When I was in my early teens, I was a lanky, non-confident girl who was always being swayed by the opinions of others. I liked art and home life and seemed to attract best friends who pushed me to be more silly or fashionable or guy-crazy than I actually was. I was in that odd place like most young girls are where their bodies are beginning to show signs of womanhood, but their emotions and life experiences suggest that the pendulum still rests strongly on the "girl" side.
"Like, hey. Like, wow. Like, whatevva."
In short, it was hard to be myself because I didn't know who my "self" was. Those teen years are really the equivalent of researching a grad school paper. My life thesis in 8th grade was how high I could tease my hair and STILL maintain a banana clip in it, all with the help of a little Aqua Net hairspray. Speaking of hairspray: I took up babysitting so that I could maintain my hairspray budget of $17.47 a week. I was highly flammable.
Other junior high foibles include the time I dated a boy for one hour because a friend begged me to do it. By second hour of that day, my SAME friend helped me craft a break-up letter. (Lame.)
Perhaps the pinnacle of my 8th grade wisdom was when a very popular girl came up to me and asked me if I thought Tiffany was a "butt." Except she didn't say "butt," she said a word which rhymed with "butt" and implied that Tiffany might make friends too easily with boys. Being unaware of this word, I ASSUMED that the "butt" word meant "jerk" (not because I asked but because I used context clues from popular girl's argument) so I answered the popular girl confidently, "Yes. Tiffany is totally that word." She smiled and said, "Sign this petition." And so I signed a petition stating that Tiffany made friends with boys far too easily. I'm sure I dotted the lowercase "i" in my name with a bubble heart because that's what we did in the 1980s.
It gets worse: That day I came home and used my new word on my mother.
Hiroshima was nothing compared to the explosion that came from her face.
Related: I learned that the "butt" word did NOT, in fact, mean "jerk."
Also: Context clues cannot always be trusted.
Why am I offering these stories? Because this:
Even though I was hormonally imbalanced and teetered precariously between the worlds of girl and woman and sometimes acting like a full-fledge ogre, I knew that I could visit my grandmother in Pennsylvania and be just me.
I didn't have to dress up or impress her or *gasp* CHANGE who I was.
I could just be me.
The girl who didn't know how to do her hair.
The girl who spent $30 on a surf shirt so that people would like her.
The girl who wouldn't even know what to do with a boy if she liked him.
The girl who loved art.
My grandmother didn't do a whole lot with me. We didn't go on vacations together or go shopping. She bought Cracker Jacks which we ate at night while we watched Wheel of Fortune. All her cereal in her pantry was labeled with a date on top. For a little variety we would mix the cereals in our bowls... a little Raisin Bran and Corn Flakes and Waffle-Os.
We picked broccoli from the garden. It was my job to take a small paring knife and kill the green broccoli worms. They burst when I sliced them. I thought it was fun.
When I turned 18 and graduated from school, my Grammy found a recipe for-- get this-- OWL SHAPED cookies. It involved two different colored cookies doughs which you would wrap one over the other in a large tube shape and slice so that it was a circle with an outline of another color, and then use a pistachio for the beak. She came from an era where happiness was homemade.
She was so excited to make these cookies that she couldn't wait for Granddad to get home; she took the great big Lincoln Towncar and went with me to the grocery store. Upon backing up the car, she caught the bumper on the side of the garage and peeled it from its original placement, causing it to stick out a full foot, if not more.
In order for Granddad to not be so angry about the bumper, she decided to fix it. I thought she was going to try to push it back into place. Instead, she ran inside and got the Windex. She made the bumper shinier than before. What a riot!
In the end, we made the cookies. While most 18-year olds prefer foods with more of a "cool" factor, I was quite happy with the owl cookies. Seriously (shaking head) OWL cookies? With the car repairs and ingredients for the cookies, they must have cost $500.
I haven't spent gobs of time with my grandmother, just enough here and there. But what I can say is that she kept a Spirograph on hand, she gave us fun food, she let us work beside her, she didn't try to impress us, she always, always sends us birthday cards and Christmas cards as well, she loves Jesus and--in the end-- I feel safe with her. I feel like she's on my team.
She's soft and comfy and unassuming. She wears those ankle socks with the pom poms on the back so that they don't slip into your tennis shoe.
In essence, our family is left with snippets of her previous self. I've heard people talk about losing loved ones before and debate about --forgive the term-- the virtues of losing someone abruptly verses sluggishly and I have to say that plucking bits of a loved one's personhood one memory at a time seems horrible, like using an eraser on an evil pencil very, very slowly.
My reaction, then, needs to be this:
To unabashedly sustain her beauty and goodness and fullness.
To continue to bake cookies, particularly ones in the shape of an owl.
To use Windex to shine up life's errors.
To be myself and realize that living simply beside someone is far more powerful than trying to entertain them.
To realize that Cracker Jack's are special because someone told me they were special.
And to realize that people are special, too, for the same reason.
