Grilled Pork Chops

Dear Grandma,

Last night was our first dinner together, just the two of us. You made grilled pork chops, string beans with almonds, fresh salad and Portugese rolls. We had tea and cookies for dessert, and everything was delicious. We sat at the little table in front of the window in the Keeping Room, the window that looks out on the long backyard where you used to have your vegetable garden with its white picket fence, and your other garden (I call it your rose garden) with its brick paths and fruit trees. You don't garden vegetables anymore; the pretty white picket fence is a memory. The rock wall is still there along the west side; the wall where my cousins and sister and I made "soup" by rubbing the rocks together until the fine orange dust came out, and pouring the orange dust into the "pot" of water that one kid would stir with a stick. We played "Ghost in the Graveyard" in your backyard on summer nights - the backyard was enormous then - hiding, running and shouting in the darkness beyond the circle of light from the back porch where you and my aunts and uncles and my parents sat and talked.

One of the first questions I wanted to ask you last night was about your wedding. I'm grown up and planning my own wedding, getting swamped by hordes of details that need attention and I yearned to know what your wedding was like, hoping to be refreshed and renewed by your story. You had been having a hard day yesterday; Grandpa's health is poor and his recent move into the nursing home has meant some changes for you. You had spent the day in confusion, sorting through old paperwork and important documents, trying to get a handle on things like where Grandpa put your birth certificates, marriage certificate, and wills. You found some unexpected surprises - Grandpa's draft cards and an envelope with several two-dollar bills tucked away in it, and a silver five-dollar Pennsylvania Railroad coin of his.

When I asked you to tell me the story of your wedding, your face relaxed and you settled into reminiscence of some happy times. You had been "going with" Grandpa for two years when you got married. You weren't even out of high school yet; it was May 29th of your senior year. He wanted you to finish school, and you wanted to finish, too. You asked your principal if it would be OK for you to get married before graduation. You had ordered a blue dress of sharkskin, something you told me would be "hotter 'n heck" on a summer's day and hard to come by now, but was fashionable then. You haunted the post office for a couple of weeks, waiting for the dress to arrive. The wedding day arrived before the dress did. Your friend's mother had a pretty blue dress and matching hat she let you use, and your friend went outside and picked a bouquet of white "little bell" flowers, as you called them - you couldn't recall their specific name. Grandpa called the minister and his wife to say the two of you would be late, and it was eleven o'clock at night by the time the ceremony took place. With the minister's wife as your witness, you were married to Grandpa in your borrowed blue dress with your bouquet of white spring flowers. After the ceremony was over, you drove to your aunt's house, and when you told them the news, she offered some ice cream from her icebox, and that's how the small group of you celebrated.

I asked if your parents or his parents minded that none of them were able to see your wedding. You said that they didn't mind; it was all you could afford. You had no fancy ceremony or reception; no honeymoon trip anywhere. Grandpa had a ball game the next day, and you went back to school on Monday. Your French teacher threw you a "linen shower" on June 19, 1941, after you had been married a few weeks.

I was impressed by how efficiently you got dinner on. I guess that's from years of cooking for seven children and a husband who expected three meals a day when he was home. You moved about in your tiny kitchen, explaining to me how you had to time things right because half of the electrical outlets are on the "old house" circuit and half of them are on the "new house" circuit; you can't run the microwave and the toaster at the same time or a fuse will blow and you can't run the oven and your small grill at the same time. Just one of many inconveniences you've learned to live with over the years.

I had to help you carry dishes down to the Keeping Room; you almost dropped a teacup off its saucer when getting it from your china cabinet. You hands sometimes shake so much nowadays because of your Parkinson's. When you went to serve yourself fresh salad, you spilled a tongsful across your dinner plate. You had forgotten to put the tomato in the salad, so you cut one up and served the bright red pieces in a pretty blue china bowl.

As we ate, we talked about things, and the subject turned to books and reading. You and I share a love of both. You told me of how you knew an older gentleman named Gordon Jackson when you were a girl, and he had "barrister" bookcases - great, floor-to-ceiling giants brimming with books, and how you would be allowed to borrow and read any book you wanted, and then return it in exchange for the next one. You also enjoyed writing when you were younger, and you still recall certain essays you wrote which received good marks in school - particularly the one for your French teacher that you wrote about a candy kitchen. You didn't know the French phrase for candy kitchen so you titled it "La Cuisine du Bon Bon." Your teacher corrected you - it's La Confiserie - but your classmates liked your title better, and so did you.

I asked if you ever kept a journal, and you did when you were younger, but you told me you had burned them all. I asked you why, and you said that when you reread them you thought, "How dumb I was."

You wrote in other ways: your first attempted story was a Western, inspired by Zane Grey. You also had a pen pal from your French class, a Jewish boy who lived in Paris. He stopped writing to you shortly after Paris was occupied in World War II. Years later, when you had three children, you found the address and wrote a letter, by chance to see what happened to this man. He was still there, and wrote of how the Germans came and took his father and brothers away, and how only he and his mother survived. His English had improved greatly; he had worked at the American PX during the war. However, Grandpa didn't think it was a good idea for you to correspond with this man, and so you stopped.

In recent years you have taken to writing your life story, longhand. When I finished college I offered you my laptop computer to use, to speed up the writing, and you took it for a few months but returned it, saying you preferred writing it out yourself. You have to write when the mood strikes, you say. You have never been able to force the writing, and you don't understand writers who can sit down and make themselves write from 9 to 5. (I don't know how they do it, either.) Lately you haven't been adding many pages to your story; things with Grandpa have you stressed out and feeling down or too busy and tired to write. Of course I understand that, at eighty-four, and with almost daily visits to the nursing home, taking care of paperwork and worrying about finances, it is probably too much to sit down and work on writing your life story. I wish you would, though - a selfish desire of mine, because I want to read it. You have such an amazing memory that you can begin practically from your first year of life, and recall events with clear detail.

You see me as a writer. You said to me last night, "You're a good writer; I'd like to see you do something with that." What a gentle and encouraging challenge for me, during a time in my life when I have felt like my desire to write must have been the foolish dream of an English major, and that I was growing out of it. Never mind the neat row of books all on the subject of writing that stretches seventeen inches along my lower bookshelf; I was passing through that phase. But then, you said that to me last night. I felt foolish for not having tried faithfully to work on my writing skills. Unappreciative of any gift or talent that I might have, that you could see in me and that I had been ignoring. Another one of your descendants has taken a shine to writing as well. Your great-granddaughter Jennifer is seven and has decided that she is going to be a writer, and has written some stories which were sent to you. I have competition!

After we finished dinner, I carried the dishes upstairs to the kitchen. I didn't want you to have to worry about rattling or dropping them in front of me, so I joked about putting my old waitressing skills to work as I piled the dishes and carried them in both hands. You said that sometimes at the nursing home, one of the staff will offer to get your cup of coffee for you, but you tell them you used to be a waitress. I never knew this about you, so when we settled back down at the table with our tea and tin of leftover holiday cookies (I picked the rugalach, my favorite), I asked you where you had waitressed. You told me that one day long ago when you came home with the groceries, the mail was nothing but bills. You put the groceries down and called the owner of Bentley's Dairy (now Maple Haven Farms), and asked her if they'd be hiring. She told her husband about your request, and they said to come in the next day; they would have a job for you.

At that time, Bentley's Dairy sold 46 kinds of ice cream, all made right there, and breakfast, lunch and dinner. They were open from seven in the morning until nine at night. They were located across from the baseball fields, and during the ninth inning of the games, the kids could come over and get ice cream cones for a nickel each. With seven children of your own, what tip money you made usually went toward these ice cream cones. You had promised your children that if their dad got a home run, they could come in for an ice cream, no matter what inning it was. Sure enough one evening, all seven came in excited ("Dad got a home run!") and so you scooped up ice cream cones for each of them. They filed back out to the ball game with their cones. Only a short time had passed before they all rushed in a second time ("Dad got a home run again!"), for another ice cream each.

I think you must have liked waitressing more than I did. You like all people and you have a very gentle manner, whereas I can sometimes be too introverted, with a simmering temper. Your job at Bentley's Dairy made enough money to help with the cost of groceries for the family.

I asked you what your hair used to look like when you were my age - about the same color brown? No, you said, yours was quite a bit darker, and long. When you were a very little girl, your hair was curly, until one day, an older gentleman took you to the barbershop for a haircut, and it grew back straight and has been straight ever since. You had an aunt with really long, wavy hair, "past her seat" and when she visited it was your job to wash her hair. This involved pouring rainwater over it, rinsing with vinegar (I asked you, didn't that smell? It goes away, you said) and another rainwater rinse, and then brushing it out until it was dry. The whole process took half a day, you said.

I asked if you ever wore makeup when you were younger. You said you wore lipstick quite a lot, but never bothered to "do up" your eyes. You always just glanced in the mirror and went - now you look in the mirror and see an old lady looking back at you, and you chuckled about that.

I asked you where you would travel, if you could choose to go anywhere you liked. You mentioned that one of your daughters, my aunt who recently retired, has been urging you to go to Hawaii. You said you have no desire to go to Hawaii. You would rather go back to England before going there. I understand and agree; having lived in both places as a military kid, I developed a special fondness for England, while my younger sister holds Hawaii dearer to her heart. You said you've always had an interest in England since you were about fourteen; before you had done the extensive genealogy research and discovered that the Hadleys came from there. I know that the two weeks you spent in England were probably some of the best days of your life - the trip of a lifetime. You mentioned a couple of cities that you have visited and liked; namely Boston and Portland, Maine. You have never been to New York City and don't care to go there.

You wanted to find the video of one of my cousin's weddings for me to watch, and so you got up from the table and started looking around the bookshelves for your video cassettes. You mentioned that my aunt had "reorganized" and now you don't know where anything is. You had mentioned this in the kitchen earlier as well. I helped you by lifting the mantlepiece clock off the shelf while you looked behind it. You told me that the clock belonged to your grandmother, and that you have an aunt who died in childbirth, and the clock in my arms, which was in the birthing room, stopped ticking when she died. I wiped the dust off the clock's dark wood and was careful not to let the winding key slide off the top. When I put the clock back, it began ticking. "It does that off and on," you said. It immediately chimed midnight, in its own time zone. The sound of the chime was quiet and pretty, with the whir of the old mechanisms behind it. I felt privileged to have heard it.

We sat back down at the table by the window after you found the videotape, and began talking about England again. You got up and pulled your big scrapbook off the shelf. I slid my chair over and you thumbed through it backwards page by page, looking for something. One of the pages showed a photograph of my sister and I, sitting up in the shared bed of our B&B room, grinning in our pajamas, ages ten and seven.

You turned through the pages of brochures, guides, photographs and your typed journal entries detailing each day, and finally came to the front of the book, where you had taped the Bon Voyage card the family had given you. On the back of the front cover you had copied a portion of a poem familiar to both of us, by Robert Browning. You read through it out loud:

Oh, to be in England

Now that April's there

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree boll are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England - now!



We smiled at each other after you finished. That was a fitting end to our first of what would hopefully be many Thursday evening dinners together throughout the long winter and spring, before I married and moved away.