Grandma T

We don’t always know what to make of a woman who is beautiful, well spoken and smarter than the rest of us; a woman who was never afraid to say how she felt and had the where-with-all to identify the errors of our ways and the temerity to identify the shortcomings of strangers in public. But to begin to understand Grandma T or Naomi, we must understand the era from which she came.

Grandma T was born in 1912; a time when the Tsar still ruled Russia, when The Ottoman Turks controlled the Middle East, the Austro-Hungarian Empire unified central Europe, when Teddy Roosevelt last ran for President and roads that connected communities were made of dirt.

In her lifetime she witnessed many of the pivotal events in American History, the 1918 flu epidemic, WWI, the Great Depression, Lindberg crossing the Atlantic, WWII, the Atom Bomb, the fall of China to Mao and the Communists, the Soviets acquisition of the Atomic Bomb, the Korean War, the commitment of President Truman to budget $50 Billion annually for the military, the Jet age, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the start of the Vietnam War, landing on the moon, Watergate, Reagan, the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of terrorism, the computer, the internet.

During this time, Naomi raised a family, three boys and two girls, Richard, John, Aleta, Penny and later Tim. She also provided a home for her sister and another home for her step-daughter Alyce. She was married three times. Her first marriage was to my Grandfather, but that only lasted a couple of years, barely long enough to hatch my dad.

Naomi’s second marriage was to Herb Thornton, the man who was the real father to my dad and the only paternal grandfather I had ever known. Their marriage brought together two broken homes and made one beautiful family. I don’t think it started out ideally, I know she complained that Herb would hide the thermostats in the coziest corner of the home to prevent her from heating the house properly, and she may have been onto something. Herb had put up a dummy thermostat at Miller Supply to pacify his female staff at work, and the ruse worked. But I suspect, by the time they had been married 10 or 12 years she and he had perfected the art of marriage. About 1950, she wrote in her newspaper column how she thought that Herb was her best friend and hoped that he thought the same about her. I think their love grew from there.

Her third marriage to Travis Cochran, was a victory lap. Really it was her way of showing off her matrimonial skills. She was showing us all how effortless commitment could be, pretty rash for someone of 84 years. This last marriage consummated a sixty-year engagement, during which time both Naomi and Travis were happily married to another and raised families of their own. Their age was betrayed as they seemed to grow young with their rekindled romance. Few of us are blessed enough to even find one love to last a lifetime, she was fortunate enough to find lifetime loves twice.

All of this helped to define who Naomi or Grandma T was. She remembered the 1918 flu epidemic. As a little girl of six, she was rarely allowed to go out in public and only while wearing a mask. She remembered the messy house in which her unbathed grandparents lived. Her grandfather smelling of grease and oil, never chopped wood, but would rather lay an uncut log in the fire slowly pushing it into the coals as he fed the fire and his indolence. Her life with them brought forth a fear of germs, the need to clean hotel bathrooms before using them, carrying anti-bacterial green soap used by hospitals, the need to wipe down restaurant table before allowing her children to touch the top of the table only.

Grandma T complained about Truman’s free fiscal policies as he was seemingly willing to put anything in his budget. She joked that she wished he would take over her finances as she scrimped to save four dollars in one month only to have it erased by an unexpected bill. In letters to and from my dad, they would talk about how they had saved some money for a big purchase of a typewriter or some other luxury. Pennies here and there were watched closely. Living through the depression made her fiscally conservative, but I always thought she was rich, modest but rich.

She fretted about her sons going to war. When the Korean War started, my dad was 18. Grandma was uncertain if he would be able to finish school before he would be called away. Grandma T paid attention to what happened in the world but translated the problems of the world into solutions at home. Naomi had friends adopt babies from other parts of the world, color and nationality didn’t matter. One mother whom Naomi knew called her adopted fry “her world children.” The Korean War and her love of children brought us our Uncle Tim.

Naomi had no fear in confronting those less educated in the ways of proper behavior. She once wrote, “Last night I had the good fortune to hear de Paul’s Infantry Chorus and the poor luck to have been seated in front of a first class knot head.” Midway through the concert Naomi spun around in her seat and grabbed him by the knee and informed him that others were present for the concert and that he should be considerate of them before he unleashed his “baseball mitt’ hands in their cannon like applause.

Naomi could also see through extraordinary fanfare and identify the reality of a situation. Penny remembers having lunch in the Homestead Restaurant in Walla Walla with her mother. Their plates were delivered with great flourish and as Naomi surveyed her meal, she zeroed in on the garnish, which was some sort of braised mushroom (not attractive) and she said, "If I saw that on the sidewalk, I'd step over it."

My sister Joan remembered her first day at WWC. Joan was 17, and she just came out of the college bookstore with a young man, who was trying to be her boyfriend, when she heard "Joanie!" As Joan looked toward the woman who had called her name she noticed that it was Grandma and Grandpa T. They had pulled over and started chatting with Joan from the seat of the car. Joan tried to politely ignore the young man as she spoke with her grandparents, but Grandma asked sweetly, "And who is your friend there?" Joan had to introduce him. Then Grandma asked him if he went to school and what his major was. "Social Work and Psychology," he innocently replied. Grandma said, without hesitation and with the most apparent disgust she could muster, "I hate you. Drive home, Herb." and off they went.

The first clear memory I have of my grandma T comes from the summer of 1973. In August Penny, my aunt got married. It was hot; it was a wedding, a very formal wedding. As mother of the bride, this was her time to exert her influence the most. She was an organized-Emily-Post-type-woman; everything had an order and a place; ritual and ceremony held distinct value in her eyes.

As a little kid freshly turned 8 years old, I didn’t have a chance to get to know her. She terrified me. I am sure that she terrified all of her grandchildren. Some of them even knew about the “paint stick” she hung near the staircase. Her well maintained house on Date Street had a place for everything even her grandchildren, but only once they washed their hands and minded their manners or became respectable adults. To my benefit, she was busy with the to-dos of her last daughter’s wedding. This was the crowning achievement of her years as a mother. If she did say anything to me it was a probably to tell me to wash my hands, sit up straight or even ask me if I thought what I was doing was the right thing to do.

In all, before I was twenty-one I believe that I saw her less than ten times and I probably spent even fewer hours in her presence. We spent no amounts of time together. We took no trips. She never watched me or took care of me in any maternal way. At most I saw her like I would see other older ladies at a church potluck. She would bake some strange dish and I would try to figure out how I could navigate my way around her entrée.

The summer I turned twenty-one, we moved to College Place just around the corner from Grandma’s house on Date Street. For the year that our little family lived there, I saw a different person than I thought I knew as a kid. In May of 1986, Herb had passed away, in June our youngest daughter, Whittney was born; and in July we arrived at the apartment on 6th street. A week later I turned 21.

She still had her Emily-Post-aura, but in many ways she had softened. That same summer both my sister Joan and my aunt Penny arrived in College Place; both with a son and daughter, and both with marriages in the waning stages. All at once, Grandma T had family with little ones about, six kids under the age of 8 mixed in three families. She was softened, subdued, saddened, but also strong. She was personable.

That year allowed our relationship to develop. I think, unwittingly that year I won her respect. We never spoke about it and it is only now as I begin to think about it that it begins to make sense: through my youthful impatience I was married before I could vote and had a family before I turned twenty-one. I think she was watching me, looking for hints of my character, looking at similarities in our circumstance, and hoping that I would not be like other men she had known in her lifetime. I think she wondered if I would stand against the pressures of life and live up to my responsibilities. I remember seeing all of that in her eyes although she never said it.

When Dad had his stroke, Grandma came to the hospital with Penny. It didn’t look like he would be around much longer. Dad’s condition allowed her the chance to mend some of the rift in their relationship, I hope that in the time she spent by his bed that they patched up the decades of trouble. At his house, she looked around at his things like an archeologist or detective. Looking at his life’s accumulations, she pieced together a life of a son she had not entirely known, but had always loved.

Just like Grandma T looked at Dad’s things as he lay in the hospital, I have spent the last two weeks dusting off the memories of her, trying to piece together the Grandmother I did not know nearly well enough. I have read all that I could find that she wrote. I laughed as she spoke through the pages. I saw frailties, fears, dreams and struggles I didn’t know she had. She always seemed so strong. I saw my dad as a young man about to leave home for life on his own. I felt her pain and heartbreak when he finally did leave. I felt Naomi’s love growing for Herb as he planned to build a bigger garage and piled lumber in the driveway. For the past two weeks, I have focused on her, I have dug through the scraps of papers that she had written, I talked with a few of the people who knew her best and I have fallen in love.

Grandma T wrote so well, that even a shopping list would bounce with wit and sarcasm as it spilled emotion and insight. One of the most apropos things that she wrote dealt with funerals, and she wrote about funerals more than once. Naomi thought we should have funerals at least once a month. To her funerals provided “quiet time to sit and think a bit” where “no one expects anything of you except to be quiet.”

After hosting her own baby shower, where the women sewed diapers as Naomi served tea and cakes, and her own moving party to bid friends and neighbors farewell, Naomi hatched a plan to host her own funeral. She didn’t see any point to having her own children travel across “whole strips of states” and her other loved ones “getting heart attacks themselves getting to a funeral that (she couldn’t) arrange the date conveniently for.” She didn’t want to lay there in the bier and not have a “chance to say something too.”

Grandma T wanted “a funeral ahead of time” and this is how she described it:

“Perhaps I’ll buy a new dress or maybe new teeth. It will depend on the circumstances at the time. . . When I think I am beginning to wear thin around the edges I am going to set a big party date. I’ll buy a whole shop of pretty flowers and fill the punch bowl and tell the folks to bring the best food they manage. I’ll bet there won’t be many ‘mixes’ either. I’ll have new slip-covers in the living room and get extra chairs and have lovely music. I’ll have a couple of preachers come by ahead of time and we’ll work over some nice speeches they can make. I think it would do us a world of good to hear some of that while we are still alive, otherwise some poor man will gather a few notes from my dopey bereaved ones and there’ll be a hodge podge of things half true and the best things that I ever thought will be left out. No reason not to have this all said and enjoyed while I am still here to appreciate it.
I’ll get to see all of the grandkids and speak my mind as I please-because I’ll be old and there are privileges that come to the aged. I’ll have a crimp in my hair and a pretty dress and things to say and things to hear and things to see.
Then later on when the day really comes-it can be a very normal day except for the one small chore-of getting me to the last resting place. I will have had my final party and enjoyed it with you. Its horrid thinking of every one being present and I not having a chance to talk too!”

Grandma, I know you didn’t want us to forget the best parts of you, but the best of your thoughts we could never capture. You refused to be tamed. Even in your role as just a housewife, a name you hated for a job you loved, you were never just anything. You had great instinct and intuition. You were smarter than the other cusses in the family, every one of us. It must have been frustrating to have been surrounded by people who would never be as well spoken as you, who could only dream of matching your wit and instinct. You were complex. You were strong. You were flawed. I am so happy you could write. I thank God for that. Reading just the few pages that I have seen, I feel as though I can invite you over anytime and you will come tell me a story, stories that I heard only rarely while you lived. I am sorry that I could not corral your best ideas. The rest are scattered in all your papers, in all the minds and most of the hearts that you encountered, in your family, and in the men you loved most. Some of us don’t know it but all of us have a little of your best. It is sad to think that none of us have it all. I will miss you.