Today is my grandmother's birthday. It's relatively easy for me to remember because it is exactly one month (and a huge number of years) before my own birthday. I do have to refer to where I have it written down to determine how old she turns every year, but given that I can never even remember how old I am without having to stop and perform mental math, I hope I can be forgiven for that memory lapse.
As I typically try to do every year on her birthday, I make the semi-obligatory phone call to her house. She is not the type of grandmother to call me up on my own birthday, or heck, even acknowledge that I was born a good portion of the time, but this is something I like to do for her anyway, regardless of just how one-way this street appears. Most years, I call after dinner in case she had the chance to go out somewhere nice. This year, I wanted to place my phone call before the other relatives who reside with her got home from work. Those two other individuals scare me a bit, particularly the one who talks incredibly fast, makes very little logical sense, and tried to hug my head right off my shoulders when I saw her for the last time about eight years ago. She's on my avoid-unless-you-are-stuck-seeing-her-at-a-funeral list.
Anyway, I bribed the kidlets with two new books to keep them occupied and relatively quiet while I wished my grandmother a happy birthday. In hindsight, two books for three kidlets was probably not the best ratio for such a thing. I suppose they could have been much louder, so I shall have to consider it to have worked.
My grandmother was oddly nostalgic. She told me stories about what things were like when she was younger. She told me how her icebox worked ("The iceman would come and bring a big block of ice and carry it up the stairs to put it in the top of the icebox. It would drip down into a drip pan underneath the icebox. It worked! My last year in that apartment, I finally got an actual refrigerator.") and ignored me when I asked questions about how often the block of ice needed to be replaced or how often the drip pan needed to be emptied. I am presuming she either did not remember or did not think such questions were worthy of an answer.
She talked about being pulled in an [unintelligible word that I still do not know what it was] behind horses to get to school, and how they had to bundle up and go outside to run around in the winter, regardless of the temperatures at their recess time.
My grandmother talked about going into the local school to tell first graders about life when she was their age. They were astounded at the lack of television and electricity. ("They wanted to know what on earth we did if we couldn't watch television. I said we were busy helping out with the house. We had to help my mother with the picking, and the canning, and everything else.") They were baffled about the lack of a bathroom. ("We did not go into any detail on that one though!")
We talked a bit about my great-grandparents, her parents. I mentioned the only memory I have of her father, which is of him poking me with his cane while my great-grandmother cackled and told me to take it from him to teach him a lesson. She said he was always "teasing" the little kids that way. She told me how her father would reach into his pocket and pull out a stick of gum to give to "the boys" (Whoever they were. I don't even know if she meant when she was a kid or if "the boys" were her own sons.) before church, and how they would sit there and just chew and chew while her mother would be fuming. She chuckled when she mentioned how my great-grandmother would ream out my great-grandfather after each time he did such a thing.
I asked her about doing laundry, which is one of the most present subjects on my mind these days. She talked about having to use a washboard to clean clothes, and how they all had to be wrung out by hand. Her mother would handle most of the wash, but each girl was responsible for cleaning her own underwear. My grandmother fondly recalled when her father finally got a "Maytag with a gasoline motor." She said it shook the whole street and you could hear it from quite a distance away, but she was so happy to not have to wring out the clothes by hand. ("It sat out there on the back porch, and I did the laundry every Friday.")
Mostly, my grandmother mentioned how they did not have everything, but they had enough. There was enough food on the table. They had enough clothes. They had "wood burning stoves that are probably healthier for you anyway" so they did not feel cold in the winter. She claims it was a much better time. This is from a woman who lived through the Great Depression. I am not sure if she truly felt that way at the time or is looking at her life through rose-colored glasses.
Happy Birthday, Gram. It turns out that you gave me a gift today instead of the other way around. Thank you for telling me those tales from years gone by. I wish you would put pen to paper to record them, but since you claim you lack the motivation for doing so, I hope I have managed to accomplish a bit of that for you here.
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