My grandmother
made the best fried chicken I knew. GFC: Grammy’s Fried Chicken. Onions, lots
of onions, rosemary, salt and pepper. She would cook it with one cast-iron skillet
flipped face down over another, a stroke of genius picked up somewhere long ago.
I’ll never forget the sight of her in a floral apron, wielding those two
skillets like tennis rackets in a rare display of physical strength, the steam
and the smell of sautéing onions rising up out of the kitchen as I watched mallards through the living room window.
And the meals: chicken, white rice, green beans steamed and squeaky, probably
pulled from the garden hours earlier. Vanilla ice cream and home-canned peaches
out of the cellar for dessert. Unpretentious, beautiful, prepared and served
with quiet but steadfast pride.
When I was
young, in the summertime, we would ride bikes to the neighborhood garden down
the street from Grammy and Gramp’s. Gram rode a big, elegant maroon bike with a
wide leather seat. It was another forceful image, like the skillets – she rode with
the same slow-motion grace a child sees in the sight of his father casting with a
fly-rod or his mother scooping him out of harm’s way from a passing car. In the
garden, she and Mom would pick flowers while Gramp drilled us in the finer
points of pulling carrots. We’d all ride or walk back to the house, baskets
laden, triumphant in our simplicity.
Sometimes, when
we were visiting around Christmas, we would drive into downtown Rochester to
see The Nutcracker. We’d put on our
dress shoes and nice shirts, Gramp a dark suit and a red tie, and Gram would
bring out her fur coat. After the performance, my parents and Gramp would hem
and haw about this scene or that, noting a lackluster or extraordinary performer,
or discussing the Philharmonic’s next concert. Gram might chime in with a smile
and a nod here, an “oh, yes” there. I will never know what emotions passed
through her as she watched candy canes waltz and the violin sections sawed Tchaikovsky
to the rafters. Somewhere in her past, probably before the Depression, had the young Jean Lincoln dreamed of dancing with a prince through a moonlit forest?
Had she known that her life could be as beautiful and free as a sleigh cutting
through freshly fallen snow?
We are losing
the generation that knew a different world. The world of the Dust Bowl and
Auschwitz and Hiroshima, in which barbarism could still run rampant and tornado-like
across the surfaces of our so-called developed nations. My grandmother: the antidote
to savagery. Beautiful, composed, private to the end. What irretrievable
knowledge will pass as our elders do?
Too many of my
memories fall during her waning years, when Gramp handled much of the cooking
and yardwork to avoid boredom, or after they left the house, after he died
suddenly, momentously, like a record ripped from the turntable with the final
track unfinished. Her days then passed like the slow rolling of a placid sea,
waiting for the occasional swells of family or friends visiting, holidays or
the first snowfall, the single weekly uplift of Sunday dinner with my aunt and
uncle. Or perhaps just waiting, patiently as ever, for that distant shore to
finally appear.
At one of those Sunday
dinners this past December, the last meal I would share with her, we ate
strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert. I asked Grammy if she and Gramp had grown
rhubarb in the garden for pies. I knew, of course, that they had. Strawberry
rhubarb is my dad’s favorite, and my own, for a reason. But I wanted a story. What
I got instead was poetry. “Oh, yes,” she said, smiling, then pausing as the
grin faded. “Goodness, I guess those days are gone now.”
That night,
unable to sleep, I wrote that Gram’s ninety-five year old mind had become a blizzard, everything
blowing around, relocating, indecipherable. But beautiful to witness in its
transience.
My own mind
jumps too quickly to images of her in a wheelchair, fumbling a pillbox or
fussing over unkempt hair, trying to remember which grandson lives where these
days. But deeper back, deeper down, is the image that I know will last, the
touchstone of enduring love. The sky is blue and the house snow white, and Grammy
and Gramp are standing together, hip-to-hip by the old mounted bell at the end
of the driveway fence, waving goodbye for now.
