USA: Singin’ All the Way For Love of Personal Stories

. POUGHKEEPSIE, New York / Singin' All the Way / September 9, 2009 GRANDMA IDA By Lyn Burnstine I’ve always said that I loved my grandmother more than my own mother. I wrote lovingly about her in my first memoir, Singin’ All the Way, and dedicated it to her, thanking her for giving me the love of stories. Ida Alice Burgess came to live with us when her third husband died. I was seven then, and seventeen when her death came the day after my high school graduation. She was younger when she came to live with us than I am now, so it’s hard to reconcile my memories of an old woman-- who mostly spent her last ten years sitting-- with the active life I live: swimming, water exercises classes, driving— involved in all kinds of volunteer and performance activities. She did have terrible vascular problems with her legs, reportedly stemming from a long-ago kick from a cow, and not much help from the medical community, which she probably never sought out anyway – I remember her proudly proclaiming that she’d never gone to a doctor in her life. She helped Mother with sewing, mending, cooking and dishwashing–all from a chair or stool. One day, long ago, after wondering for many years from whom my second daughter got her strikingly good looks (although I think all of my three kids are beautiful, the other two do look like their father, so there was never any question where their good looks came from), I had a moment of realization. She looked like my grandmother, who used to shyly, but proudly, tell me that she had been a “belle,” as a young woman. She told me stories of growing up dirt poor in Southern Indiana, and of having to leave school after the fifth grade to help out with the financial support of her large family. She went to the “big city”– Louisville, Kentucky– to work for a rich, Jewish family, where she missed the downhome kinds of food she’d grown up with. She told me stories of her three marriages; the first two to healthy-seeming men who died of Typhoid Fever and Tuberculosis–one within three months and the other within three years after marriage. She told me about my grandfather, a widower with seven children , who came back to Southern Indiana at the urging of a friend (who was also Ida’s second husband’s cousin), to marry my grandmother who “needed” a husband, and would be a fine mother for his children, two of them not yet grown. She did, indeed, become their much-loved mother-figure for the rest of their lives. She told me stories about my mother, her only surviving child, and about her little Violet, born prematurely after a horse-and-buggy accident, when a snake spooked the horse. Her decision to protect her step-sons, by jumping with them to safety, cost her dearly. She taught me to sew, crochet and embroider. She was gentle and soft-spoken. I never heard her raise her voice; the closest she came to sounding cross was when she defended me against my sister, June, four years my elder, when I was teased and tormented by this sister. My memories of her as protector and defender made it all the more puzzling to hear my sister announce some years ago, that she had been our grandmother’s favorite. I said “I always thought I was her favorite.” We looked at each other, stunned, and June said, “Wasn’t she a wonderful grandma to make us each feel that we were the favorite!” There might have been some justification for her favoring my sister: there might have been a particular bond because of June being a redhead. My mother, Grandma’s darling long-awaited daughter, also had splendid red hair. Grandma’s own hair had been red before the Typhoid Fever took not only her husband and unborn child, but her luxurious red hair. When it grew back it was brown and remained so until turning gray in her old age. Even though her formal schooling was limited, she was wise in so many ways. Her life stories surely started me on the literary path I eventually followed. As a grandmother and great-grandmother, my finest hours have been those in which I’ve tried to pattern myself after her. I’ve fallen far short in the arena of selflessness, much better with the unconditional love part, and best of all in the storytelling department–not that any of my older grandchildren necessarily want to hear my stories! There is a new crop of babies now: four great-granddaughters; two of the four are redheads; I have another chance. On the most recent visit, after having a real tea party and painting with water colors, the eight-year-old redhead said to me “What will we do now?” When I said “let’s just talk,” she looked at me as if I were suddenly speaking a foreign language. By the end of the first story about funny things her daddy said when he was little, she was giggling and begging for more. Thank you, Grandma Ida. [rc] Written for Seniors World Chronicle Lyn Burnstine grammylyn1@gmail.com