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.