Remember and Wonder

*This is the only "studio" picture I can ever remember seeing of my Grandma. 

I can’t really remember the last time I felt that way, but it was a feeling that snuck up on me this afternoon. Quietly, briefly, like a whisper in a crowded room from a familiar voice you thought was long dead.

It wasn’t anything particularly notable. I was just lying on the couch, under a light blanket, under the ceiling fan, the blinds open with the afternoon sun struggling to break through the summer thundershower threatening to wet the hot concrete on the driveway. I don’t know what triggered it. Maybe it was the temperature, the particular way the couch pushed back against me, the right amount of sunlight, the time of day…but it hit me, that feeling I haven’t felt in so long, a feeling that seemed to belong to another person, in another time.

There’s no real word for it. I’m not even sure if I can say it’s a universal feeling, but as I was lying on that couch I was suddenly, physically, reminded of the countless summer afternoons I had spent lying on the couch, under the window air conditioner, at my grandma’s house. It was a feeling that brought an immediate sense of calm to my troubled and anxious mind, just as it had done so many times back then.

It was a feeling that made me miss her, her house, my youth, the way in which the troubles I felt back then felt so enormous, yet they melted under the reality of my youth, my insignificance in the world.

Memories are so often rose-colored and trick us into believing that what-was was so ethereal and lovely, but I try to know better. As much as I miss my grandma (who’s been dead for almost a decade now, gone for a couple years more), as much as I will always think of her making bacon and biscuits most mornings, her chocolate pound cake, of shelling peas and butter beans, the way she would dance and sing old Hank Williams songs with my cousins and me, I know she was a hard woman, made that way by a world of which she never asked to be a part.

I’ll remember the way she got after us with peach switches, one time chasing my cousin around the dinner table and out the back door! I’ll remember how she didn’t hold her tongue, even around us grandkids (I learned most of my good “cuss words” from her; her favorite started with an “S” and ended with “hit”). I’ll remember the way she left the church after it left her, deciding that my family was too rough, too unsophisticated, too…whatever the hell churches can come up with to exclude someone who doesn’t fit their mold. After I started going to church, she still knew some of the words to the hymns she hadn’t sung in years, and when I preached my first sermon, she was there, in a wheelchair to hear it.

I’ll remember how she didn’t stop the truck one time when I jumped out of the back, believing I could run as fast as the road was moving so I could retrieve an old hat that had come off my head (I couldn’t have been any older than twelve, but in her defense, we weren’t that far from the house). I’ll remember how she dumped out a five-gallon bucket of peas I had been picking because she said I wasn’t stacking them in the bucket right (in nice, neat, horizontal rows so  more peas could fit in the bucket). I’ll remember the way she would hang her earplugs around the rearview mirror of that old Chevy truck that Granddaddy bought brand-new in ’82, how she always wore blue jeans with an elastic waistband, and if she wore shoes, they were worn out dirt-white tennis shoes with Velcro straps or the rubber boots she wore to work in the chicken plant.

I’ll always remember getting in trouble on Friday nights for talking in the bed with my cousin David after she had rendered us immovable by the heft of those old quilts (which somehow kept us warm in winter and cool in the summer). I’ll never forget when we were real little, how she’d give all three of us (my two cousins and me) a bath after she had taken a bath: she wasn’t one to waste the water. We’d all three put on one of Granddaddy’s old undershirts and sit in the floor and watch Hee-Haw, and if we got to stay up a bit later, The Golden Girls.

I’ll remember Saturday morning trips to the grocery store, the way she’d always buy Sunny Delight because she knew we liked it or Little Debbie Nutty Bars because she like them. I’ll remember those few times she’d say, “Chris-fer, pull over there and let’s get us a whopper!” when we’d drive past the Burger King in front of Winn-Dixie. She didn’t hesitate to let each of us of cousins drive to town when we got our permits. Lord knows about that time we were probably a bit safer on the road than she was; she once got a warning for going over 60 in a school zone—a warning!

I’ll remember how, as the years caught up with her, she started seeing things, and people would tell her she didn’t see them, that she was just crazy. I think that’s why she always laughed when I’d call her from college and say, “Hey, you crazy old lady!” She’d always reply, “What’re you doing you crazy old man?!” She would call my cousins by the wrong name, call my dad by my granddad’s name, even call my cousin Brad, Jim Bob (which admittedly, was something I started and was surprised it stuck). She never called me anything but Chris-fer, or Chris-fer Paul; she never forgot my name.

I sometimes wonder what she’d make of me these days, her grandson with two degrees (and a year away from a doctorate) while she left school in the third grade. I wonder what she’d think of my passport, seeing as how she didn’t even have a real birth certificate (I remember her saying something about being born over a pot of grits…or something like that). I wonder what she’d make of my two boys, both adopted from China, of the pictures of me from the Great Wall. I wonder what she’d say if I told her about drinking coffee with people from around the world in the corner of a little classroom in Amsterdam. I wonder if she ever tried tamales, and if she did, did she like them as much as I do.

It’s funny, I guess, how you think you’ve had so much time with someone, how you know you’ll miss them, but believe that time will go on and their place in your life will grow over and callous, crystallizing your memories. Yet, there’s still this ache, this want to show them all they’ve done for you—all the ways you’ve tried to make them proud, to make their hard work, pain, and sacrifice worth it. There’s still this need, deep-down, to hear them say, “Aw, to hell with them folks who think they’re better than you just because they were born in a bigger house,” to feel them laugh, hear them sing, see them just standing at the sink, looking out the window, watching the sun break up through the pine trees.  There’s still this need to lay down on the couch on a hot afternoon under the window air conditioner and be reminded that the enormous troubles you feel are really rather insignificant because your grandma will always love you.