Chit Chat

Watermelon

Eating has always been a ceremonious affair around here. I have many vivid memories of visiting the grannies at this house as a kid, and being bullied into eating way more portions of German food than I could ever ask for. Sophie and Olga’s mother, who died a few years ago when she was 103, used to serve wursts and krauts and kartoffels and streudels in piles that were higher than my head, while yelling at me and my sisters to “Essen! Essen! Essen!” All the while I couldn’t wait to fly out of there and play my Gameboy on the car ride home.

Back then I never dreamed that one day I’d be living here as an adult, being the one responsible for buying all the food. The massive feasts don’t really happen anymore though, as Olga’s not really able to use the stove or oven unsupervised now. Sophie is still able to cook for herself a bit– she mainly subsists on Sprite, Chips Ahoy, fried chicken, boiled potatoes, and the occasional can of Budweiser or cake from the bakery around the corner. I know Mrs Fruehauf is still at it in her kitchen because I can always smell something like cabbage or some kind of roast coming from her apartment, but she never invites anyone in to join her. She stopped being friendly with Sophie and Olga about twenty years ago.

At any rate, the moments when I walk in Olga’s door with grocery bags in my hands are glorious ones for her. She loves going through all the bags as if she was uncovering treasure– when she finds a loaf of bread or a half gallon of orange juice her eyes light up, and she’ll oooooh and aaaah at a bag of grapes or apples. She’s thrilled at the sight of her sugar free cookies and deeply pleased at a jar of instant coffee.

But the real treasure to her, the one that makes her cry out in joy and head straight for a knife and cutting board– watermelon.

The other day I was dropping some groceries off to her at around 8pm, which was right about when she was nodding off to sleep for the night. So she was very very grumpy when she heard me letting myself into her apartment and making a bit of a commotion with keys and plastic bags. She hobbled out of her bedroom half asleep and grumbling with the sourest of sour looks on her face. I tried dangling the loaf of bread in front of her to cheer her up, but she was too grumpy to care, and she didn’t even take a second look when I was waving around the cookies.

Then I pulled out the big red and green kahuna, and suddenly she was smiling as if she’d just been given hundreds of thousands of dollars. Seconds after seeing it, she was fishing around for a knife and cutting board, and before I could finish taking the plastic wrap off the voluptous half -melon, she was slicing in with laughter and shrieks of happiness.

The next morning, only a third of the thing was left.

Have a Seat

The Washing Machine

On the list of Granny Mansion’s most cherished appliances, a close runner up to Sophie’s 1970′s home perm hair bowl would be our old Maytag washing machine. Set up where a dishwasher might typically be in a kitchen, the washing machine is rigged to drain into Olga’s sink and is about as loud as a helicopter.

“Oyyyy she shakes,” as Sophie observes.

It once shook so much that it tipped over in a flood of water and suds, I’ve heard, so Olga’s taken up a habit of clutching the machine on both sides during the spin cycle with the intention of suppressing the vibration. When she does this, she naturally begins shaking as well, and seeing her wrinkly, flabby body jiggling to the tune of the spin cycle is something I will remember and love always.

Throughout the entire rest of the cycle, she sits about 3 feet away from the machine, watching it with very intense eyes, just waiting for her cue.

Olga’s also one of those old country folk who believe in more bleach always. Several times she’s decided to pour a little splash into my loads when I’m not looking, and as a result, I’ve ended up with a number of shirts having that splotchy tie-dyed look that I was going for in 7th grade. Pretty much all of her sheets, mumus, and underwear are paper thin and snow white from years of continual bleaching.

And though the washing machine has been well-used for decades, we’ve never had a dryer in the house. There hasn’t really been a need. The grannies are content to string up their undies on clotheslines out the back windows to wave in the wind like flags of old eastern European pride.

Shrines

Though the grannies and I spend our days in different ways—I commute to Manhattan every day, Sophie takes daily trips to the cornerstore to buy Sprite and Chips Ahoy, Olga hasn’t left the house in about 5 years except to go to the emergency room, and Mrs Fruehauf takes daily trips to the neighborhood senior center to play Bingo except on the days she takes her senior bus trips to the casino in Yonkers—we are also one in the same. We’ve all got very German last names, and likewise we’ve all got a certain fondness for pilly cardigans, big eyeglasses, a good kraut.

And lately it seems I’ve picked up a habit of making shrines throughout my apartment, as is very characteristic for a grandmother. A shrine of candles and dried flowers here, a shrine of an old typewriter and photos there, a shrine of bamboo plants and mini books on top of the toilet. I assume it won’t be long until I’m taking inspiration from Sophie and shrinemaking with baby Jesuses, rosary beads, Christmas ornaments, pieces of mail from a decade ago.

One of Sophie’s proudest shrines is the row of a dozen fake roosters lining the top edge of her refrigerator, in size order. I think she’s proud of how, over the years, she’s managed to collect 12 different sized rooster figurines, some even with real chicken feathers. Another notable shrine in the house is Olga’s neatly ordered collection of pill bottles and photo frames atop her kitchen hutch—the wonder of which is that the photos in the frames change on the reg. This isn’t because they’re digital photo frames, but because Olga switches out photos two or even three times a day depending on her mood.

So in any given frame, in the morning there might be an old photo of her sister Sophie, but if in the afternoon she gets into an argument with Sophie over something like a carton of milk, she might change the photo to an old portrait of their mother. If seeing her mother makes Olga too emotional in the evening, she might change it to a photo of her old garden or even back to a photo of Sophie.

And at the end of the day, whether I’ve learned by example or whether it’s in our family blood to cling to relics from the past and collect them in piles around our apartments, this habit of shrinemaking doesn’t seem to be one I’ll kick anytime soon.

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.