How Penny Failed to Assist Me

My grandmother, my dad's mom, is turning 82 this year. Her name is Odelia but she's always gone by Penny. She is one of those women (That I am turning into, frankly) who knows everyone's story and doesn't notice that she's gone on too long in telling it. I rarely talk to her on the phone not because I don't like her (I do like her) but because it's a two hour time suck, easy, and at the end of it, I don't usually feel like I've absorbed any information.

She used to live in Overland and would drop in. One time, I came home from Easter down in Cairo, and she was planting my front garden. On a whim. Of course, when my parents were first married, she made them new curtains, or, more likely, resized second-hand ones, and let herself into the apartment to hang them while they were out of town.

Now she lives out past St. Charles and I don't see her much anymore. I think twice last year, in fact, which is shameful considering how many times I made it to Cape or Cairo or Columbia. But people fall off my radar if they aren't in my face all the time--the same is true with my Aunt Sarah, who only lives about 4 miles away. I could bike there, and yet, I don't.

Anyway, she called a couple weeks back and asked if I needed any help. I didn't, really, not at that point, but we chatted a bit about the baby, the girls, whatnot. She knows I'm working on genealogy and she had some things to add. And told me to call her if I needed help.

Well, I don't communicate that way. I didn't get that this was her way of asking to see the baby. My mom let me know about a week later that I probably needed to call Penny. Not in a guilt way, just in an understanding that Penny wanted to see Leo (her favorite uncle was a Leo--the name is a powerful draw) and that maybe I didn't catch her meaning. So I called. Told her I had this banner to make. Could she come hold the baby?

She came Monday, through the faux snow, and sat on my couch. I tanked Leo up, and, drunk on breast milk, he sat on my lap and smiled away at her. What a charmer. So cute. Cooed and grinned and batted his eyes. And she knew I had this banner, so she said to hand him over and go work.

I handed him over, and he started to cry. Not like "hey, I liked that lap better" or "but I'm not done sleeping/eating/etc." Like terrified painful shrieking. Like the little stork bite birth mark on his forehead turned purple. Angry scared bad news kind of crying. So I took him back. He instantly stopped, and turned on the charm, as if he hadn't just done that.

We tried a few more times. No luck. In the end, I didn't get much banner done, and that was probably good because I started over the next day. Penny also brought me a little statue of Mary because I'm her oldest granddaughter and she had been the oldest granddaughter and had it passed to her. It was Maria's. Maria was Alois Frick's daughter, one of the kids he abandoned in an orphanage in Cape Girardeau while he fled to Texas after the Civil War. The nuns gave her the statue.

The rest of the day, I tried a few times to give it a go upstairs--once Leo napped for about an hour and that worked ok. But the rest of the time, I was forced to hold him and visit with my grandmother. And you know, that wasn't such a bad idea.

The past few months, I feel like a wave of ancestry has been drowning me. Holding that mild-faced Mary statue and thinking about how I'm forcing roots down and filling in blanks in lives of people there's nobody left to talk about (Bridget Kidney, for instance, and Jennie Blake). I'm sucking up stories about my grandfather like they're a precious commodity. I'm stopping at cemeteries. I'm talking to my grandmother, and listening.

Leo probably won't remember her, I think as she leaves--Sophia barely remembers Mike's grandmother who died when she was almost 3. Maybe Penny will make it another 10 or 15 years, but she is already not the same person I knew in college or when I first moved here. Two days after her visit, my mom called to tell me she'd fallen and broken her wrist--the way she said it on the phone to my dad was "I fell three times today and broke my wrist," as if she had to keep trying. We laughed a bit at this--we know this woman and who she is--but it was another reminder of how the present is quickly, silently, slipping into the past.

Not what I intended to sit and write. But that's ok too.