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.