In the annual birthday memory self test failure, and the total mental blindspot that keeps me from using anyone of a number of technological aids to do the remembering, i am a big looser. But today Dean is the big winner. More importently then me remembering, he is going out on the town with his wife (who has been instructed to throw him around like a rag doll on the dance floor). Hell, by the time i find bandwidth and remember to post this he should be sitting down for dinner!
Archive for January, 2007
This is what was finally aproved for the Tribune.
My Grandmother died of congestive heart failure this afternoon. After shrugging off pneumonia this week. She was well over a hundred–she had a reached an age almost unbelivable. There seemed to be no pain.
With her passing my parents have become elderly, and I have become truely middle-aged. Paraphrasing one of my younger and far more eloquent cousins, we have moved from a world in which it was normal for your great grandmother to be alive down the streat to the world of the Nuclear Family. We have lost the one (albeit laconic) link to the maelstrom of fin de siecle 19th/early 20th century Eastern Europe. We lost a woman who traveled in time for over a hundred years. How the hell do you really measure time travel anyway? She came from a ruted dirt village without even coal, let alone gaslights. Anyone with a horse or dog could beat or kill you. She had the First World War fought in front of her parent’s home. She married my Grandfather, and they decided to get out of dodge…
Before she could even get to the getting as it were, she had to travel from the 17th to the 19th century, so she and my grandfather left europe, slowly moving from dirt track to gravel road and eventually to cobble stone. Then they picked up speed, moving from wood stove to coal stove, from wagon to train to coal fired steamer. Then they rocketed into the 20th century, just by landing in New York. Bright lights, big city. Get it through your heads: central heat, ice boxes, paved roads, autos, multistory buildings, heat and light, all were a 2 month trip for her. Electricity, even in the tenements! FLUSH TOILETS!
At that point there was too much to take in, and things slowed down. she had two kids, twenty years later her daughter started having grandchildren, twenty years after that her son started having grandchildren, and 7 years after that her first set of grandchildren started having great grand children. When she died she had great great grandchildren.
She lived a long, long full life. One that was full of story at least in scope and scale, if not in the details. Not that she ever shared any: her answer to questions about every amazing thing she ever witnessed was laconic to say the least (when pressed about what happaned to her during the first world war were typical: “It was terrible! i don’t want to talk about it! Who would want to know such things!”). My sister’s kids will never get the chance to try and pull those details out of her. Because her story is over.
