The Letters

Today I finished the Herculean task of mucking out my grandmother's house so she can move to a retirement community closer to my parents. When I say mucking, I mean wrapping an endless trove of china and chachkas up in newsprint and tossing them into one of the 32 boxes that are the sum of my week's work. There were also garment bags, but I am not going to put those on my packing resume because I didn't have to wrap anything.

My grandmother, my mother had told me before I started the packing, is not a sentimental woman. Darn straight. Her mind is starting to slip. To compensate, she keeps a short-list of catchphrases at the ready to save her time during conversations. The current top five for me are, "Don't live too long," (Grandma, I haven't lived long enough), "Just bring me a shotgun," (this is not funny, it is almost funny becasue she says it to be funny so that is extrememly-uncomfortable-type funny, but not enough to actually be funny), and "It's about time," (This in reference to my special friend of the last few years and I getting seperate apartments and nearly seperate lives. What she probably means by this is, "He wasn't even Jewish.") Though the memory is slippijng the traditions are staying. Reminding her that both of her children married gentiles who subsequently converted, making the Jew input to output ratio of her loints 2: 7 (grandkids included), silences her, but only because she wants to change the subject.

But back to memory and sentimentality. The house was full of papers. I found a copy of my graduation speech, manuscripts from all my unlce's books and a copy of his tenure, and financial records back to the 70's. I found one letter from my grandfather to my grandmother from his time as an army MD in WWII. "My dearest, sweetest, loveliest, most amazing wife . . ." My grandfather died of cancer in 1989. He was addicted to home dry-cleaning, one of your more mutagenetic hobbies. When we packed up the pantry my mom picked up a crusty bottle of genucleen and proposed that it may have been the very bottle that killed him. The man who home dry cleaned in the 1940's was no sap. My gandfather was the last Jew admitted into his class at Bowdoin. He broke ground by performing some kind of pediatric stomach surgery for the first time ever in the state of Maine. A highpoint of his life was the invention of electronis chess. A symbol of his precise and intentional life is that his watch ran out of wind within ten minutes of his death. Until I read the WWII letter, it had never occured to me that he had ever used four superlatives in one sentence.

The letter referenced another letter he had just sent and another one he was about to send. In the mostly empty dresser my grandma kept for him in her bedreoom, there was only the one letter. Why did my grandmother get rid of the others and when did she do it? Did she trash them when he came back because here was the real and present thing? Did she dump them in a previous move? Between Main Street and Sea Lane, or between Sea Lane and the house I just moved her out of? Did she toss them when he died, after he died? Maybe she never kept them in the first place. My mother is quick to volunteer that the chest she kept all her grammar and high school mementos in was junked (by her mother) before she got a bachelor's degree.

The missing letters stand out even more because of the things she has saved, and I have now wrapped. In the rear of her display cabinets were made-in-japan floral ashtrays that hadn't been used for decades. There was also a little statue of a boy looking down at a doll at his feet, with a stethoscope around his neck and no pants on ("what kind of doctor is he playing?" asked my unlce). I have never used the word crap so frequently in my life. There were also intersting and precious things, some of which had obviously traveled very far to get to the glass cabinets. My grandmother can be said to have mixed tatses more than bad taste. And I am taking various high tea accessorises back home to Seattle which I certainly can't compain about.

My grandmother is not a cold woman, either. She has bosom buddies of every age, both in Miami and Maine. She lights up every time I call her, and I feel warm on the other end of the 3000 mile phone line. She wears a lot of red. She gives to anyone who knocks on her door and offers her address labels with pink-ribbon-wearing pandas on them. She is loving.

But not sentimental. So there is no material record of her life before marriage in 1945, and very litte after that unless it is financial or pertaining to her offspring. The marriage itself is captured in one photograph of my-grandma-the-bride that is pucnhed with the photographers name because it is a proof (enjoy the meanings of the word proof there). At the present, she is losing the present. Not that it matters too much if she asks where I am going to dinner four or five times in one sitting; it's just dinner and I always go to the same places anyway. Her far back memory seems pretty intact, but we have no fossil record to compare it to.

When my dad's father was nearing the end of his life he experienced severe dementia. I would visit him with my brother and he would punch my brother in the arm and ask if I cooked and cleaned as good as I looked. It was still in his memory that he had grandaughters, but there wasn't a link between that knowledge and the growing, talking, changing people who we presently were.

My grandmother is no where near that state. But there is a difference between her past and her present. The latter can be felt, tasted, seen, heard, but doesn't leave an impression, shakes off like an etch-a-sketch. The impressions of the past, on the other hand, are so defined that they are solid. Or maybe the solid touch/taste/see/hear things are not needed to remind her of them. The memories themselves have more value that the physical world they came from, the world of the missing letters.