Love Grandma's Open Salon Blog

When You Are Discouraged or Feel Bad

Mon, 7 Sep 2009 17:09:34 -0400

I knew I shouldn’t have held my breath after asking my mom to start rummaging through her boxes for letters, writings, and other random jots by my grandma. Not only is she perpetually exhausted from work and life, but she’s almost as disorganized as I am. That’s why I was so surprised last week when she produced a few of my grandma’s cards during our lunch together. A half-sized manila envelope postmarked August 30, 2006, caught my eye. I opened it up. Inside, I found a white cardboard CD mailer with an unpostmarked 87-cent Albert Sabin stamp and a return address that read “CALVARY CHAPEL.” On the outside of the mailer in blue ballpoint pen, my grandma had written the following note to my mother:

This is not from Calvary Chapel. It’s Melissa’s ta CD, which I think you will love. It would be a good thing to play when you are discouraged or feel bad. I played it at least ten times, myself. Your library card is enclosed, also.

I looked inside. There was a white paper CD sleeve with a disc I had burned for my grandma in 2005. The red- and green-Sharpied text read:

Women in Leadership

05-04-05

“Jefferson Daily”

Interview Segment

My heart fluttered. I’d forgotten about sending my grandma that CD. We never got a chance to discuss it, so it took me by complete surprise to read her reaction to the content. I still don’t know if my mom has actually listened to the disc. She has a habit of putting things like that off, waiting for the perfect moment, which never quite seems to arrive. I suffer from putoffism myself, so I empathize completely. But to think my grandma had played it repeatedly, had actually chosen to listen to it when she felt “discouraged”—that was an awesomely humbling revelation.

The disc contained an excerpt from the May 4, 2005, Jefferson Daily show on Jefferson Public Radio. As presenters at an upcoming conference, a psychotherapist named Taffy and I were being interviewed by Jessica Robinson about the changing roles of women in society, the workplace, and the home. Less than twenty-four hours before the interview, a friend who was one of the conference organizers had called me up, asking if I would be willing to appear on the show. I hesitated. I’d never done anything like that before. I really wasn’t thrilled about the idea of listening to my trembling voice on the radio as I publicly humiliated myself. On the other hand, maybe it would be fun. It was pre-recorded, so any particularly embarrassing moments could be edited out if necessary. And I knew the topic of my conference talk backwards and forwards: “Don’t Think of a Patriarch: Nurturant vs. Strict Models of Leadership,” based on the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent paradigms George Lakoff outlines in Don’t Think of an Elephant and Moral Politics. I was already feeling nervous about the upcoming presentation. Maybe this would be good practice. “Oh, all right,” I said, a small flock of butterflies alighting in my stomach. “I’ll do it.”

That night, I was too anxious to sleep. Well, I guess I got a few hours. But I remember waking at the crack of dawn, thoughts racing through my head almost faster than I could type. Hundreds of pages of readings crystallized for me as I bashed out a surprisingly coherent synthesis of my conclusions. I’ll include them below, partly as an archival curiosity, but also because the Nurturant Parent model so perfectly describes both my mother’s and grandmother’s parenting styles that this document may offer insights into their personalities.

The interview was alarmingly early—something god-awful like 7:15 or 7:30. I raced through my morning routine and stopped at the library coffee shop to pick up a Bunny Hop (two ounces of Java Juice, some melted caramel, a handful of ice, and a bucket of half-and-half topped by a dollop of whipped cream).

Yes, I was nervous, but it turned out my second hunch was also right. It was fun. Jessica, Taffy, Deltra (the Women’s Resource Center coordinator), and I basically just sat around discussing feminism, sociopolitics, and history in a little office crammed with radio equipment. Poor Deltra got cut out of the final version when the half-hour discussion got edited down to five-and-a-half minutes. And it was strange hearing some of our statements out of context, but Jessica did a nice job. For the curious, below is an mp3¹ of the excerpt that played on the radio just hours after our initial conversation, starting with Taffy’s account of what it was like growing up as a woman in an earlier, more misogynistic generation (also available here in case the embedded version fails to play):

What does any of this have to do with my grandma? Good question, really. Except this interview featuring fragments of my haphazard musings about hegemony and women meant something to my grandma. And it’s no surprise, considering she forged a life of independence, leaning against the predefined roles for women she’d found so suffocating. Her unconventional interest in tools and wiring led her supervisors to appoint her the first woman electrician at the shipyard where she worked during World War II. Later, in the fifties, my grandma boldly divorced her husband, choosing to raise three children on her own rather than remain in an oppressive relationship. This meant securing a full-time job that paid below minimum wage ($1/hour instead of $1.20/hour) to support her daughter and two sons. Single mothers were a relatively rare occurrence in the fifties, and it took chutzpah to opt for this financially painful, physically exhausting, and socially ostracizing path. But she somehow managed to balance work, motherhood, and domestic responsibilities. And amazingly well, too, my mom would attest.

My grandma even helped to raise me, and I far preferred her nurturant parenting to the strict patriarch I was later forced to live with when my mom married my biological father. Except for a kindergarten stint in Massachusetts, I spent the first six years of my life living with my mom and grandma in southern California. It was as wonderful a childhood as I could hope for. One of my favorite memories is of waking up with the sun and racing into the living room to tumble into my grandma’s lap. She was the only other one awake that early, and we would sit together in the plush, rocking recliner ulphostered in an autumn-colored floral print. At six a.m., Felix the Cat would come on, and we’d watch the Professor get into all kinds of fixes as the annoyingly gregarious Felix repeatedly dashed to the rescue of his enemy.

Afterward, my grandma might make me Cream of Wheat or oatmeal. Sometimes, my Uncle Bobby, who lived in a detached studio in the backyard, would come in and attempt to make pancakes. My grandma and mom would sometimes tease him about his lumpy, rubbery discs, but I still enjoyed eating them with real maple syrup. Bobby, the mad scientist hermit, would bring his breakfast back to the studio he had set up as a chemistry lab for his experiments (one of which later resulted in an explosion that liberated Bobby of the two middle fingers on his left hand, but that’s another story).

The fragrance of sautéing onions, peppers, garlic, and mushrooms would fill the kitchen as my mother improvised a scrumptious vegetarian omelette. She and my grandma let me steal sips of coffee in between drinks of my Postum, the substitute my mom prepared to keep me from getting addicted to coffee. The three of us would sit together at the dining table, eating and talking and laughing, imagining what our day was going to be like.

I started getting nostalgic for Felix the Cat iconography a couple of years ago. I purchased a Felix bowling-style purse on ebay, as well as a yellow lunchbox purse that made me think of Felix’s bag of tricks. This nostalgia coincided with memories that had suddenly started flooding my mind out of nowhere, causing me to start writing a poem about my grandma three weeks before her stroke. The day after I started the poem, I received her last letter to me. It was as if we were somehow connected to one another’s thoughts, even though we hadn’t spoken for a while.

That December, I realized it would be the first Christmas I hadn’t spent time searching for the perfect gifts for my grandma—usually Jeeves and Wooster books in whatever forms I could find (CDs, cassettes, paperbacks, hardbacks). On December 12, I came across an item on ebay that was an unbelievably appropriate symbol of both my grandma and our relationship—a pin showing Felix the Cat standing in a crossword puzzle! My grandma was the veritable queen of crossword puzzling. I had been tempted by the allure of crosswords myself. Two or three times I had obsessively attacked them, learning enough about myself to know I would need to wait until retirement before allowing myself this dangerously addictive diversion.

That $1.99 pin was the last present I ever bought my grandma. That’s how Michael described it in the story he told after I showed him the ebay listing: the last gift. I can’t remember the details of the story—just that it was so beautiful, it made both of us cry.

I wear the Felix crossword pin on my black hat, which goes into regular circulation in the fall and winter. Every time I straighten my hat in the mirror and notice the pin, I think about those dawns when I’d leap onto my grandma’s lap, our voices joining as we sang the opening theme together:

Felix the Cat, the wonderful, wonderful cat

Whenever he gets in a fix, he reaches into his bag of tricks

Felix the Cat, the wonderful, wonderful cat

You'll laugh so much your sides will ache

Your heart will go pitter pat

Watching Felix, the wonderful cat.

Footnotes

1. I just inserted the CD in my computer to rip the audio for this post, and the disc was identified as Somme shit2 with an album title of “Marajuana Violations” by Dj Dimeyes. Wow. That is hilarious. I’ve never even heard of that. I can’t help laughing when I think of my grandma telling my mom to play Somme shit “when you are discouraged or feel bad. I played it at least ten times, myself.”

2. This is the title iTunes mysteriously derived from its online database. I tried finding a copy of this song online so I could listen to it, but alas, I was unsuccessful.

Addendum

Notes on “Don’t Think of a Patriarch: Nurturant vs. Strict Models of Leadership”

As women have made the transition to leadership positions, they have tended to unconsciously adopt established models of authority.

In our culture, hegemony has traditionally taken a patriarchal form, or what cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the Strict Father model.

The Strict Father model seats the locus of power with the patriarch of the family.

This model emphasizes obedience to authority enforced through punishment.

The purpose of punishment (“tough love”) is to develop self-discipline and self-reliance in the child (i.e., character).

Because this is a dangerous and difficult (i.e., competitive) world, it is crucial that the child obey the father, who is responsible for supporting and protecting the family, as well as for setting and enforcing the rules.

This model gets linked up with Adam Smith’s view of capitalism, which says that by everyone pursuing their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand.

Therefore, by pursuing your own profit, you are helping everyone.

This is how morality gets linked to prosperity: the pursuit of self-interest, which requires self-discipline and self-reliance.

Ultimately, this model seeks to control the child through fear.

Cultural institutions tend to reinforce this model: school, religion, sports, corporations, government, the media—all of these benefit from obedience to authority, controlled through the mechanism of fear of the “other,” as well as the pursuit of self-interest.

In “A Nation Deceived,” Andrew Bard Schmookler discusses how fear is used to control the populace.

Lakoff argues that fear activates the Strict Father model in the mind, causing what Schmookler describes as a loss of tolerance for ambiguity.

This leads to black-and-white thinking.

Because we are afraid, we crave certainty, since uncertainty magnifies our sense of vulnerability.

This makes a leader who shows no doubt, who doesn’t even think twice before acting, comforting to those conditioned by the Strict Father model.

The more afraid we are, the more irrational and therefore the more manipulable we become.

The Strict Father model parallels the Authoritarian model presented by Diane Baumind.

Like the Strict Father model, the Authoritarian model attempts to control the child’s behavior in accordance with an absolute set of standards.

It values obedience, respect for authority, work, tradition, and preservation of order.

The Authoritarian model discourages verbal give-and-take between parent and child.

Interestingly enough, studies show that the children raised under the Authoritarian model tend to be aggressive and out of control, have low self-esteem, and exhibit less evidence of “conscience.”

Because their sense of right and wrong was taught to them through punishment rather than communication, their moral orientation tends to be external.

The temper-tantrum–throwing children on exhibit in shows like Nanny 911 are prime examples of the terrors that can result from the Strict Father model of parenting. It is only when the nanny teaches the parents how to communicate with their children and the kids develop a sense of collaborative responsibility for the household that the children become calmer and more respectful.

These principles can be easily mapped to the employer-employee relationship through the Work Reward Metaphor.

The Work Reward Metaphor states that the employer is a legitimate authority; the employee is subject to that authority; work is obedience to the employer’s commands; and pay is the reward the employee receives for being obedient.

As with parents and children, this approach tends to engender mistrust, resentment, and lack of respect on the part of the employees for the authoritarian employer, particularly when that Strict Father leadership is practiced by a narcissist.

Bruce Gregory discusses the threat narcissism poses to sustainability in his article, “The Impact of Narcissism on Leadership and Sustainability.”

Narcissists are addicted to a complete domination over the present space or situation, which derives from their sense of grandiosity and craving for power.

This is the Strict Father or Authoritarian model taken to destructive extremes.

In my experience, some of the most salient examples of Strict Father leadership happen to be women.

Often, women who have risen to positions of leadership have acquired that status by playing the game—competition, survival of the fittest, etc.—which has further conditioned them to model the Strict Father paradigm.

Instead of falling into existing patterns of leadership, however, I would argue that women move to redefine dysfunctional power structures in the workplace.

This is where George Lakoff’s analysis of the Nurturant Parent comes into play.

Unlike the Strict Father model, the Nurturant Parent model is gender-neutral.

This model emphasizes love, empathy, and responsibility.

Other values that follow from empathy and responsibility are:

Protection

To be and encourage others to be happy and fulfilled

Freedom

Opportunity and prosperity [because they facilitate freedom]

Fairness

Open, two-way communication

Community-building, service, and cooperation

Trust

Ultimately, it comes down to building a culture of mutual respect, open communication, and trust.

The Nurturant Parent model is similar to Diane Baumrind’s Authoritative and Harmonious models.

In the Authoritative model, there is an expectation for mature behavior from the child and clear standard-setting.

There is firm enforcement of the rules through commands and sanctions when necessary.

This model encourages the child’s independence and individuality.

Open communication is key, as is the recognition of the rights of both the parents and children.

Unlike the rebellious, detached children raised under the Strict Father model, children raised under the Authoritative or Harmonious model tend to be independent, able to function in both the cognitive and social spheres, socially responsible, and self-confident.

In the workplace, the Metaphor of Work Exchange applies.

Work is an object of value possessed by the worker.

Employment is the voluntary exchange of the worker’s work for the employer’s money.

Work is a matter of trade, not obedience.

Mutual respect, collaboration, creativity, and trust tend to distinguish a workplace influenced by the Nurturant Parent model.

Note: If you missed the previous posts and would like to read more about my grandma, links to earlier chapters are available in the left-hand column.

The Snail, the Skunk, and the Young Girl Caterpillar

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:08:34 -0400

Dedicated to Robin, who received blessed news today, and her Crepe Myrtle blossomed its first pink flower

This is a relatively lighthearted post featuring my grandma and mom reading poems they wrote as children. It’s from the last video I shot of my grandma, taken while she visited on April 20, 2007. A few weeks before, my grandma and I had been talking on the phone, and she mentioned having found some poems she, my mom, and I had all written as children, ranging from the ages of eight to ten. I mentioned how much I would love to read them, and, amazingly, my grandma mailed them to me within the week, along with one of her short stories and some political articles by my Uncle Bobby. My grandma said how impressed she was with Bobby’s writing and that he’s been getting better, and I asked if she’d told him that. She said no, and I encouraged her to. I wonder if she ever did.

Here are the texts of my grandma’s poems:

“The Snail”

A pleasant life the snail leads

Down among the grass and weeds

Dreaming of the mug

Of a slug

“The Skunk”

A little skunk sat on a stone

Wondering why he was all alone

Clear enough, I did not know

To tell him that he had B - O!

“The Caterpillar”

There once was a young girl caterpillar

Eating flowers and veggies to fill ’er,

She aimed to become a butterfly later

But a bird came pecking around and ate her.

I think I remember my grandma saying she had written “The Caterpillar” more recently, attempting to duplicate the style of her childhood poetry. During that phone conversation, she recited it to me, and we discussed the feminist implications of the girl caterpillar being prevented from becoming a butterfly by the aggressive, sexist world. Of course, I was overanalyzing it, but it was fun explicating my grandma’s poem with her. Especially since I know she had felt trapped in a gender that precluded her participation in more male-oriented roles. Some of her happiest years were during World War II because that artificial barrier was temporarily removed and she had an opportunity to work as an electrician in a shipyard. She relished the freedom to work in a “man’s” field and was devastated when the war ended and women were told to go back to their kitchens.

And now, here are the texts of my mom’s poems:

“The Poor Little Elf”

The little elf stood on his toes

A minute later, he fell on his nose

“Ouch!” He said. “I fell on my head!”

Next, he fell on his knee

Then he lost his house key

Then someone stepped on his house

Probably some big ol’ mouse

But he found another house

That wasn’t stepped on by a mouse

“The Stork”

The stork brings babies

But he doesn’t bring rabies

He has a long, slender long beak

It’s very shiny and sleek

“Cheer Up”

Cheer up

Have a cup

Of champagne

Join a campaign

“Stamp Collection”

A stamp collection is a prized thing

You love to sing

When you put the last stamp in

You get goosebumps on your skin!

“The Little Pink Flower”

I see a little pink flower

It would taste sort of sour

But it smells so sweet

It makes a bird sing tweet

Although it grows from the ground

It doesn’t make a sound

Its leaves are such a pretty green

You can’t see it good through a screen

It seems appropriate that my mom wrote about empathy, optimism, and the sweet beauty of little pink flowers. With her artistic, sensitive soul and delicate demeanor, she is indeed a little pink flower.

As my grandma says, “See, that’s all.”

Note: If you missed the previous posts and would like to read more about my grandma, links to earlier chapters are available in the left-hand column.

Finding Their Way Home: The Preview

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:08:17 -0400

When we set out on a road trip to my grandma’s house five years ago, we had no idea what the fruits of that afternoon would be. My mom had driven out before us and was sitting in the garden with my grandma when we pulled into the driveway. My Uncle Bobby was making a racket in the kitchen as he completed the mise en place for a late afternoon meal.

Michael and I had just celebrated our twelfth anniversary. Not ones to splurge on extravagances, we persuaded ourselves to purchase a special gift in honor of the occasion. It required going deeper into debt, but it’s something we had been longing to own for years, ever since we first dreamed about making documentaries: a videocamera.

I still remember the epiphany. It was the summer of 1998, and we were driving a U-Haul through northern California after a failed attempt at moving to San Francisco. That’s an excruciating—and excruciatingly long—story, so I won’t go into it now. Michael and I had stopped to eat at Wendy’s in some small town on our way to Oregon. I think it was Weed. After climbing back into the U-Haul cab, one of us, I’m not sure who, brought up the idea of making documentaries about ordinary people. Like the cashier at Wendy’s. I don’t know what it was that struck us about her. Perhaps it was her perfect everydayness, her quotidian plainness. A little plump, dishwater blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. Nice. Quiet. American girl.

The ordinary was fresh in my mind, as I’d recently written a piece about it for a collection of essays on words, published by the now-defunct Santa Barbara Review Publications. In the essay, I quote one of my journal entries from 1993: “My characters are the ordinary and the common, the oft-neglected and forgotten, the vessels of beauty and originality that go unnoticed or ignored.” This longtime penchant for the ordinary is partly what drew us to our favorite artists—Eavan Boland (favorite poet), Brian Friel (favorite playwright), Mike Leigh (favorite director), and Cy Twombly (favorite visual artist).

We didn’t have the term for it then, but we later realized what these portraits of ordinary people should be called: home documentaries. Home docs for short. Like the subjects themselves, the videos would be humble and unpretentious, shot on a run-of-the-mill mini-DV camera. No tripod. No lighting. No wireless or boom mics. Just me and a crappy videocamera.

Six years after the epiphany, that crappy, blessed videocamera for which we are profoundly grateful came into our lives. We’d only had it a few days, and I had shot maybe five minutes’ worth of experimental footage around the apartment. When the day came to drive out to my grandma’s, I grabbed the still camera (which only has enough memory to hold about 24 photos) and the videocamera, with no real conscious intentions in mind. I just knew I wanted to bring them. Later, I would find out why.

I caught snippets of the road trip along the way: stills of blue sky and clouds, forests fringed with magnificent redwoods, schoolbus parking lots, and passing semis, lumber in tow. Every time the camera ran out of memory, I had to delete photos to make room for more. Until there were no more pictures I was willing to delete. So I moved on to the videocamera. About half an hour before reaching my grandma’s, we stopped at Taco Bell and sat eating in the parking lot. While Michael finished his burrito, I turned on the camera. I noticed there was a seagull roosting on top of the KFC/Taco Bell sign. I zoomed in. It wasn’t a very good lens, so the video started dancing out of focus whenever I got too close. But I experienced a stirring sense of wonder as I drew impossibly close to the seagull, whose darting, curious eyes made her seem eerily aware of my voyeuristic presence hundreds of feet away.

During the last leg of the journey, I shot random footage of the ocean, the guard rails, the small town where my grandma lived. I put the camera away just before our arrival. Now I almost wish I hadn’t. It’s those unrecorded moments that are gray spots in my mind. I remember walking with my grandma as she gave me a tour of the tiny house, but I cannot remember what she said. I know there was something about the exhibition of works on paper Michael was having that summer. And her mild embarrassment at the messy state of her cramped home. And her garden. Her beloved, cherished garden, which brought her a deep sense of joyful peace.

It was our first time visiting the home my grandma had moved into over a decade before. We rarely travel, so it took us five years to make the long drive there after moving to Oregon. We can never bring ourselves to abandon the creatures who have come to depend on us, so every journey must end back in our own apartment that night, caring for our animal children. Travel is also challenging for Michael because of his Asperger’s. And we’re generally too obsessed with our creative projects to do anything but work when we have the opportunity to take vacation.

Workaholic that I am, I managed to bring our creative projects with us, while hardly realizing it was happening. After about ten minutes of catching up with my grandma, Uncle Bobby, and mom, we decided to drive to the beach. As we pulled into the sandy lot beside the driftwood-littered shore, I reached down and picked up the videocamera.

Michael climbing on the driftwood tree

Only I didn’t tell anyone it was a videocamera. My mom and grandma just assumed it was a still camera, and I didn’t contradict them. I just started shooting. And everyone went along being themselves, none the wiser. My mom eventually figured it out, but by then, she was acclimated, so she remained unselfconscious. My grandma and Bobby didn’t seem to care much one way or the other, and Michael was his quiet, artistic self despite being in on the secret.

Bobby making a funny face

Nothing really extraordinary happened that afternoon. We took a walk on the beach, conversed in the garden, and enjoyed a supper prepared by Bobby. It wasn’t until Michael and I got home and watched the footage a few days later that we realized this record of an afternoon at my grandma’s was a surprisingly coherent narrative. Most striking was the number of compelling themes that emerged in our conversations—particularly tying stories about insects into themes of family, aging, home, mutability, and friendship. Michael, who is the most demanding critic I know, said he thought the footage was actually good enough to run as is, sans editing, even. That sent me off on the idea of doing an as-is documentary series. But that, again, is another story.

I did a rough cut of the documentary in iMovie in time for my thirtieth birthday, so that was satisfying. I had selected the score from Michael’s existing compositions, and he was rather dismayed when he saw pieces intended to stand alone being paired with video. I would later be glad of his disappointment, however, because three years after the video was first shot, Michael composed a hauntingly exquisite score for Finding Their Way Home. Meanwhile, we embarked on the editing and post-production process.

Mom sitting in the garden

During the summer of 2007, we zealously attacked the documentary, with hopes of finishing a rough cut in time for my mom’s birthday in October. We could scarcely wait for my grandma to watch it. I told her about the beautiful, poignant score Michael had composed for it and said we were getting close. Almost close enough to begin sharing. But not close enough to finish before it was too late.

Just three hours before receiving the phone call, we had been immersed in editing Finding Their Way Home. So it felt like we had spent the entire day with my grandma when my mom called to tell us she’d had a stroke. It was strangely incongruous to think about having just watched my grandma playfully drawing faces in the sand while she lay in a coma nearly 200 miles away.

Grandma remembering something sad

After my grandma departed the soft animal of her body on Tuesday morning, September 25, we didn’t know if we’d ever be able to watch the footage again. We roiled in a sad-sick brew of grief and guilt and regret and heartbreak that kept us paralyzed for weeks. We soon realized if we didn’t dive right back into Finding Their Way Home, we might never be able to bring ourselves to finish it.

Opening the file for the first time and seeing my grandma’s mischievous smile nearly burst our hearts with bittersweet sadness. But it was also a profound gift. The more time we spent with my grandma on screen, the more healing we experienced. Only she could make us laugh like that. Medicinal, indeed.

We did manage to finish a rough cut in time for my mom’s birthday, but not until the following year. We found that, however healing, the grief was still too fresh, so we temporarily turned to other projects until summer 2008. My mom cried when I gave her the DVD for her birthday last October. Only she couldn’t bring herself to watch it. She still hasn’t. I guaranteed she would laugh more than she cries, but that hasn’t made her any more ready to watch it. Which is fine, because we still had a lot more polishing to do.

And polish we did—through November, and December, and early January. On January 5, 2009, we burned a master copy. Three days later, the brand-new Seagate hard drive we had transitioned to during Thanksgiving weekend failed. We lost two months’ worth of work on the documentary. When I called Seagate to inquire about data recovery, they transferred me to their subsidiary company, which provides this service at a cost. $1,700 to be exact. This despite what we later learned: that defective firmware had rendered the drive unrecognizable, and the failure was occurring in over a third of these models. The good news is, the data is supposedly intact, just stuck on an invisible drive.

So once again, Finding Their Way Home lay dormant. We were faced with either recreating two months’ worth of work from our last backed up copy (stupidly, I had performed a backup prior to the crash—but to an archives folder on the same hard drive!) or doing battle with Seagate, a task I would typically undertake with vigor. The idea of my worst fear coming true, however—the inaccessibility of our creative data—had so deflated my spirit, I could not bring myself to pursue it. At least right away. So we turned to editing footage for other, shorter home documentaries.

Then, in the spring, we had another technical crisis. Our old Mac experienced a meltdown. One of the two CPUs appeared to be failing, or perhaps it just looked that way because of a faulty system upgrade. Either way, the computer was unable to make it past the gray screen without hiccuping indefinitely. Since 98 percent of our time is spent working on creative projects on the computer, we made the rather desperate decision to buy an iMac a few days later. We will be paying off the debt for months, but we were able to resume work within the week.

The software, however, was another matter entirely. We spent weeks searching for the installation discs for various applications, including Final Cut Express. In the instances where we found the discs, we had difficulty tracking down the serial number. Final Cut, which Michael had purchased for my birthday several years prior, proved exceptionally elusive.

So the summer vacation we intended to spend working on the documentary was instead spent on other creative projects, mostly writing. That and the quicksand vortex otherwise known as OS. Now our vacation is over, and we’re still prevented from working on the documentary. The wait has been almost unbearable. Then last week, we found a discounted version of the latest Final Cut Express, and we somehow cobbled enough together to order it. A couple of months too late, perhaps, but we take comfort in knowing the software is en route. Scheduled to arrive, appropriately, on our seventeenth anniversary this Tuesday, August 18.

Enough months have passed that we are actually excited about working on the documentary afresh. Instead of seeing it as an attempt to laboriously reconstruct two months’ worth of lost labor, we are focusing on the opportunity to create a newly inspired work of art.

In the following letter to her sister, my grandma talks about the children’s book it took her years to finish. She wasn’t about to give up just because the first publisher she sent her manuscript to rejected it. Like the documentary we dedicated to her, “It was too much work to just let it lay.”

October 31, 2000

Dear Beth,

I’m the poorest of letter writers. Well, once I start I tend to go on and on. It’s just starting that I’m so poor at.

I talked to Angela yesterday and she seems worried about you. She said you’re not doing so well. Of course, now I’m worried too. Please keep up the fight and get well. I’ll pray for you.

I expect you know Angela is in Eugene now, renting a room for herself and her dog. At least the room is for her. The dog stays outside. I think she’ll be here on the weekend to pick up her cat.

I’m taking care of her cat, Peanut, a lovely and loving animal. He stayed under my bed for about two weeks, just making secret visits out to eat and go potty. At last he decided Bobby and I weren’t cat-killers, and he came out to eat, go potty, and be petted. Now he sleeps on top of my bed, and often cuddles up to me, if I happen to be in my bed. I’m there a lot.

I think I told you I was having an operation. It worked, but boy, am I tired! I’m being bored a lot, because when I’m tired, I don’t do anything much. My eyes get tired reading, because of those cataracts. I guess I’ll go to the eye doctor to check again whether he thinks I’m ready yet for them to be removed. I didn’t want to get my eyes checked until I was sure I wouldn’t die from the operation. I didn’t, as I said.

I’m making a cross-stitch picture for Steve and Roberta. It’s their last year’s Christmas present. (I’m behind). It took me months to get a new needle, since Gold Beach doesn’t seem to have the right kind of needle. I finally got some in Medford, when I went there for Wendy’s birthday. Needles disappear always, but now I have a large enough supply to last another year.

Is this letter making you tired? I don’t think it’s interesting, but I’ll go on.

It was really nice to have Angela stay with us for a while. I hadn’t seen her since she was about two. She and Margie were so funny then. They reminded me of Budge and Toddy. It’s tragic that she got Crohn’s disease. She’s such a nice person to have to deal with that. She gets pretty discouraged sometimes. When I talked to her yesterday, she hadn’t been feeling well, at all.

She said she really likes Eugene. In parts of it, she feels like she’s in Wisconsin. I guess if we hadn’t been born in Reno, we would have been born in Eugene, where Mom and Daddy planned to live after they got married. Mother said the preacher that married them liked them so much, he asked them to stay and take care of his house while he went to some religious conference somewhere. They liked Reno so much, they decided to stay. I don’t know if she told you about that, but it’s something I remember her telling me. I wish I knew more, but at the time she felt like telling me things, I wasn’t so interested. At least I remembered a few things.

Did I tell you I finished my book? I submitted a couple of chapters to Simon and Schuster, but they weren’t interested. I will, some day, submit it to another publisher. It was too much work to just let it lay. After all, I started it in 1993, I think. I didn’t work on it all the time. Just in spurts. I can’t concentrate on one thing long enough to accomplish much. I think I would be a good writer if I could carry things through. At least, I finished my book, if nothing else. I don’t know how many things I’ve started and didn’t finish in my life, so I am proud of my book.

You can lay down now, or lie down. My teachers never could teach me which was right. I have finished this letter.

Remember, you have to get well. It’s important.

Note: If you missed the introductory essay and would like to read more about my grandma, you can do so here. Future posts will be added to the list in the left-hand column as they become available.

I Hereby Resolve to Write to You, Especially When I Die

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 21:08:48 -0400

That’s what my grandma wrote to her sister, Beth, five years, five months, and twenty days before her death.

I hereby resolve (almost) to write to you, Harry and Jack more often, and especially when I die.

These words are characteristic of her black sense of humor. She savored language and possessed an understated Wodehousian wit that could make everyone in the room burst into laughter.

Yet my grandma was also a consummate perfectionist/procrastinator. She wrote all of her life but rarely finished anything to her satisfaction. She also put off writing letters and browbeat herself over the guilt.

This is a guilt I shared, especially after my grandma departed without my getting a chance to respond to her last letter, dated three weeks before her death. I received my mom’s phone call about her stroke at ten o’clock on Sunday night, September 23. I’d had her letter sitting on my desk at work with a post-it reminding me to call her, which I was planning to do on Monday.

What I didn’t know was that my husband, Michael, and I would end up spending our last visit with my grandma in a hospital room in the middle of the night, before Monday morning even broke. I talked to her for hours, holding her hand, brushing the silver strands from her smooth brow as the coma pulled her into a deeper and gentler peace.

For months afterward, I chastised myself for waiting too long to call her. Even worse, I’d put off sending a birthday present I knew she was going to love. I did manage to send her a copy of Grandmothers Counsel the World: Women Elders Offer Their Vision for Our Planet in time for her birthday on June 17. I’d even had Agnes Baker Pilgrim, one of the grandmothers featured in the book, inscribe it for my grandma. I made the mistake of thinking she was 83, so Granny Aggie sent her blessings for her eighty-third birthday. I joked with my grandma about it and said she could save it for next year.

With that gift, I promised another that hadn’t yet arrived. I told her I would send it separately later. My grandma, a diehard Jeeves and Wooster fan, had never enjoyed the pleasure of watching the BBC series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie—at least as far as I know. I’d been sending her Wodehouse audiobooks over the years, and she was always extremely particular about who played Jeeves. I’m pretty sure Martin Jarvis was her favorite. I was positive she would believe Stephen Fry is literally Jeeves incarnate.

So Michael and I got her the boxed set of Jeeves and Wooster, but we didn’t send it right away. I wanted to wait until the postcards I was making for an upcoming exhibit were done so I could include one of those. And then, once those were finally ready to send, I got so caught up in the preparations for the opening reception I was also catering that I hadn’t found a moment to actually write an accompanying letter. I’d been working past midnight nearly every night for the three months leading up to the exhibition I was doing with the two women in my writers’ group. At last, all of the details were in place for the September 27 opening reception. I thought I could finally call my grandma and send her package that week.

But then the phone call came. “Grandma had a stroke,” my mom cried. “They don’t think she’ll make it through the night.” Of course, she did. She was always stronger than most people gave her credit for, including herself. It was Tuesday morning, September 25, 2007, when she finally danced the light fantastic out of this world.

Even though she was eighty-two, I had some ridiculous notion that she’d be around for at least another decade or two. She was so independent and sharp-minded, living in her own home and tending her beloved garden, making the last part of her life quite possibly the happiest. I figured she would be around to see the rough cut of the documentary I filmed when we visited her in August 2004. Michael and I had been working slavishly on the post-production all summer, with Michael composing a score so hauntingly beautiful I couldn’t wait for my grandma to hear it. But she didn’t get a chance to do that. Nor did she see the hours of interview footage I shot with her in the subsequent years, intended as fodder for a more historical documentary Michael and I still hope to complete someday.

I saw my grandma for the last time in early July. My uncle Steve had flown her out to Long Beach to visit for the first time in years. After my grandma’s return flight arrived, my step-father picked her up. He called me spontaneously to see if I wanted to join them for lunch before my grandma headed home. Thank God, I did, and we spent a long lunch at the coffeeshop across the street. It was one of the few times I’d seen her without bringing along the videocamera. Of course, I remember regretting not having recorded the funny anecdotes she was telling. I remember one part about her sister, Betty, dating an Australian sailor, and she joked about him saying he was “diving for pearls” while cooing on the couch with her sister.

That summer, my friend Patricia had decided to interview my grandma for a book she was writing about women in retirement. I wanted to have a high-quality recording of the interview, so I lent Patricia our digital recorder. A tad technophobic, Patricia worried about failing to record properly. She wrote down my directions on a napkin. As I was explaining it to her, I asked if she would be using her standard tape recorder as a backup. She said no; she needed to stay focused on one machine at a time.

At that moment, I had a sinking premonition. “Are you sure about this?” I asked Patricia. “Maybe you should just stick with your tape recorder since you’re more comfortable with it.” She assured me it was fine, not to worry.

But I did worry. Not because of Patricia, but because of the unreliability of technology and my feeling of powerlessness to prevent equipment failure remotely. About twenty minutes before Patricia was scheduled to meet my grandma in her garden for the interview, I called my grandma to make sure she had backup batteries. She said she did, and that was the last time I talked with her on the phone.

When Patricia returned, I learned the rechargeable batteries had indeed died. In the interest of professionalism, however, she didn't tell my grandma but instead took copious notes during the interview. So my best efforts to stave off failure had failed. Patricia had found my grandma’s story so fascinating, she bought a set of batteries and returned the next day for a followup interview. When I picked up the recorder from Patricia, I turned it on. “No song,” the display read. Which meant the recorder had failed to capture the second interview, as well.

I think part of me didn’t have the heart to tell my grandma about the hapless recordings, and I suspect that’s one big reason I didn’t call her right away. Which turned out to be not at all.

And so all of these regrets compounded into a behemoth guilt when my grandma made her final departure. The grief, the shock, the insomniac exhaustion in the months that followed were bad enough. But the guilt. The regret. Those were the most painful parts of the process for me. The unsent birthday gift. The unrecorded interview. The unmade phone call. The unwritten letter.

Several months later, I found a letter she had written us exactly six months before her passing. She began, “I feel so guilty! Guilty GUILTY!” Then she went on to explain why she had been feeling so guilty: “I have been trying to write to thank you for sending the amazing package . . .”

She was feeling guilty about not sending us a thank-you letter for our Christmas presents three months before! I remembered how Michael and I had told her how she had absolutely no reason to feel guilty, how we completely understood and suffered the same strain of perfectionistic procrastination ourselves.

That’s when I realized: Of course she understood about all of the undones I’d been agonizing over for months. She was the exact same way herself! The last thing she would want me to be feeling was guilt. This was a grace so profound, so perfect in its precision, I was finally able to shed the weight of regret I’d been shouldering for months and just simply, achingly, grieve.

I hereby resolve (almost) to write to you . . . especially when I die.

And she did. Indeed, she continues to. The letter I quoted at the beginning only arrived last month. My uncle Bobby has been gradually sending me my grandma’s old computer files (written on a PC she used for seventeen years (!), relying on floppy disks after the 40-mb drive filled up). Bobby has also been sending me her autobiographical vignettes and children’s stories. So with every new fragment, I get to know more of her tender compassion, her thoughtfulness, and—most especially—her wicked sense of humor.

And now, you can, too. I think she would be especially thrilled to know she’s making good on her promise to “write to you . . . especially when I die.”

March 26? 2007

Dear Mike & Melissa,

I feel so guilty! Guilty GUILTY! I have been trying to write to thank you for sending the amazing package, but each time I write, I read what I wrote, and think “That’s not funny. You expect me to write funny. Maybe tomorrow I can write funny.”

So, I’ll just say “thank you.” And don’t tell me my letters are hilarious or anything, or I can’t write at all. It’s OK to say “I enjoyed your letter. It’s such a nice old-fashioned way to communicate. Not like email.” Grandma can actually still write with her fingers. Wow! With a pen!

As far as that goes, Melissa can write funny. I remember one of the things she (you) wrote in high school that was tarabo(a?)ngingly (spelling—I gave Bobby your stuff to read and haven’t seen it since) funny. And Michael (you) and Gary were always doing excruciatingly funny things.

It’s nice to have humor still in this world, such as it is. Things always start out with a tarabang for me in the morning, when I first smile at myself in the mirror. No teeth, usually, hair all weird, eyes squinty. I start the day laughing. I like that.

Unfortunately, I can’t play the Jeeves tapes now because the round stringy thing that makes the tape go around, broke. Some day I may get it fixed. At least I can play CD’s.

When I read your interview (Melissa) with the writer (forgot his name—Bobby possesses the magazine), I thought, “How can that brilliant writer (Melissa) be descended from me?” Amazing.

Thanks again, and sorry for making you wait so long to hear. The head librarian (Sandy) was really happy when she got the CD’s and gave me hugs. I love our library. Hope we get to keep it.

The End,

Grandma