~a column by Colleen O’Brien
My kids threw me an 80th birthday party two weeks ago. It turned out to be one of the highlights of my life, along with a little discord that we all had to ignore to continue our myth of the perfect family – there is no such thing, as we all know, although my tiny family comes pretty close, but…ahem… we are too human to be perfect, so there will be discord, incivility, humphs and taking walks alone to cool off. We had already made a deal that no one would go to the hospital (this meant no kids or adults running in the pool arena), no old people tripping. And private vows to get along.
I look back and keep choosing the best day, or the best event, or the best meal or the longest laughter. My choice is different each time, but I do keep coming back to the game my daughter thought up: “What would you like to ask Mom/Gramma Collie that you’ve never had the chance to ask her?”
She framed this so thoughtfully by not saying “…that you need to ask her before she dies….”
The question most hilarious – and possibly most dangerous regarding hurt feelings – was “Who’s your favorite grandchild?” This from the oldest of them, my 33-year-old grandson, a devilish wit who makes us all laugh till we beg for mercy. The youngest grandchild, 20, kind and funny and an actor/singer of note, who sang an Ink Spots tune just for me, shrugged and smiled as if it didn’t matter; and to him, it didn’t because he knew where the rivalry lay. The middle and only female grandchild, a captain in the Army teaching at West Point, also a singer with such bell-like tones she raises the hair on your arms when she sings that high note, and a person of immediate command considering her young age, sang out, “Brutal!” She and her smart-alecky cousin had a running battle when they were little counting the photos of themselves I had around the house to see if the numbers were even.
“What was your favorite trip, Gramma?”
This I had to fudge on: My first favorite trip was the day after my wedding, flying to California with my new husband, whom I’d known of since kindergarten and actually met in second grade. The freedom, the exhilaration, the love and fun of being with him all the time was heady. My next favorite trip was to Russia in 1989, the historical shock being the morning I was scheduled to leave the country that turned out to be the day of the KGB coup against Gorbachev. A bit of a hair-raising circumstance, wondering if I’d ever get out of Russia and what exactly would I do to make a living if I were stuck there. But, as you can see, I came out alive, even though my husband and his friend, discussing the deeply disturbing news back home, wondered if I’d started World War III and how could they get me outta there.
“What was the best thing you ever wrote, Gramma?” Ah, tricky. There has to be a touch of hubris in the answer, I thought; and, in this case – loss of the essay from my casual filing system, meaning there was nothing to prove just how brilliant it was. The answer, however, was. “An assignment in the class I took on the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville.”
I explained to the young ones that I went back to college at 50 and was forced by my advisor to take a semester of the big fish story. I’d purposely never read the thing, thinking it to be a long and boring man story about how big the fish was. I protested and got nowhere. Muttering at the expense and waste of time, I bought the book. With huge surprise, I soon fell under the spell of the guidance of a professor who loved the tome, for I, too, fell in love with it. So, for my end-of-semester paper, I wrote 13 pages of rhymed couplets, one for each chapter of the famous fish tale. I was asked to read it in class. Some students liked it, one called me a teacher’s pet, one called me a show-off, another snored midway through. Part of the problem in the students’ opinion of my paper was that at the age of 50 I was a serious student, happy to be doing papers and reading assignments and realizing that all subjects were of a whole, complimenting each other, something I did not understand when I first went to college at 18; much like most of my classmates in the Moby class.
I later lent the assignment to a high school teacher introducing Moby to her class and never saw the paper again. I don’t know the name of the woman anymore. My professor did not save a copy. It was not in my computer, which by the time I missed the couplets had for purely computer reasons lost half of its retrieval abilities. I could never repeat what I did – it took me all night to write it, for heaven’s sake – so it now only lingers on the fringes of my memory, not even one couplet popping up and out of a hole in my Swiss cheese brain.
The most serious question was this, from my son: “When did you know you were an adult?”
Wow. My immediate answer was, “Not yet,” knowing it would bring a laugh. But on the reflection of just a moment, I realized what it was, and I had never thought about it this way before.
I was 22 years old, about two months from having my first child, living in San Diego, my husband on a ship in Vietnam, my only friend in town, in the same condition as I, off to her childhood home in Detroit because her family insisted. I was suddenly alone, thinking vaguely, Gosh, who’s going to take me to the hospital?
Earlier in the week, I’d sent a letter to my family in Jefferson, proudly (and cockily, I thought later) telling them how I, good Navy wife, was going to stay in San Diego, and I’d have the baby at Balboa Hospital, and blah, blah, blah. But that was before I knew my friend would be fleeing. That electrifying fact brought me swiftly to understand that I had to make a decision. By myself. No consultation with my partner, no asking of advice from my mom. And the decision, I understood at once, was going to renege on my brave little letter home.
So, I dialed the folks. They’d just had Sunday dinner with my grandparents and were delighted to hear from me, telling me that they were reading my “loving” letter to them when I broke in with, “I’m coming home.”
It was a wise decision. My parents were relieved that I was safe and sound, my husband , who had not even received the news yet (when he did, he at first perusal understood my letter to say that I was leaving him. Yikes.), was also relieved that I would not be alone. And two weeks later I was the only one in the Greene County Hospital maternity ward having a baby. I got to stay there for a week. My baby was healthy, a nurse telling me he looked just like Toby, my father-in-law. At my young age, I thought this was really funny and couldn’t wait to write it to his far-away son.
The birthday party gang was silent for a minute when I finished the story of my first hint of becoming a grown-up. They were probably thinking about the moment they became adults. Or, like their mom and grandmother, the many moments during their lives of achieving that here again/gone again status.
