Old Memories

Remembrance

As a matriarch who took no crap from nobody and basically lived until the end of time, my great grandmother was an admirable lady. In her 90′s she was walking a distance of almost two miles from her 3rd floor apartment on Seneca Avenue to Granny Mansion each day, at 99 she underwent open heart surgery, and until her very last days she was very much still a providing mother to Sophie and Olga.

For a long period after she passed away, Olga wore black clothing in mourning. Even now, on three or four Sundays throughout the year, I’ll still find Olga dressed in black for the memory of her mother. Before she became unable to take car rides, she very often used to ask me to drive her to the cemetery on Woodward Avenue to visit her mother’s grave.

On one occasion, several years back, we all piled into my car and headed over on a chilly spring morning. That was one of Olga’s last recreational car rides– the very last was a disastrously messy trip to Martin’s Beauty Salon, but that’s another story for another day.

The cemetery is only a short drive away from the house, but going there always ended up being a half-day affair between the time it took to get everyone out the door and into the car, and then from the car to the edge of the cemetery where my great grandmother is buried. In this process, all sorts of problems and questions arose—whether to wear velcro sneakers or boots, whether to bring the cane or walker, how many times to check if the door is locked, who needs more legroom in the front seat, whether we should put the heat or the air conditioner on, and so on.

When we finally arrived at the headstone on that spring morning, we stood encircling it in silence for a few moments. Then Sophie began shuffling around in her purse. I thought she might be going in for a tissue or a kerchief, but nonchalantly, she pulled out a bouquet of dusty plastic flowers plucked freshly from one of her apartment shrines. I was happy to just lay the flowers down in front of the grave and say a little prayer, but she insisted on propping up the bouquet in the ground.

So as I was kneeling down discovering that the ground was still too frozen to stake them in the dirt, Olga was offering up her cane up as a tool to dig a little hole. When we made no progress with that, as the rubber base was making no dent in the ground at all, Sophie reached back into her purse and began fishing around once more. I was thinking about how miraculous it would have been if she was carrying around a trowel, but the item she pulled out was instead a fork.

And then seconds later I had one of those moments when you float outside of your body and observe yourself from a distance– there I was, crouched on the ground in this cemetery in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline, clawing at the icy earth with a dinner fork, planting a bouquet of plastic flowers.

Boyfriends

While Granny Mansion is something of a sorority house, a few men do hang around every so often. Aside from the occasional doctor or plumber, my dad, and Mrs Fruehauf’s sons, our other male visitors are mostly just boyfriends—mine, my sister’s, and Sophie’s.

My guy, Steve, is the bee’s knees. Heidi’s boyf Ben is also great, but Sophie’s boyfriend is a bit of a loser and we’re trying to get her to break it off with him. He’s a short, hunched over, greasy Romanian man who must be about 30 years younger than she is, and I don’t think their relationship is romantic. I see him come over on some Saturday afternoons, and Sophie tells me they sit at her kitchen table drinking cans of Budwieser. I have no idea what else they do, as she locks her door every time he’s here.

Once when I was gardening, I was after a trowel and knew she had one in her apartment. So I knocked on her door asking for it, but she refused to let me in—she actually started yelling at me to go away and leave her and her boyfriend alone. I tried explaining through the closed door that I just needed her to hand me the trowel, but she still refused to unlock the door. So I gave up and returned to the garden, only to see her, minutes later, quickly crack open her back window, chuck the trowel on the ground, and then slam the window shut.

Sophie may just enjoy the company of this man as a friend, or maybe she has feelings of affection toward him, but she does still go on dates at the Klubhaus with other men. And every time she meets one of my male friends she gets all vaclempt and giggly like a teenage girl. She’ll always be curious about them in the days after, and ask me questions like “Is dat fat boy mit dat nice hair gonna come over tomorrow?”

From all I’ve seen and heard, she’s always enjoyed spending time around men. But I get the feeling Mrs Fruehauf hates all men ever—many years ago she left her husband to raise her boys on her own because the man had trouble with a bottle, and she had no time for that. Olga is indifferent to men I think—her only real concerns about them are whether they speak German and whether they have beards. She loves German speakers, and she’s got a real problem with beards. My great grandmother did as well—I’ll never forget her constantly encouraging my mother to cut off my father’s beard in the middle of the night while he was sleeping.

Whenever Olga has an interaction with Steve, she always stares up at him with eyes intensely fixed on his beard. Often without words, she’ll start swiping the side of her face with her hand in a gesture to indicate that he needs to have a shave. Also, when the three of us are having conversations about other topics like groceries, the news, or the garden, she’ll interject to rattle off names and directions to old Ridgewood barbershops that she thinks he should visit, proving that through the whole chat she’s been dwelling on his beard.

But she’s been warming up to him quite a bit lately, as she’s now learning something that makes her very happy—he’s another person she can bully into doing the garbage.

Plastic Bags

Sophie has plenty of storage space throughout her apartment, with her several closets and dressers and cabinets, but she seems to like stashing things in unsuspecting places.

I once asked to borrow a frying pan, and to retrieve it she had to dig underneath her kitchen sink, behind a box of laundry detergent, some old towels, and a miniature bottle of Schnapps. When she eventually pulled it out, she had to spend some time untying the knots she’d made with the handles of each of the three plastic shopping bags encasing the frying pan. For safekeeping.

On another occasion, after I had just brought her some groceries, she was insisting on giving me a tip. I always tell her I don’t need a tip when I go grocery shopping, but she always insists. This time, she said she had it all ready in an envelope for me, but she was having trouble remembering where she put it. So I watched her pull out about six stuffed and knotted plastic bags from behind her armchair, and once she laid them all out on her couch, she started unknotting and going through one at a time. One bag had a purse in it, which actually had another smaller purse inside of it, one bag was full of sweaters, one had a pair of sneakers, and one was full of more plastic bags. She did end up finding the envelope with my tip, and I was thrilled to see that it was $5.50 all in coins.

I was recently chatting with my sister Heidi, who’s also living in Granny Mansion for the summer, and she told me how she had just found a plastic bag full of bras and underwear under a pillow on Sophie’s couch. When she asked Sophie what it was, Sophie replied, “My junk.” And when Heidi asked her why she needed it there, she didn’t have an answer.

Maybe to change into when needed?

Advice on Sleeping Well

For years, there’s been an unspoken open-door policy in this house. Meaning that most of the time, the doors to each of our apartments are kept unlocked (unless of course Sophie’s boyfriend is over or Olga is feeling moody). So naturally, barge-ins happen frequently.

Rarely are they hostile barge-ins; mostly they are just friendly check-ins for questions or to simply pass the time with someone else’s company. Although, Sophie has been known to hobble into Olga’s apartment enraged and hollering about a bowl Olga has been borrowing too long or how she’s still mad at Olga for always making Sophie chauffeur her around in her car twenty years ago, or something of the like.

Being on the top floor, Mrs Fruehauf and I are more or less safe from barge-ins from Sophie and Olga, as the trip up the stairs is too much of a biblical trek for the arthritic grannies below. But I feel no shame in barging in on Sophie or Olga whenever I please. When I barge in on them, I usually find them sitting in their respective armchairs, either watching tv, listening to the radio, nodding off to sleep, or staring blankly into space. Sometimes they will be up and about, futzing around their apartment, but usually I can count on them being parked in their armchairs.

My very favorite barge-in happened one afternoon last summer, when I needed to ask Sophie some important question about something or other. I could have just called her to ask, but it’s much faster for me to just fly down the stairs and right into her apartment than it is for her to get up and answer her phone. So as I barged in, I found her in her usual spot. But this time with something very strange going on.

She was sitting in her armchair with a towel over her head.

For a moment I was frightened, thinking she kicked the bucket and in her last few living moments attempted to cover her face with a veil, but when I asked her what she was doing, she grunted and said she was taking a nap. When I asked her why she needed a towel over her head for a nap, she answered, “I sleep better mit dat towel.”

Well I’ve never tried it, but maybe the lady’s onto something?

Granny Mansion Moments

As part of a summer project with some friends, I posted a Granny Mansion moment each day through the month of July on the CollaboratElaborate blog. The project was hugely successful and so much fun-- it was amazing to be involved in a project along with immensely talented writers and artists. I'll be gradually migrating some of the stories and photos over to this blog, so keep your eyes peeled!