandkids getting shit knitted for them, it was a good-natured ribbing and my sister chimed in something about Grandma loving them more, her in particular, and we laughed and i forgot all about it, it was a few years in to a party that would stretch close to two decades, i had bombed out of grad school and set up in the old Steel City hood, my old man had an apartment in Lakewood so i went to spend some time with him over the holidays and X-mas eve we went over to his mom's, i remember my grandmother handing me a box, at this point i was too old to be getting gifts so i was a bit surprised, the hair was the beginning stage of rat's nest, a long and nappy mess, and what had Grandma given me? she had knitted a fucking gorgeous hat and scarf, damn near in Rasta colors, i was speechless, she just smiled and said "well you said i never knitted you anything, i hope you like the colors."

And what did i learn about her? well shit, i learned my grandmother hated her first name until she found out she was named after her grandmother, a full-blooded Cherokee, i learned her middle name was Eudora and that growing up people called her Dottie, that everyone back in Tennessee still did and that all her close friends always had, i learned she got married in Jackson, Mississippi and that she was born the same year as Hank Williams, Henry Kissinger, and Bob Barker, that she grew up a poor farm girl but loved her daddy Hassell, stories of which she told the last time i saw her a year before, how she knew how to ride a horse but not a bicycle (bicycles were un-ladylike), that she learned to drive in 1967 at age 44 the same time as her only daughter, that her favorite baseball players were Larry Doby and Satchel Paige, and that the first time she saw my grandfather she thought he was the handsomest boy she'd ever seen."

There is much i'll never know of my grandmother and much she'll never know of me, i do know that for some reason during my last semester of college i was denied my student loans, it was the middle of a messy divorce and any money i could have begged, borrowed, or stolen would have been tied up and so i said fuck it, it'd quit six credits short, the old man said we'd figure something out and what happened was that his mother, my grandmother, explained to him that he was the only one of her kids who had never asked for or borrowed money and that she'd pay my last semester tuition because she thought it was important that i graduate, i was the second college graduate from my family, my dad was the first, when the old man told me he had the money for my last semester i asked how? he smiled and said it's taken care of, i told him i would pay him back, he chuckled and said Junior she wouldn't take it from you even if you had it, that's just your grandmother...

And though my grandmother had far closer relationships with pretty much every other one of her grandchildren i remember what she said one rare holiday foray home to Cleveland, i was just seriously entering the Wilderness Years and what she said she had actually said a few years before, back before the dissolution of my parents marriage, she said i reminded her of my grandfather, a man she had divorced but a man i believe she loved very much, flaws and all, my mother immediately stopped her from finishing, a fact i was keenly aware of, on this day she had said it again and i asked her what she meant, she laughed in her way that was familiar in the way your grandma's laugh is and told me that i had his eyes, said i had his sly grin and that there was just mischief about me and boy if that wasn't your grandaddy when he was young, there's an old post (3/29/2010) that talks about my grandfather, a somewhat mythic figure in my life who i met exactly once...

I sat and listened as i heard parts of my family's history that i had never heard before, learned things about my grandparents and father and uncles and aunts that i never knew, was reminded that my grandparents were the only ones from their families to leave Tennessee, to move to Cleveland, a city that becomes more foreign to me every time i return, a city that's become a memory even though the things i loved most as a kid are still there, the places i loved most in my youth are still there, maybe not the same names or maybe not even physically standing but they are there when i drive down the street, cruising old neighborhoods, remembering where the Gold Circle was and how it's been two dozen different things in the last 30 years, it's that strange feeling of being half asleep and seeing these things so familiar and yet so odd, like listening to a warped record...

And so goes my hometown, i understand the nature of things and chances are at some point my physical attachment to the city will be gone, it will become a myth like my grandfather, it will be stories and songs and half-dreams whispered in a drowsy ear, it will become like the myriad of lost women who bring a smile to my face in thoughtless moments, a daydream well spent, the place where i was born, to the second son of an oldest daughter of a poor Tennessee cotton farmer and her husband, one of ten children, a guy with a fourth grade education and who grew up on a farm and did trigonometry in his head while cutting metal for industry and wars, and the things i did there will be nothing more than stories to tell the boyos as we watch the snow fall or shoot baskets, tales of a life... it was snowing as i left Cleveland two Saturdays ago, i smiled because my grandmother never did get used to the cold weather, i smiled because she had lived to be 92, i smiled at how ordinary and beautiful her life had been, another life in the billions of lives that have passed through this ball of air and water, known and loved to the few who knew her in the billions roaming around, it made me happy, it's what rolled through my head as i sped down I-480 towards the Ohio turnpike, the music blasting, racing back to my new home so i could see Nick Disaster play in his flag football play-off game, to watch the I-mac run and goof around with his friends, to see the smile of this girl who's now a woman, to remember the dead fondly, to say their names and tell the stories, and to love the living unconditionally, cuz someday i'll be just a name and some stories...

(top photo, my grandparents circa 1941-43?)