I awoke to a snow-globe world, a yard transformed by frozen precipitation that, at least as far as I knew, wasn’t predicted. It’s a perverse way to celebrate what would have been Mom’s 97th birthday. She would have hated the snow, as she did all winter weather. Another, better way to celebrate Mom’s birthday is with this guest post by her, a tradition I established after she died. In this except from a story Mom wrote years ago she talks about visits to her grandmother Concannon. Mom is pictured above, second from right, with her sisters and brother.
I can still remember our silent rides to see Grandma every Sunday afternoon. Daddy drove us to her house on High Street in his big brown Pontiac with the yellow wire wheels. My sisters and brother and I would have rather been anywhere else in the world. The dread we felt mounted as we got ever closer to her home.
Her door was usually unlocked (most doors were in those days), but my dad always knocked gently before he opened it and led us inside. Sometimes our grandmother stood to greet us, but often she didn’t get up from her high-back chair at the far end of the room, which to an impressionable child like me looked for all the world like a throne. We each said hello to this tiny woman my dad called Mama and she always answered with a similar hello followed by each of our names. I always wondered if she did that just to prove that she knew the three of us girls apart.
After we spoke to her, we took our place in one of the small hard chairs along the walls and waited to be called on to speak. Once we were of school age we were always asked what we were studying and what we were reading on our own. I often rehearsed my answers silently on the way over, then gave them quickly and breathed a sigh of relief that it was over until the next Sunday.
Through all those years I watched Grandma and my dad together, mother and son, with so little to say to one another. Each bit of conversation between them was followed by a long period of silence. Although I did learn from listening that they both liked Franklin Roosevelt, were sure no other Irish tenor would ever replace John McCormick and didn’t believe in buying anything you couldn’t pay cash for, I was never able to figure out if they really loved each other.
Grandma died when I was a senior in high school so she didn’t get to see me graduate from college, the first in our family to do so. I wish she had known. I think she would have been pleased.
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