Ash Wednesday Recollections of Grandma

My grandmother died on Ash Wednesday 1978, when I was young and away from the church. Having been raised mostly Presbyterian and having spent my earliest adult years in California in the sixties, my mind was not attuned in 1977 to a traditional church calendar. Like many of my generation, I was a wondering Druid with a head full of magical mysteries.

First some background. I loved my grandmother and grandfather with all my heart. They took me and my sister and our six maternal cousins to their country home ("The Bugs Nest") outside of Punxsutawney, every summer for weeks on end. They lined us up with buckets to go picking blueberries or catch crayfish in the stream, or with sticks, string, safety pins and worms, to go fishing for bluegill and bass in their big pond. Grama would fry up our three inch bluegills for lunch while her fragrant bread dough sat rising in big bowls, gently covered with tea-towels, or her ginger-cookies baked in the oven, or the chicken she killed the night before sat waiting to be dressed. She baked her home-killed chickens, usually making dumplings to go with the homemade bread and the homegrown potatoes, the homemade apple pie and the ginger cookies, just to be sure we had enough carbs. But when it came to "store-bought" chicken, Grampa loved to barbeque it with his secret special sauce: heavily salted water. He always said all you needed was salt water to make that chicken taste like butter.

Grampa and Grama sometimes made fudge and icecream. Grampa loved to heat up chocolate sauce mixed with peanut butter to top the ice-cream. When they made fudge, he would stir dramatically as we watched wide-eyed with jabbing fingers as it spilled into strings from a big wooden spoon. Sometimes on a Saturday night Grampa would pile up to eight of us into the big old Dodge and take us to a little store out the road for penny candy: wax lips, candy cigarettes,wax tubes of sweet liquid. One night he woke us up to take everyone in the car to look at the full moon shining on Cloe Lake. My grandmother, a card-carrying member of the WCTU, would not have suspected that he kept a whiskey bottle hidden in the basement, and had a shot or two now and then.

There was always a lot of laughter and spontaneous singing in Punxsy, either bits and pieces of song, or all five verses. Grampa and Grama lined us up around the piano (with my mother, the former church piano player at the helm) to sing old-time tunes and hymns: "In the Garden" "Rock of Ages" "Dearie Do You Remember?" "She is More to be Pitied than Censured" "When the Saints Go Marching In." On Sundays they dressed us up and took us to Sunday School and services at the EUB church, where Grandpa sang bass in the church choir. They took us to ice-cream socials at the church, where Grampa sang with a barbershop quartet. There was no baking, no card-playing, no dancing,no sewing, no going to the movies, no heathen activities on Sundays, or else we would surely be doomed to eternal hellfire and damnation. Behavior modification technique to give Grama and Grampa a restful Sunday? Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy!

We took long walks with Grama, who pointed out and identified birds, plants, trees, while singing bits of old hymns as we followed along with knapsacks and canteens of water, like a ruffian group of VonTrapps. This is not the life our more urbane parents lived, and we returned happily to our good schools, our luxe homes, our glamourous mothers, and our busy fathers in the fall, but we loved every minute of our country summers. After Grandpa passed, Grama spent more time with us in Pittsburgh but we still go to Punxsy to this day, where my sister and some cousins still hold down the fort, a much-updated (and urbane) version of the old days.

On Ash Wednesday in 1978, I went to my grandmother's bedside at Shadyside Hospital in Pittsburgh, past dark, towards the end of visiting hours. As I drove there I nearly hit a homeless man who was standing disheveled in the middle of the road near the hospital. Adrenaline shot through and must have dislodged and released some vestiges of marijuana or psychedelics in my brain from the sixties. Because as I parked and entered the hospital on that eerie night, I walked through hallways and up an elevator, feeling as if I were looking through a fisheye lens at people walking towards me- doctors, nurses, visitors passing me and seeming to look at me meaningfully with dark smudges of ash on their foreheads. I had no idea what the smudges were, no frame of reference came to mind, I just sensed death.

It was like a dream- people with somber faces and darkened brows passing me as if on an airport's moving walkway. I knew my grama had died. As I got ready to enter the room, my uncle and cousin were there in the doorway. I said to my uncle "She's gone isn't she?" and he nodded a somber yes. I went to her side within a minute or two of her passing and put my hand on her cooling arm. I had a most distinct awareness of her spirit rushing and whooshing to an upper corner of the room and beyond. In the state of heightened alertness I was in, it seemed much more than wishful thinking to feel her spirit going to heaven. It's a certainty she's there.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and
Nancy
Requiescat in Pace
2-3-08
She lived gracefully, and died gracefully.
My life is blessed by our friendship.