Beatrice Louise Law

Saturday, November 22 was my grandmother's birthday.  Beatrice Louise Law (Rains) would have been 89.  Unfortunately, after ten years of debilitating Dementia and Alzheimer’s, she passed away in late September. She was an important person in my life and I loved her. 

When I was a child, my grandparents came to visit us in Southern Oregon from their home in San Diego every several years.  They arrived, usually in mid-summer because my grandmother was a kindergarten teacher and had summers off, in their four-door Mercury. I don't know the exact year of the car, I’m sure my brother would, but it was probably a 1976.  It smelled of new car and my grandmother’s peppermint gum and I thought it was the most beautiful car ever made. The Mercury (that’s how my grandmother always referred to it) was blue on the inside with automatic windows and, a luxury in my world, air-conditioning.  My grandmother turned the power on in the car and my brothers and I sat inside and pushed the little silver automatic window buttons over and over again, fascinated, until our mother said the battery would die and made us get out.   

 

They arrived to our house with the back of that Mercury stuffed with presents for us.  Their suitcases were in the trunk, but the entire backseat area was overloaded from the floor to ceiling with toys and clothes for the three of us children.  I remember a vague disapproval from my mother as they drove up to the house, and we spotted all those gifts practically spilling out of the car, but I couldn’t fathom why.  How might we be hurt by a small spoiling, once a year by our grandmother?

 

On the top of the pile were mounds of blank pads of paper, perched haphazardly like an afterthought.   Honestly, and I hate to say it for fear my dear grandmother appear a thief, but she may have confiscated them from her kindergarten supplies stash.  The color of oatmeal, they smelled of new, cheap paper and had the consistency somewhere between toilet paper and newspaper.  To me, there was nothing better than pads and pads of blank paper in which to put words, in rows and rows, until it turned into a letter or a story. 

 

The other prized gift the summer I was eight, was a peach, long-sleeved, lace party dress, with ruffles like a layer cake all down the front.  We were to go out to dinner that night to the Chuck Wagon Buffet and I wanted to wear it.  My mother, practical and sensible, (and also hot all the time, I might add – she wore shorts in the winter just as an example) couldn’t understand why I would want to wear such a hot dress to dinner when it was 95 degrees outside and the middle of July.  But, my grandmother took my side, understanding that something so beautiful could not be put away until the winter when it screamed out to be worn now.  My mother relented, saying we would have to take the Mercury, and I would have to ride in the front so the air conditioner could blow on me, so I didn’t faint from heat, but I probably would anyway.

 

I didn’t faint that evening, but I was a little hot, sitting pristinely between my grandparents on the bump in the middle of the long seat.  But, I didn’t care.  I got to wear my new dress and sit next to my beloved grandmother who smelled faintly of face cream and peppermint gum, and who smiled at me with her signature red lipstick on her wide mouth, showing the gab between her two front teeth.  I thought I was the luckiest girl in the whole world to have that dress, to ride in such a fancy car, to go to dinner at a restaurant.  I imagined, as we drove the twenty minutes into ‘town’ that everyone at the Chuck Wagon would marvel silently how grown up and sophisticated I was in my new dress.  Life was perfect in that moment. 

And, later, at the Chuck Wagon, I didn’t even spill any of the soft serve ice-cream from the machine on my new dress.  And, my brother went back to the buffet line three times.  But, that’s another story.

Comments

[Katherine]

I should know by now not to read your posts without kleenex nearby...how did you capture what I felt so clearly (with a different dress and I think it was Marie Calendars), even though we had different grandmothers?