The Things She Carried
I've been gone a while. ?Real? life has swallowed me whole, and I can't imagine what it would be like again to have time to maintain a blog. Crazy!But, strangely enough, I came home tonight and wanted to post something in particular. I have a few posts in me still about Ethiopia, and a few more about my travels in Kenya and Tanzania, but tonight, for some reason (no one mention red wine!) I want to write about something more personal. To have the record for myself, as it were...I am not generally a diarist, all appearances to the contrary.
My Grandma Mabe died on June 20th, 2006. Right before I left Addis to travel in Tanzania and Kenya. It was sudden, it was painless, and I knew that she wanted to go. And I miss her terribly.
What's funny (not funny ha-ha, funny weird) is how much you learn about people when they are not around. For example, a story I heard about Mabe tonight via her younger son (this is the kind of stuff you can't make up):
Circa 1941: On weekday mornings, she would hand her 1-year-old son (my dad) over to her in-laws. She was living with them in Poughkeepsie, NY, while her husband was absent doing sales across the country for Oxford University Publishing. She was a educated, Masters'-Degree-holding "lace curtain" Scots-Irish girl, living in decidedly challenging circumstances with her husband's solidly working-class, southern Irish-born family in what would eventually come to be known as the "rustbelt" of upstate New York.
Having divested herself of her demanding offspring to his adoring grandmother, she would walk down the street with a cream cheese and jelly sandwich in one pocket and a pack of smokes in the other, on her way to the milk factory. She didn't own a car until later in life, when she made her own independent income as a public high school English Lit. teacher.
The milk factory was one of the United States Governments' many hidden wartime factories during WWII. Normally, they built milk separators, but during the war they built a cage in the middle of the factory floor for wartime manufacturing. My Grandma Mabe, then 25 years old, recently married and recently a mother, managed a team of about 15 women, who walked into that cage every day to build the bomb sights that went into our fighter planes dueling over the Pacific and Central Europe.
This is the same woman who started Spackenkill High School's first international senior trip program to England and Scotland to explore the famous sites of English literature, fundraised through bake sales and car washes;
the same woman who played the piano beautifully, but not quite as beautifully as her mother, a New Zealand-born concert pianist;
the same woman whose home was in the mountains and lakes of the unknown Adirondacks, at a lake that doesn't even have its own postal address;
the same woman whose favorite foods included hot dogs, potato chips, stuffing, ice cream, and tea;
the same woman who beat us all soundly at both Boggle and Gin Rummy while muttering about how "unlucky" she was at cards and how slow she was at Boggle;
and the same woman who, after leaving this world, can still teach me about how much life has to offer, and what challenges one must meet with both fortitude and forgiveness to get there.
posted by Margot @ 10:48 PM
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