Advice from Josie

My grandmother, Josephine MacKinnon, passed away on May 12, 2014.

She was 89 years old.

Grammy Jo to me, Nana to the world, she was sweet and gentle and her family extended well beyond blood. It was broad and varied and full of diverse characters who all loved Josie.

She was very dear. Nana lived one of those contemplative and quiet country lives (apart from a brief stint in the big city of Dover, NH).

She loved breakfast - something I inherited from her. She loved still mornings with coffee and a window looking over unbroken snow. She had a green thumb. Or two. Or maybe three. She could make anything grow. Josie loved her family, her friends and her pets. Her beloved Bichon Frisée, Monique, was buried with a marker in my grandmother's meadow.

She cared for people. It was an irrepressible trait. When it wasn't her seven kids, 10 grand kids or one great-granddaughter, it was the friends and acquaintances they brought into her life. Or her work as a home care nurse. Or her time helping the troops during WWII (her husband, my grandfather Dan, fought in Europe)

Grammy Jo, while being sweet, was also not afraid to call people out when they were being shitty. "Shit" being the only curse word I really remember her using. She wasn't afraid to call someone a "shit" if, say, they broke into Nana's house to play with one of her visiting grandchildren (Nana still loved you, though, Caity).

So. Be sweet, like Josie. But don't stand for bullshit, like Josie.

Like Josie, watch old movies in the afternoon. Fall asleep during them. Snore. Loudly. Who cares? The people who are with you at three in the afternoon all love you. 

Be sure to have people who love you, like Josie. Have them over for lunch (chicken salad with grapes). Then fall asleep in the living room.

Nana could sleep anywhere, any time. Nanalepsy, I called it. She had a particular knack for passing out in cars. Before even leaving the driveway, Nana would be out cold. And her sudden naps weren't an old age thing. My aunts say she'd fall asleep just as easily while riding with them to the bus stop as kids.

"Enjoy bacon while you can." 

Grammy Jo mostly taught by example. She lived a good, simple life but occasionally took a moment to offer some opinion or tip or piece of wisdom. In this case, enjoy bacon.

She was on a restricted diet for her last 8 years or so (minus the time right at end where she could eat anything she wanted). And through the lens of her low-sodium, largely meat-free diet, she could see that bacon truly is a wonder.

At a family brunch, she said that to me with a grin. Enjoy bacon while you can.

Be thankful you can tie your shoes.

What a gift it is to be able to tie your own shoes. With that skill, anything's possible. The whole world's a well-kept street if you have shoes on your feet.

Grammy Jo taught me to tie my shoes. I learned late, as I recall. And the tutelage came while the whole family was camping on Lake Aziscohos in Western Maine. She taught me that one with the rabbit. Around the tree and down the hole.

When you're five or six, tying your shoes is as big a deal as getting your driver's license. Bigger. You can't even get a driver's license if you're not wearing shoes.

It gives you freedom! You're free to explore, ready to meet people. To walk the dog. To get a coffee. To shop. To help. To teach someone else how to tie their shoes.

That's what my grandmother gave me.

Small Family Car Rides

My Dad left when I was seven years old. He and my Mum had been together for a while before I had been born and the loss was hard on both Mom and I.

But we had family not too far away.

My Grandmother and several Aunts have always lived, if not on the same road, at least in the same region of New Hampshire. And they were there for my Mom to help pick her up and keep her sane.

So we would drive out there a lot. In Mom’s red Subaru hatchback and later in the teal Impreza sedan, then the white Impreza hatchback. We were a Subaru family. I remember the padded cloth seats and the nylon seatbelts and the checking on the edges of the rear windshield.

But I mostly remember the music.

Mom and I were a team for a long time, we were joined a few years after Dad left by Maxx, my Jack Russell Terrier. And like any good team of heroes out on our own we had our theme music.

We went through phases.

Tom Petty got lots of circulation. The Beatles, too. I remember considering the album artwork all rectangled and squared behind the hard plastic. The green of ‘Rubber Soul.’ Tom Petty’s skeletal frame behind the Rickenbacker on Damn The Torpedos.

But we really loved Paul Simon.

Those trips between Sebago, ME and Lee, NH were scored by Graceland probably more than anything else. At least they are in my memory.

Mom loved the man whose folk music carried her through the 70s. Loved that he was successful again, loved the wonderful new sounds coming from the speakers. I loved them, too. I didn’t have the history with Simon that my Mother had, of course, but I could feel that she did.*

And this album about travel and heartbreak and finding something seemed to be the perfect accompaniment. Route 202 was our Mississippi Delta. We weren’t received in Graceland, but in my Grandmother’s kitchen in Dover or standing over the hot air register at her duplex in Barrington.



The three of us - Mum, Maxx and Myself - would leave our home which, for all the love, still bears the scar of separation and pile into the car. Crack open the tape cassette and let that asthmatic accordian carry us down King Street. The bass kicks in as we turn onto 114 and by the time we’re up to speed Mom and I are both singing along “It was a slow day and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road.”

We’d pass signs and talk and lose our place in the music and come back for “the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.”



My relationship with Mum was really defined in those rides, I think.

The home - where my Mother still lives - was still freshly marked by Dad’s absence. My Grandmother’s house was a comfort but there were always other people there. In the cars and the roads and the music we could carve out a space for ourselves and that new void we were still feeling.

It’s important to note that I love my Dad very much and I always have. But for some time it was hard to reconcile those feelings of love with the shattered trust of seven year old Krister.

I can’t imagine what it was like for Mom.

In New Hampshire Mom got to rebuild herself with her mother and sisters, the same people who had been there the first time she built herself up. And I got to know and love my Aunts, Alis, Ann and Bonnie.

When feelings were still raw and exposed, I considered changing my name from Krister, which is my father’s name. And the name that I landed on was Al. Seven or Eight year old Krister, I can’t remember exactly how old I was, loved the song. I also adored my Aunt Alis - or Al, if you will - and that may have also played a factor.



I’m not really sure what changed my mind. I think my Aunt was part of it, I seem to recall some sage advise about “giving it time.” Even then I understood that she was mad at my Dad and would have liked to see some sort of vengeance but that approach was not the healthiest.

Of course, I’m glad I stuck with Krister now and have been for years. I’m proud of the connection I have with my father regardless of what was a difficult separation.

Echoic Memory is the term for the way a sound can trigger a recollection. Sometimes it can hit as a full immersion into a past experience. Graceland for me, every time I hear it, pulls out little bits of this whole experience. Of car rides through Southern Maine. Of the freshness of discovering my new relationship with my Mother and my Dog. Of finding out who my family is. Of finding out who I am.

*This part of the post, and in fact my whole inspiration for writing it, really must go to Nell Boeschenstein's ruminations on Graceland for In This Recording.

Abuelissima

I've been thinking a lot about it and I've decided it's true, Grammy Jo is pretty damn cool.

She doesn't skateboard or listen to hip, young music. She doesn't skydive and I can't imagine her wrestling alligators. But for such a tiny woman she has a massive heart. It's gotta be three or four times the normal sized heart, which you'd think would provoke serious medical problems. In her, though, there just seems to be a preponderance of love. It's staggering, really.

She has seven children, siblings, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. So just in the family she has 30 or so people she loves. Then there are the myriad friends she's made in her long and hearty life. I believe she loves them all, too. And the dogs! And cats. And now even a bird.

If you need proof that she's been loving to all these people, try remembering all the names at one of her birthday parties. They regularly get bigger attendance than my college graduating class. People coming and going throughout the day, camping out in tents. Traveling from foreign countries, even. Although in all fairness, that's usually her firstborn and company.

All for one little woman. She's tiny. I'm not sure she's five feet tall but she's ridiculously dense with love.

Here are two examples:

In WWII when my Grandfather went off to join the army, she followed him. Wherever he may have been stationed, she worked for the troops. When she first started she was on sandwich duty. It was war time and the country was still pretty desperately poor from the Great Depression, so you can imagine there were pretty heavy rations. My grandmother ignored them all. These were hungry boys! So, she fed them what she felt they needed.

Of course she was caught. So she was pushed down to coffee duty. Where she was only too happy to hand out extra rations of sugar and cream.

Then they put her at the candy shack. Apparently you could only buy candy bars two at a time for a nickel a piece. Of course, when a young soldier came up and said that he and his boys were going out for a tough mission or whatever it is army boys do, and they were going to be desperately hard up for sweets.

Accordingly, she sold them several crates, ringing them up ten cents at a time.

Of course, when the powers-that-be found out about that, they busted her down to water duty.

When she was working in the cafeteria, she always had the cleanest dishes. The dishwasher was, apparently, some sort of booze hound. It was common knowledge and not a lot of people treated him with much respect. But of course my grandmother was nice to him and of course her dishes were the cleanest.

Here's another example. This one transcends humanity.

My grandmother had a horrible car accident a couple years ago. She crashed into a tree and was pretty close to dying for a long time. Way longer than any of the family (and friends) really wants to think about.

This wreck, this catastrophe, happened right around the corner from the house and her dogs were in the car. The running theory is she was distracted by the dogs (which were all fine) and lost the road for a second.

But the reason she was even on the road was that the dogs were all barking at a toad. She packed up the dogs into the car to protect the toad. My grandmother cares so much for an amphibian, I can only imagine what's going on in her heart for her family.

Anyway, it's a lovely sentiment and I love my grandmother very much. I can't imagine a person who couldn't.