Mother of My Mother The Intricate Bond Between Generations

Introduction My grandmother lived in a town called Mount Vernon, and for most of my early childhood I thought that meant George Washington had once been her neighbor. There was a legitimate old-world feel to her street: gabled roofs, imposing oak trees, trellises, gazebos. Her house was a Cape Cod-style with a century-old maple tree anchored near the curb. Inside, the walls were painted slate blue and the blinds always drawn, and the living room smelled of electric heat and boiled chicken and week-old fruit slowly going soft in a large wooden bowl. My mother bounced her right foot anxiously whenever she sat in the room and my father had to step outside periodically for fresh air, but even when my grandfather sat in his salmon upholstered lounge chair and trapped me between his crossed ankles, refusing to release me until I said the magic words, Open sesame, I never felt the desperate need to escape. I drew great comfort from a room where the walnuts on the end table were the same walnuts I'd seen there last year, a room where the type of holiday cards displayed on the mantel were the only evidence of the passage of time. It did not take me long to understand that rooms were predictable but the people in them were not. My parents, relatively even-tempered in our home, were capable of anything in my grandparents' presence--irritation, laughter, indifference, anger. My grandparents, it seemed, could transform from doting elders to meddling intruders in the span of one carefully timed comment. Then my grandfather died unexpectedly the summer I was twelve, a passage I learned about weeks later when I returned from summer camp. In my memory he's a large, gentle man with a shoebrush moustache who stands at the perimeter of every room. Funny, really, since he always sat in a lounge chair in the center or in a seat at the table's head, a commanding presence in his own right, but in my mind my grandmother's personality pushes him aside. Where he was Laurel, she was Hardy. Where he was yin, she was yang. I never had the kind of grandmother who wore aprons and spectacles and pulled warm cookies from the oven, the kind who exists more often in children's books than in real life. I didn't have the kind of grandmother I saw on television, either. She was neither as sage as Grandma Walton nor as goofy as Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies. You couldn't reduce her to a single dominant trait the way you could say Aunt Bee was cheerfully domestic or Maude acid-tongued. The grandmother I knew was colorful, opinionated, ubiquitous, stubborn, loving, patient, devoted, intelligent, intrusive, funny, tragic, uncontrollably obsessive, wildly superstitious, and capable of both astonishing acts of compassion and unpredictable fits of rage. She had little in common with the "New American Grandparent," of the 90s, the one who mall-walks and e-mails and moves down to Florida to remarry at seventy-five. My grandmother wore suits, but they weren't the kind you jogged in. She lived in the same house from 1952 until she died. Because Mount Vernon was an easy thirty-minute drive from my parents' home in Spring Valley, New York, my grandmother was a staple of my childhood. I questioned her presence no more than I questioned the existence of my swing set, or of lunch. She was just, simply, there. Several days a week she crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge and showed up at our door, usually without warning, always carrying gifts. Plastic snowshakers, Lucite coin banks, those little upright metal calendars where you turned a tiny knob to change the date. She drove over during the day, while my father was at work. It was not unusual for me to come home from school and find her sitting in the kitchen with my mother, drinking coffee in her coat, or for my mother and me to return from an ice-skating lesson or shopping trip to find her parked in front of the house, listening to AM radio in her car. Only now do I reEdelman, Hope is the author of 'Mother of My Mother The Intricate Bond Between Generations' with ISBN 9780385317993 and ISBN 0385317999.