GRANDMA MAC, ALTA
The story I most like to tell about my grandmother McMahan has to do with the summer I took a job selling Bible encyclopedias in Dalton, Georgia that included a cross country trip in her yellow slant-six Dodge Dart.
I was “recruited” after my first year of college to a sales scheme that sent me to Nashville, Tennessee for a week of what was called “sales school” and then to Dalton, Georgia, where I was to cover the entire county, or more if I could, selling Bible Encyclopedias and a children’s study program door to door.
I took the job, if it could be called that, because the thought of going back to Detroit for the summer after my first year of college and working in a factory made me weary and scared. In the end that’s exactly what I did, but in between I had a little adventure.
I was dropped off in Dalton, directly off the I-75 exit, already a hundred dollars or more into the red. We were expected to pay for our motel stay in Nashville during the “sales school”, where, every morning, we got up, ate breakfast, and went to meetings that started with a rousing chorus of “I feel happy! I feel healthy! I feel terrific!” (Loud cheers). I was truly disgusted after the first morning but continued on in spite of my overwhelming feelings of foreboding.
After about a week in Dalton, a small town just over the Tennessee border, my grandmother appeared at the door of the rooming house where I shared a room and a bed with another fellow who had been roped into this scheme and who I had never met before going to Nashville.
We had little say in where we would be sent, other than being told that people from the north would be sent south and vice-versa. The rooming house was across the street from the part of the rail yard where train carloads of chickens were brought in to be slaughtered. The smell was almost as bad as the heat… and there was no air conditioning. The shower was accessed from a breezeway around the back of the big house. It was June in the foothills of Georgia. The other fellow disappeared without warning a day or so before my grandmother’s surprise visit.
My grandmother made this surprise visit on her way to see a cousin who lived in Marietta with her new child. I was hoarse from the day’s selling, and she was immediately worried: “What’s wrong with your voice?”
I think we went out for a meal. It didn’t take much convincing on her part to decide that, as I had sold absolutely nothing in the week and was running out of money, I should accompany her back to Michigan on her way back north from visiting with my cousin.
The trip back was one of the best road trips I’ve ever taken. The little Dodge moved nicely and my grandmother wasn’t adverse to speeding… through the mountains and then the flatlands… we were back in Michigan in Mt. Clemens and my parents’ home before the sun went down. And then I got a job in a factory making truck body parts in a punch press plant where people were routinely maimed and cut up by the sheet metal and regularly malfunctioning presses.
For years as I grew up we saw grandma about one time yearly. She had separated from my grandfather, who I never met, when my mother was in early adolescence, apparently because, as my uncle later put it “He was just a little too free with his hands”
I always maintained, and knew, that my grandmother was a brave and independent woman for her time. Separating from a husband, even for that, was rare, and she had three children to raise… which she did with the help of her parents on their farm between Ottumwa and Des Moines.
As a child I was fixated on her apple pies. I claimed she made the best apple pies ever and she always obliged when she visited or on the rare times we visited her. I recall the last one she made was somewhat burned. I’m not sure making an apple pie was really her forte or cooking a preferred way of expressing herself. It might have been an inside joke between my mother and her, but she always made a pie for me.
What she did like to do was travel. And in her later years, the kids grown and not having to support my uncle as much anymore, she took to traveling the country in that yellow Dodge, buzzing around from relative to relative. Her trip to Amsterdam and the Netherlands was a highlight for her. She talked often about the people she met and how, once when she had lost her way, people she met took her in like family.
She traveled for some years accompanied by my father’s mother. My mother’s mother’s name was Alta and my father’s mother was named Veleta.
Alta and Veleta on a bus trip across the country. Alta and Veleta chuckling together on the couch. Alta and Veleta scheming to keep my one brother-in-law from taking up the whole couch where he generally loafed when the entire clan was together. Plotters. Neither who cleared 5'1”.
They did have their disagreements, my grandmothers, and during one trip… a cruise to Alaska, something happened that caused a rift that ended their traveling days together. I never learned the details.
My grandmother’s pink stucco triplex in Long Beach, California was our destination when the family loaded in the similarly pink Dodge three-seater station wagon and traveled all the way from Michigan in the early 1960s, hitting a good number of national parks on the way there and back. She lived in the ground floor unit and rented the other two units on the second floor. There was a church filled with loud singing and praises across the street from her home. We were kept busy by my father’s always full agenda: Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, a glass church in the mountains. Funny though, I don’t remember visiting the ocean while there even though I do recall grandma telling us it was only a few blocks away.
Grandma made me administrator of her estate as she approached the end of her life. My mother’s death had changed her. I usually say it took the wind out of her sails, and even now I can find no better way to describe it. She was happy to have me manage her end-of-life affairs for her. One of her little packets of savings (which, put together, were not all together insubstantial, at least not for someone whose most lucrative job was that of a switchboard operator in a hospital) turned out to be an inheritance she received from a woman she allowed to live rent free in her Long Beach digs for a while because she was having a rough time of it. That was all Grandma ever said about that relationship.
My last visit with my grandmother, a few months before she died, occurred while she was in the hospital and then in an Adult Foster care home where she lived out her last weeks and months. She was happy to have me there and we met with her lawyer, an unnecessary act but one that reassured her. My uncle was promising to be a trouble spot in the proceedings, and she also wanted to be able to give money directly to his wife because she had taken over much of the care necessary as she became less able to care for herself. Grandma wanted to make sure the money went to Aunt Donna and not my Uncle. My grandmother had the lawyer put in a stipulation that anyone who made claims against it or proceeded to fight the trust as it was written would automatically forfeit their portion of the inheritance. Most of the money was divided equally between her remaining children and her grandchildren. I had also made some arrangement with the foster home where she went after she was discharged from the hospital, which seemed to be a great comfort to her, and for which she said I had “saved the day”.
While sitting with her in the hospital that last time a few months before she died, she asked about a nine-week trip we had taken to Europe not long before. We were independent travelers, our luggage consisted of canvas NATO backpacks we bought at a surplus store, and we only scheduled travel arrangements and lodging ahead of time if we needed to. Train passes, rental cars, and ferries. We had brought pictures to share with her, because we knew she would be interested in our travels.
As we went through the many pictures she said, “where are you going to go next?”
We told her we had thought we would like to go to Africa, although we had no idea how we would get there or how we would raise the money to do it. She patted Susan’s hand and said, “You’ll go” and went back to looking at our pictures.
Later, after her funeral, on the flight back to Michigan, completely by chance, we shared the three-seat row we occupied with a man who turned out to be the director of the Detroit Zoo. He told us about educationally bent African safari trips the zoo sponsored several times a year. We had no idea then that the money my grandmother would leave to us would cover that trip, but in the end that is the one we chose… in her honor.
My grandmother loved playing cards. She was a force to be reckoned with in any game of pinochle or euchre, and she loved to win. She would slap the cards down with an exuberance, take a sip of wine and sit back with a kind of self assurance that was impressive and unduplicated in any other card game lover in our family. I, on the other hand, am a lousy card player. I was told once by a psychic, who had no idea about my miserable record of losses in our frequent family card games, that I had been shot for cheating at cards in a past life when I lived in Gold Rush era San Francisco.
You should have seen my grandmother try to mask her disappointment whenever I was made her partner in a card game.
GRANDMA VANCE, VELETA
The fall before she died we took my grandmother for a drive through the countryside, around the lakes and hills of Northern Michigan. We had lived there for two years, and she was moved into a senior rent assisted apartment by my father immediately after my mother died the fall before. It was a beautiful, bright day and the trees were especially brilliant that year.
She was a tiny woman. Barely five foot tall and only once was she able to hit 100 pounds. The car seat was quite high for her. We strapped her in the front so she could see better. She said “Oh how beautiful!” at least a dozen times during the trip.
Not long before that she was told that she had developed a heart condition that, if not remedied, could kill her. The end event would be swift, she was told. It could be remedied by surgery, although at her age, in her later eighties, the surgery itself could be difficult and perhaps not survivable. She chose not to have it and lived until she was almost 93.
She was a very stylish woman. Her closet was always filled with low key, fashionable and sharp outfits that she bought in various stores in Detroit and during regular trips she took to see various relatives and friends of hers.
She had a job in an outer shopping district of Detroit, an area anchored by several freestanding department stores (a Sears perhaps? And the Montgomery Wards store where once when I was very young I got lost) and many other stores that lined the intersections between McNichols (6 Mile Rd.) and 7 Mile Rd along Gratiot Avenue that have since been abandoned and largely turned to rubble. She walked every day, in her fashionable shoes routinely purchased from a place that carried shoes that were used as display window shoes, smaller than the smallest sizes usually available in run of the mill shoe stores, to the bus stop at South Gratiot avenue just north of 16 Mile Rd. at the entrance to the subdivision where we lived.
Her husband, my grandfather, died the month before I was born and my father moved his family, two daughters under the age of five and a very pregnant wife, back to live with my grandmother in the house my grandfather built. I was never made privy to much about how this all occurred, but it must have happened quite quickly. In that same way, once my mother died, my father moved my grandmother to the apartment much nearer to him where she died a few years later.
There was an unusual closeness between my father and his mother. Or at least unusual to me, someone who never really felt that any similar closeness with me was sought or desired by my parents.
I was, however, quite close to my grandmothers, and especially my father’s mother, Veleta.
Her maiden name was Halberstadt. The old pictures of the Halberstadts, in the generations that preceded even my grandmother’s, show very dour and unsmiling groups of people in dark clothing. I know that most pictures from that era tended toward that kind of dark portraiture due to the nature of the technology, but even taking that into consideration, these people were very stern.
Not my grandmother.
And not the women who were her closest friends in her later years after my grandfather died. She visited and was visited often by an entire coterie of women relatives and in-laws and friends. They laughed often and heartily. I remember visiting her sister-in-law in Terre Haute, Indiana near where my grandmother had spent a good portion of her childhood and teenaged years and where she was married. We had all gone out to a restaurant. Our waiter was a young man who was quite friendly and even flirtatious with the whole bunch of us, but especially with the older women, who were by now probably not much older than I am as I write this. My Aunt Vivian turned to my grandmother and said, “How’d you like to get in bed with that one Veleta” and they both cracked up. This was in the early 1960s. Aunt Vivian had an old Edsel in her garage that she hadn’t driven in years. It was in mint condition. I remember looking through the windows of the old garage, back by the alley, and being a little envious of the car.
Grandma’s room was on the back of the house, behind the garage. It was a sizable add-on and, along with a screened porch that was built on to the other end of the back of the house, was added before I was three. A few of my very earliest memories are of the construction of those add-ons. Before that, and after I graduated from the crib, my grandmother and I shared a bedroom and a bed.
Over the years grandma’s room became something of a refuge, even when she wasn’t there. We would often go back to her room if the TV in our living room was turned to programming we were not pleased with in hopes that we could sweetly cajole grandma into turning hers to the programming we wanted to watch. Sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn’t. She had a portable Zenith television on a metal stand with wheels and a remote-control device… quite new at the time. She also had an upholstered swan-neck rocking chair, one that I still have in my home. When we were kids we would play a game to see if we could kneel in the rocker and make it go over backwards. This was not a game that any of the adults in the house were very happy about should they discover us playing it and we were punished often for playing it.
My grandmother taught me to play scrabble. She had a devise that I believe was made by my grandfather that we would put the scrabble board on. Two square boards were screwed together with one screw through the exact center of the boards. They had a ring of marbles set between them that acted as ball bearings. One could turn the board easily so it would be right side up during one’s turn. I still have that device. The marbles look quite old. Perhaps I will take it apart someday. The marbles might be worth something.
Grandma’s married life was not ideal. My grandfather was a drunk and before he started attending AA (one of the earliest AA organizations in the country was in Detroit) he was quite cruel and distracted. In the last year of her life my grandmother began to tell us stories about her life, in a way that was very personal and surprising. She may have been telling them for herself more than us.
She admitted she had never been very happy with her married life. The marriage had been as close to an arranged one as was possible. Her father was a preacher in a sect that was a spin off of the Mennonites. He was also a member of the KKK, as was my grandfather. My grandfather was quite a bit older than my grandmother.
The stories she told about my grandfather’s drunken sprees were enlightening and sad. One involved my grandmother taking my father by the hand when he was still a very young child and going to the factory where my grandfather worked to remind my grandfather that he ought to come home as he had a wife and a child to feed. Another involved a woman with whom my grandfather apparently was having a tryst (although grandma didn’t say that outright) who came by the house and threatened them all with a pistol.
As my sisters grew up and left the house and I grew older and prepared to leave myself, my grandmother and my mother started to have disagreements. I recall a time sitting in a parking lot of a drug store with my mother. I think I was defending my grandmother for something or another and my mother started crying. This was the same parking lot where we sat another time when my mother told me she, prior to marrying my father, had an illegal abortion.
I only saw my mother cry one other time, when she was told via the phone that her father, who she had been estranged from since she was a teen, had died. Years later she denied she ever cried about that.
There was one argument in which my grandmother threw a partially frozen chicken at my mother. I don’t know what it was about. I don’t know what any of the arguments were about actually. Although that may have been the same time my father started to drink more heavily. During one of her talks with Susan and I at the end of her life, my grandmother spoke a bit, discreetly and without details, about her relationship with my mother. Toward the end of that conversation she said to Susan “They were always worried about him, but I always told them there was nothing wrong with him”.
My grandmother died in her apartment. She was alone. My father found her dead while we were away on a trip to New Orleans. Susan’s father was desperately ill with end stage lung and brain cancer at the same time but he had also encouraged us to go on our long-planned trip. Knowing what I know now I don’t think we would have gone, but he gave us instructions to go. My grandmother also was very firm in her entreaties that we should go. “And don’t you come back for anything,” she said and shook her finger.
Apparently there was another funeral in the small funeral home at the same time grandma was laid in state. It was the funeral of a man who had been in a motorcycle gang. She would have got a giggle out of that.
I CRIED IN LORCA’S YARD
(and some other travel notes)
Every time I have toured Monticello (and I have visited numerous times since my first visit when I was approximately ten years old), I’ve had to fight back tears when the group is lead into the small room where Jefferson’s wife taught the children. I have no idea why this happens.
The evening after I visited the Keats’ house in Hampstead, London, I went to see "Les Miserable". I wept so much and so hard I feel like I missed much of it. The difference between Keats’ life mask and his death mask haunted me.
I stood above Nas beach on the island of Ikaria and was enveloped in some other dimension. We walked down the long steps carved into the cliff side to get to the little stretch of sand just past the remaining foundation of the ruins of a temple to Artemis. I could have been on another planet. An incredibly beautiful woman appeared out of nowhere and dived into the pool the river makes before it enters the sea there. Then she walked around the craggy headlands and disappeared. There were so many fish where I swam. I was glad I took my mask.
I cried in Lorca’s yard after we toured his house. I sat under some palms on a bench I think must have been put there just for this purpose. Everyone else was gone. I just started weeping. I felt a bit ridiculous, but it wouldn’t stop. Franco’s goons took Lorca from that house less than 70 years before. That seems so short now.
When did that happen? Seventy years became brief. How?
Traveling makes everyone an explorer and a discoverer. Even in Africa, where, against our usual manner of travel, we traveled in a group because we only had two weeks to use and didn’t want to fuck it up, I witnessed things that took my breath away as if I was the first person to see them.
A group of three lions stealthily approaching a little herd of topi. Two on one side of the herd, one on the opposite side. The two rushed from the high grass. The topi ran. The other lion appeared. The topi swerved. One of the lions lunged at the back flank of a topi. The topi lifted that flank and flicked it up just high enough. The lion missed its mark by inches.
The rain in Africa. The roar of Hippos just outside our tent in the morning.
An Algerian waiter in Paris befriends us. Mostly because I pointed out that he had forgotten to charge us for the wine. He was grateful. But he also liked us. He took us to a jazz club we would have never found on our own.
An old Frenchman passes by and says “Bon Chapeau, Monsieur”
The first time we saw The Acropolis in Athens. We had arrived late in the evening via train from Patras after taking an overnight ferry from Brindisi, Italy. We planned to stay just three nights in Athens before we found a beach to spend that last ten days of our 9-week journey through Europe. We went out to the balcony of our room and there it was. Lit up and perched up there, shining. We went up to the roof top bar and had two bottles of Retsina and knew we had to stay longer. We called the desk and made the arrangements.
The brilliant blue and white Greek flag waving over the Acropolis.
Walking up the narrows of the Virgin River in Zion National Park until there were no other people walking with us. One is forced to walk in the river much of the way. The walls above us almost touch.
Standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica. We were visiting in May, bullfight month. The gallery was blissfully empty.
Standing, looking up, at the Sistine Chapel. We had planned to go to St. Peter's that morning but could not due to a papal audience of some kind. Instead, we went to see the Sistine Chapel first and the line was very short. Very few people in the chapel that morning. Remarkable. We thought we would be fighting crowds. I could’ve laid down on the floor. I wanted to.
We made a decision prior to one of our visits to Monticello that we would stay as long as we wished, just wandering the grounds and sitting in the gardens and orchards. By then I had already read almost anything I could get my hands on about Jefferson and somehow (even now) I continue to have a great fondness for him…. who among us is not a great hypocrite? I wandered the orchards. Sat and wrote my poem to him… an argument I could never have with him in person
In Africa the porter that looked after us in the camp where we stayed at the Masai Mara was named Bulati. He was about the same height as me, but his strides so far outstretched mine that I had to run to catch up. I noted he had no socks. He became quite affectionate with us, in whatever way that is allowed in his framework of reference. And it seemed the people, Africans, we met overall treated us differently than they treated the others we traveled with. Meina, our driver for much of the trip (we were assigned a vehicle we shared with two older gentlemen who said they were brothers), had me sit in the front next to him and we had long talks while he showed us the animals in the parks we visited with him. I was quite good at spotting animals in the bush (we saw a rare Grevy’s zebra because I spotted it off to one side, and caught an ostrich couple in the ritual dance of coitus as we came up out of the steep incline of a dry river bed). I believe he brought in an opposition newspaper and left it in the van for us to see. Meina was his last name. Elephantus was his first, but he said he didn’t care for that name.
How strange to only be able to interact and form attachments to people who were in servile positions. The others in our group didn’t seem to mind being lordly and directive. When we arrived in the airport terminal in Nairobi they clumped rather fearfully together in one corner of the terminal by the luggage retrieval belt while Susan and I immediately began talking to the Africans around us. We were excited. We noted later that when we looked back and saw the rest of our group standing in that little circle, looking ever so much like a little circle of terrified pioneers who were considering the possibility of being eaten alive, we knew we were in a little bit of trouble… socially that is. We had signed up with the particular tour because the Detroit Zoo Association organized it and we thought we might be traveling with a more diverse group. Nope. Wealthy white people all. At least wealthier than we are. We were definitely the least well off of the group. On occasion we caught little references to our being unlikely to know how to behave in such situations that require the knack of knowing how to treat servants like servants (I suppose. Susan happened upon a conversation like that in a restroom when no one knew she was there. Hm.). We related more to the servants, I guess. I recall one place we stayed… a bed and breakfast run by an ex-patriot Italian woman… we were given the room with the best view for some reason. The people in the group were decidedly rude to us. We decided it would be fun to have really loud sex that night. And it was.
That Italian woman, by the way, dressed all her servants, all Black Africans, in matching pickaninny uniforms. Yikes. There was a pool at the very cushy Mt. Kenya Safari Club where we stayed for a night. I was swimming with some other guests, not from our group, all white. A tall, magnificent black woman stepped into the pool and very quickly it was emptied of all the other guests but she and I. Double Yikes.
We visited a home for orphaned boys in one of the outlying parts of Nairobi (although it seemed much of the city could be described as “outlying”). We were shown their school. Susan had a long conversation with the headmaster, and it was clear the program of study was challenging and comprehensive, even with the few resources. The place was built from corrugated steel. The tiny living quarters, dorms with bunks reminiscent of summer camp cabins I stayed in as a boy, had no heat or electricity. The meals were all cooked over coals in a central mess hall. The school’s best poet recited his poems for us in the central yard of the school. Then the boys performed a play they had written about being a homeless child in Nairobi. To this day it is the best theatre I have ever seen.
It started to rain while we were eating dinner in the mess tent in the camp along a river in the Masai Mara. It rained harder than I have ever known. A group of Masai came into the tent out of the rain singing and dancing. Then they asked that we sing one of our songs. I unexpectedly, even to me, launched into a rousing version of “Twist and Shout”... my Ferris Bueller moment in Kenya. Ta Da!
After a long flight we arrived in our Istanbul hotel. Our hotelier took such good care of us! I have never been treated with such kindness and generosity in all our travels as we were in Turkey. After our arrival and settling in we told him we were interested in finding a Turkish bath and he sent us across the sprawling city, after giving the cab driver instructions, to a bath where no one spoke English. We were both taken by the hand and guided through our respective “mens” and “womens” sections where Susan had her bath and massage and then danced and sang with a group of Turkish women while a huge hairy Turkish man nearly tore my arms and legs apart and out of their sockets. It hurt so good. Susan waited for me to finish outside on the steps of the men’s baths. A frightened looking worker in the place approached me with some urgency and took me by the hand. He was trying to say “Madame outside” “Madame!” “Go please” Apparently a woman sitting on the steps outside the men’s baths is not such a good thing in Istanbul.
But some of the best traveling and discovering we have done has been closer to home. Our hikes along the cliffs of Lake Superior. Driving up the incredibly rugged road to an amethyst mine on Lake Superior’s northern shore where one was given a bucket and pick and charged per pound for any rocks you took from there.
Every day a fishing boat passed our camp on Lake Nipigon some miles north of the north shore of Lake Superior and then came back a few hours later. We discovered it was from a First Nations reservation just south of us. One day we timed a short drive there to correspond to when the boat came in. The hull was literally full of fish. Whitefish and trout. For five dollars we got two huge Whitefish out of the boat. The gentleman was surprised when Susan took the fish by the gills. We didn’t really have a pan large enough to cook these beasts.
It can be a lovely world.