Soul Food

Michele Marr

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I

believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people --

no mere father and mother -- are enough to provide emotional security for

a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of

variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an

indissoluble bond that he cannot break.

-- Pearl S. Buck

If my grandmother were alive today she would be 92, but she died in

1964 of what began as a persistent cough, a symptom of esophageal cancer

that went undiagnosed too long. She was 54, just three years older than I

am now.

Her early death impoverished my life in ways that left marks for a

lifetime. The day she died was the day my childhood ended. I was slammed

into a world more complex and painful than I had ever imagined. I was

left to make my way through the sudden darkness without her wisdom, her

relentless encouragement and her absolute hope and optimism.

My grandmother knew me as a child better than anyone. She admired me.

She was proud of me. She loved me for who I was and I could see that in

her eyes. She taught me by example to appreciate the world around me.

She loved people. She always thought the best of them. She was

gracious and generous with everyone who knew her. She appreciated

well-crafted and beautiful things. “It’s better,” she said, “to have a

few good things than a lot of cheap ones.”

She taught me her aesthetics and did without things, I realized much

later, to buy me fine things. For Easter one year there was a blue silk

dress scattered with a hand-painted field of flowers and for my ninth

birthday -- my last birthday in her home -- a filigree-platinum and

diamond ring I still own and wear.

She lived in a house without closets, so a small cedar wardrobe held

her clothes. A straight, black wool skirt hung next to an olive-green

eight-gore skirt. A coffee-colored, nubby silk skirt with a kickpleat in

the back hung next to a black wool sweater set with a beaded cardigan. A

powder-blue sweater with a tailored collar and self-cravat hung next to a

creamy, cashmere shirt-sleeve mock turtleneck.

Neatly folded in adjacent drawers were half a dozen French-cuffed

shirts: three white and monogrammed, one taupe, one a pale mustard, and

one ecru. After her death, I was the one who wore these garments out

during my four years of high school.

The proclamation to make National Grandparents Day official, signed by

President Jimmy Carter in 1979, reads in part, “As we seek to strengthen

the enduring values of the family, it is appropriate that we honor our

grandparents.”

I never knew my father’s father. And I never really knew his mother,

though I met her once or twice. As far as I know, my father and his

parents never spoke during my lifetime. My mother’s parents separated and

divorced when she was still quite young. We saw her father, Bubba,

occasionally, but I never got to know him. I have always wished I’d known

them all.

Not long before Bubba died I went to visit him twice. I met my

step-grandmother and one of my half uncles. Later, looking at a

photograph of Bubba and me, him seated and me standing behind him, my

face barely above his, I was both startled and touched to see an

unmistakable resemblance. How, I wondered, have these grandparents I

never knew formed and shaped my life?

The proclamation for National Grandparents Day declares, “Grandparents

are our continuing link to the near-past, to the events and beliefs and

experiences that so strongly affect our lives and the world around us. We

all know grandparents who possess the wisdom of distilled pain and joy.

Because they are usually free to love and guide and befriend the young

without having to take daily responsibility for them, they can often

reach out past pride and fear of failure and close the space between

generations.”

A little more than a year ago two sisters, Margaret and Mary, got in

touch with my mother and me by means of the Internet. Their mother,

Loyal, was my grandmother’s best friend for many years. They had come

across a handful of letters written by my grandmother to their mother

during the Great Depression years between 1930 and 1936. A few

photographs had been tucked into some of the letters.

Margaret scanned and sent them, a page here, a photo there, attached

to e-mail over the course of several weeks. They opened across my monitor

like 21st century messages in a bottle. The letters were brittle,

yellowed and frayed. The photos were faded and creased.

My grandmother sent the letters from Mobile, Alabama, to Loyal, who

had moved with her husband looking for work in Tennessee. The letters

were addressed simply to Mrs. E. C. Heacker, Memphis, Tenn. I opened the

letters again this week. The first letter announces my mother’s birth in

January 1930.

In timeworn photos my grandmother, a young girl with a dark bob and

huge dark eyes, dotes on her baby girl. Two cocksure young men -- my

grandfather Mitchell and his buddy Edwin, Loyal’s husband -- stand

shoulder to shoulder, ready for anything the world might dish them. My

great-grandmother holds my infant mother in a long white dress and

ruffled bonnet, squinting into the sun. My toddler-mother sits on a

porch. She wears patent-leather Mary Janes and looks straight into the

camera under the delighted gaze of her grandfather.

Marian McQuade was right. All of us are grandchildren with

grandparents who deserve to be honored and need to share their love with

their children’s children. Each of us, someone’s grandchild, can be

enriched by the strength, the information and the guidance our

grandparents have to offer us.

How much richer we are, still, when that happens for many days of many

years and not for one day only in each year.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

[email protected]