VISIT GRANDMA FOR LESSONS SOONER THAN LATER

My Visit Grandma story is about the first woman elected to the Bend City Council in 1964. My Grandma. I was twelve and she was something.

My grandparents were church people who abided by Presbyterian rules. They took it very seriously. As church people do, they made it a big part of their local reputation, but without the sanctimonious behavior, false piety, or judgement.

Keep in mind, they were parents of teenaged boys in the mid-60’s. When one of them came out to mom and dad in 1964, they did what they thought was right.

So did he. After high school he took the next bus to San Francisco.

Does that sound like the stories told when you visit Grandma? To visit mine meant rising to the challenge.

It helps if Grandma is bigger than life. As a small grandchild I thought of my grandma as bigger than life. She stayed on that mark while I grew and grew.

Grandma was six feet tall in her socks with a posture that added a few extra inches. She wasn’t one to shy away from her height. I looked up to her then, joining those who already did.

To visit Grandma meant taking a place while she held court; anyone in her presence knew who the boss was. Besides, she had an enforcer, Grandpa.

She organized holiday dinners, set a perfect Grandma Table with her ‘once a year’ dishes and flatware. Those times were a dizzying bustle of parents and grandparents catching up, keeping up, and looking ahead all at the same time.

Grandma Visit Lesson

During the hectic race to set a proper Thanksgiving table when I was twelve years old, I needed a nap. I said I was going to pick up the back yard and walked out the sliding door. I picked up a few leaves on my way to the side gate, came around to the front door, and snuck down the hall to the bedroom.

I wasn’t really tired tired, just tired of hearing loud talk about napkin rings and asbestos place mats that saved the table top finish.

Alone in the room, I did what kids do and started looking around, opening dresser drawers and the closet, taking it all in. The most interesting thing was a long hairy coat that hid a short stack of magazines in the back corner.

Magazines? I took pride in being the big reader in the family, even at ten. “Where’s your brother?” Reading. So I pulled a couple of magazines out of the dark closet that turned out to be Playboy Magazine, a short stack of them.

As any dutiful child sharp enough to cause trouble would do, I took a Playboy out to the big room full of everybody and asked Grandpa what Playboy was. Grandma answered instead.

“It’s a magazine celebrating the beauty of women and the creativity of writers,” she said. Creative writers and beautiful women sounded a bell in my ten year old brain.

“Besides,” Grandpa added, “It’s good to see women we don’t know are as beautiful as those we do know.”

Grandma gave a hoot.

“What’s the hairy coat?”

“It’s a beaver coat,” she said. “I wear it to events.”

How To Toast Grandma

Over the years Grandma and Grandpa showed their best side. They embraced their son and his circle of friends as their own, embraced the community in their town, and did the most Christian of all things: They showed love for their fellow man.

Grandma was a champion of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, and did what good people do: she helped.

Whether it was her church, her family, or her community, she found solutions. She supported education by getting her AA at Central Oregon Community College, continuing her quest for higher learning after graduating high school as the Valedictorian of all Dallas Texas high schools.

Grandma was an example of the Greatest Generation, and one of the things she liked to hammer home is fairness, equality, and voting for candidates who feel the same.

Make time to visit Grandma. Tell her what’s new, what’s happening. Give her the latest in the modern world that she’s missed out on.

Tell her that you voted.