Proverbs 11, Verse 4
"Your riches won't help you on Judgment Day;
only righteousness counts then."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
I might have worn my hair like Moe until I was thirteen, but Harriet did it for at least ninety years.
Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two-- I don't know, to tell you the truth. And I'm ashamed of that, that I don't know. They'll run her obituary tomorrow. It'll be there, online, with a picture of a candle. Someone will write something, someone from her condo club. And then I'll know how old she was when she died.
And that'll be fine.
Harriet died in the condo where my grandfather slipped away twenty years ago-- if that's even possible. He was getting ready for work, tying his tie in the expert Windsor knot only a veteran haberdasher could execute. And he collapsed in a heap. She didn't know what to do. Nobody knows. Andrew Calhoun sings a song about that,
"When he died, he died in her arms,
When he died, he died in her arms.
And she did not say the right thing,
And she could not save his life."
For a long time, I was angry at her. Her condo was in walking distance from the hospital. She dialed the information number instead of 911. Seconds ticked and seconds tocked, the clock in the hall taunting her.
Taunting them both.
Well. Doesn't matter now. Never did.
When I think about Harriet, stories stream back. She married my grandfather in 1975, and, since I was born in 1980, as far as grandmothers went, she was all I ever knew. I avoided referring to her as my "step-grandmother" because it's a weird and clunky moniker. And for the same reason I don't refer to my "half-sister" that way, because, in my eyes, she's not. She's it. The real deal. No step, no half. Not to me.
Some of the stories I don't remember, because I was too young. There's the one about me in the bathroom with her at her house and she advised me to "point your little thing". Legend has it that I looked at her demurely and said, "Harriet-- it's a penis." Not too long after that, she admonished me for letting my younger cousin eat crayons. "Oh, Harriet," I said, waving her off, "they're non-toxic." I used to run and play in their tomato and cucumber garden in the back of their old house on Argyle. The smell of those cucumbers was absolutely intoxicating. I still remember it.
It's funny, a few weeks ago, I was walking the children in their stroller, and we were walking down Argyle, as we'd done plenty of times before, only this time, this last time I went down that street, I stopped in front of Harriet and Zayda's old house. And my eyes devoured it, as if I was seeing it for the first time in a thousand years. But I've lived in the same neighborhood my whole life, I've never not been in front of or passing that house, I probably drive by it every single day of my life but, some how, that time a few weeks ago was different. I must have been standing there for a while-- remembering sitting on its front step in my blue shirt and clip on navy striped tie holding onto a stuffed Smurf, next to my older sister, she clutching a barbie. My Moe haircut gleaming in the sun. I remembered the time the neighbor's Audi 5000 slipped into drive and crashed through their garage. We took a picture of its grille and front end, jutting out amongst all that splintered siding.
I must have been standing there for a while. I must have looked lost-- something. I noticed a woman walking a dog in my periphery.
"Are you all alright?" she asked me.
"Oh," I said, embarrassed, "I'm just-- my grandparents used to live here."
"Oh," she said before saying, "come on, now" to her dog, but I internalized it as if she were an English constable who'd just said, "Right now, sonny, move along" and so I did. I moved along, the way the days and weeks and months do, after you promise to drop by with the babies, and you never do. Because that's the way it is, and that's the way it goes.
Move along, sonny.
Harriet liked to move along, especially behind the wheel. She was perhaps the worst driver I ever knew, and she knew it, too. She laughed about it. She almost mowed down two women walking on the sidewalk once, took out a row of some poor bastard's hedges instead. On her way down to Virginia she was stopped by a state trooper for careening her Lincoln Continental at dangerous speeds. She explained to the trooper that she was listening to an Agatha Christie novel on tape and it was "just too exciting for me". On another occasion (there were many) where she was pulled over, my young cousin shrieked, "OH MY GOD, ARE YOU GONNA ARREST MY GRANDMA?!"
He probably should have, or at least taken her license away.
Sometimes you just need to remember. And laugh, and shake your head. And go to the funeral on Sunday. And do what you're supposed to do.
Yitgadal v'yishtabach s'hmei rabah.
And she did not say the right thing.
And, Harriet, it's called a "penis."
And it's okay.
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