My grandmother always sat one of two places. Her chair in her front room was her reading spot. She was an avid reader. Hundreds of books were stacked around her chair, all worn, and all loved. Not great works of fiction, there were no classics in the mix. All the books were paperback with images of romantic encounters printed on them. The reading light above her chair was stained yellow from years of cigarette smoke. The table next to her held more books, her coffee cup, several music boxes and an overflowing ash tray. Tucked under her chair there were several pair of flip-flops. They were awful plastic with big flowers adorning the straps. Her television was a few feet away and always on. She never really watched it, she listened.
Her other favorite place was at her dining table. Surrounded by shelves lined with music boxes and knick-knacks, she sat facing the front room. She made sure to keep the front door in her line of sight. A shelf stuffed with board games sat to her right. Most of the time there was sheet music sitting nearby or unfolded in front of her. She read it like she read her romance novels. She traced the notes on the page with her fingers. To her it seemed that each note had its own texture and they were all worth exploring. After a few days of touching the pages she would go to her piano in the next room and play the music she’d been touching. Her finger traced the piano keys like they did the sheet music. The yellow cigarette stains between her fingers exposed themselves in rhythm to the music. Her piano was unique. She had bought it for $10 at a yard sale in the 1940’s. It had real ivory keys and was a player piano that now only waited to be played. She was the machine that drove it, controlling it with her thin hands. Her bare foot tapped the rusting pedals in perfect time. There was elegance to the scene. Cracked ivory keys against dark stained wood punctuated by my grandmother’s frail form. She was draped in a flowered moo-moo swaying in time to her music.
My grandmother wasn’t a formally educated woman. I don’t think she made it past the eighth grade. She learned to read music on her own. She had a strong mind that absorbed knowledge without effort. Hours upon hours of playing word games had increased her vocabulary vastly. I used to laugh as she answered “Jeopardy” questions faster than Alex Trebek could read them from his blue cards. No one could beat her at Scrabble. I am not sure if it was a mark of intelligence or someone who was simply a skilled game player.
I’ll never forget her vegetable garden. She always had aluminum pie pans tied on strings that stretched across the length of it. She said it was to scare the birds. It was so loud when the wind blew I often wondered if it scared the tomatoes.
Her favorite snack to give me, when we were into our second or third round of “Sorry”, was “Tang” and butter cookies. She always mixed the “Tang” with too much flavoring so there was thick orange syrup in the bottom of the cup. She even made a game out of eating the butter cookies. They were shaped like flowers with a hole in the center. She would slide one down her index finger and start to nibble it away to see how thin she could get it before it finally broke. Of course she was the champion of this game also.
Liberace was her favorite artist. She would play his records on her large console record player and dance with me in her dining room. She has sort of a school girl crush for Liberace. I laugh now thinking of how flamboyant he was. I wondered if she ever realized that he didn’t really go for women. My parents took her to see him in concert and she was elated. She told me about his long white fur coats and how his fingers shimmered with diamonds as he played. Her eyes sparkled like diamonds as she told me about it.
She was a unique person. I’m sad that my children never got to know her. They would have loved to have acted like elephants with long trunks prancing around her living room—something she always did with me after playing “Baby Elephant Walk” on her piano. I have her sheet music for that song. It’s old and brittle now, but I touch it once in a while. I trace the notes like she did. It keeps me connected to her.
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