In a "pen-sive" mood

I miss my grandma, still. She died on my wedding anniversary, over ten years ago, just three months after her 90th birthday party. I have a picture of myself, six months pregnant the third time around, posing with Grandma beside a four-level cake that looks like it might imminently start to slide off of the platforms separating the tiers. (It was a first attempt at building in cake.) I am not looking at it now, but it is in my head, the royal-blue suit that she wore on special occasions, a special-occasion corsage of pink flowers pinned to her breast, snowy hair roller-set in the old-lady style she had worn all the thirty years I knew her. She wears old teacher's spectacles, which means serviceable instead of fashionable, and she stands composed and looking peaceful. I know her mind is full of things, something like a running list of what to be thankful for. At least, I can imagine it so, since that's the type of sentiment that usually came out: she is thinking that it is so generous of all these family members to have come out to surprise her for a birthday, some from different states. She thinks the cake itself is so pretty (all pink, a color she likes) and that I must have gone to too much trouble to make it while being so busy with motherhood. There are four generations of us who love her in this room, and it is as much as a Yankee lady can do to keep her composure and smile for the camera.

The acute pain of her passing subsided at some point, and then the ache went away, too. It took me two birthdays to stop looking for a card from Grandma in the mailbox. Grandma wrote me letters from the time I was old enough to answer them, and correspondence was a thing we both treasured. Most times she gave advice where she deemed necessary, and a few times an admonishment, but even that would not deter me hoping for some further word. In the main, she wrote with a steadiness, a matter-of-fact outlook that was cheerful in the face of living. In college years particulary, where the culture seemed surreal to me much of the time, Grandma's latest visit to the Wade farm kitchen, to have her hair set while she visited over coffee and Mrs. Wade's blueberry muffins, was something solid to stand on.

What is it about that written word? In our time the loss of it is a keen one. I think that the civilizing power of writing one's thoughts to a dear one has something to do with concentration directed unselfishly. It is an effort to think of what news would be interesting, and what phraseology would entertain; nowadays everybody is out to take the effort out of communicating. You can only say so much, using your thumbs to text-speak. Of course, writing a letter is in effect having a one-sided conversation, but this allows for the completion of the thoughts without interruption. Over years, one learns to see what is between the lines written, too.

The other deficit I think we have suffered by the arrival of faxing and email, is the delight of anticipation. Having something to look forward to was always half of the fun, and it was good patience training, although I didn't realize that while it lasted.

My mom does not write letters, on some obscure sort of principle. And since she hardly had anything to vocalize to me other than the absolutely necessary in the years before I married and moved out, I despaired of ever getting to know her. Once from college, I sent a note home asking how to make her potato soup. In reply, Mom wrote the recipe, and below it three phrases (not complete sentences!) about some ordinary deeds at home, on the order of, "Rain all last week. Picked up beef today. Tomorrow weeding herb garden." And I just completely made that up, because I threw away the recipe long ago in favor of my own method, and the 'communication' was so toneless it defies recollection. I always admired my mom's handwriting, too, I just couldn't get her to use it on me.

Now and then, I weeded things out, and so I could cry now, not to have saved more of Grandma's letters. But I am thankful that I still have certain ones expressing joy at the birth of a great-grandchild, or thanking me for a gift (of handmade stationery, and written on same, the only piece she ever intended to use - to use it up would be a shame). I have the last letter she ever wrote to me, suffering the pain and weakness of stomach cancer and chemotheraphy, just long enough to express happiness in my news and her hope of a return to strength. I didn't keep Uncle Francis' letter about Grandma's condition just before my son's birth, which was barely two weeks before her death. I can remember it, even so.

The last time I saw Grandma was at that birthday party/surprise reunion, April 1, 2000. It was some weeks afterwards, that she saw a doctor about some vague symptoms, and was told that she had "a few cancer cells" in the lining of her stomach. A few rounds of chemotherapy should have her right again. My mom broke this to me over the telephone, as matter-of-fact carefully as possible, and I went into my panic mode: finishing the conversation in a matching, no-nonsense style, hanging up the phone, then hitting the floor. It was well into May before Grandma's treatments began, and I was more than a hour's drive from her, in another world of two toddlers and counting the weeks until delivery. In my mind but well to the back, shady understandings of chemo's effects convinced me that I couldn't see her. I wrote letters, weekly. Eventually, Uncle Francis read them to her to save her the strain. I read his letter that described her weight loss and her new turban, and the hospital bed in the front livingroom.

At the calling hours, Uncle Francis came straight for me, and gave me the long hug of a comrade-in-arms...after a few minutes he told me that Grandma had been glad to know that I had the son hoped for, though she had been too weak to read the birth announcement.

It is odd, the things that strike one. My mom, naturally reticent with me in all my growing-up years, is now Grandma Wilcox to my children. It is normal now, but at the first, it simply didn't fit. Children, with their oblivious nature, have a way of making things fit, though. They give my mom a hug and kiss at the end of a visit as part of their natural behavior, and I can see that she enjoys it. I haven't gotten that far yet, but I can appreciate that they are giving her what I give to them, so there is some sort of vicarious exchange going on.

I have seen it stated, that letters mingle souls, and I think that this is probably true, as much as kisses and hugs. And I think that the letters contain the complete package, and that it can all be lived again in the fading lines of perfect, schoolteacher penmanship.

I would like to know the person who first hit upon the idea of writing symbols to record thought. In one sense, he gave us the immortality that the human soul so craves. If I lost all my grandma's letters, I could still pass their contents to my children, and they to theirs, and so on...

I wonder whether he considered the substantiality of such a gift to his kind. One wonders.