It was never me who was going to be the artist in the family, but I was just the first of six grandchildren. There was hope. My brother, Alex, was showered with cray pas, watercolors, fancy markers. He had some success. Our grandmother framed one of his pieces and hung it in her home. He had an innate understanding of perspective. He advanced and took on the family's other passion, music, and the burden was placed on the shoulders of her third grandchild, Preston. I remember visiting her when she announced that Preston was showing great artistic promise. "Mimi!" I said, "he is four years old!" She took a piece of manila paper from the refrigerator and held it up and said, "but you should see what he can do with crayon."
Even though I wasn't destined to become the next Renoir or Chopin, my grandmother taught me other things. The first things were simple. She taught me that I could like tomatoes, a food I found useless, if they were cherry tomatoes we picked from her front yard. You can slice them, if you can be careful with a knife, so that they make a pocket for a drop of cream cheese and sprinkled with salt and pepper.
At Thanksgiving dinner, under the guise of having me help her clear the dinner dishes, we'd sneak in the kitchen where she had saved the wishbone. We'd each take an end, shut our eyes, make a silent wish and snap it. Somehow, I always managed to have the larger piece and somehow she always knew my wish. She would invite me to spend the night, with her, where we'd stay up much later than my parents ever would have allowed and we would talk until we fell asleep.
My grandmother put me to work by the time I was seven years old. While most of my friends were baking cookies with their grandmothers, I was stuffing envelopes for art openings. It was around this time that I realized I didn't have a normal grandmother. She didn't teach me how to play bridge. She taught me how to play Mancala, a game she brought back from Africa. She ran the Peachtree Road Race. Elton John was on her mailing list. He never came to an art opening, but to her, that was his loss.
When I was in college, my grandmother officially hired me to work at her art gallery. By this time I was doing more than stuffing envelopes, but I learned that when it was time to stuff envelopes, even she sat down and did her part. It was there where I learned the art of persuasion. Each week, she managed to trick me into working on my day off. I walked away thinking it had been my idea.
There are images of my grandmother I won't ever forget: her hands, decorated with ornate and exotic rings, but also plain, hardworking, strong. She was always tending to something: walking her dog after dinner, feeding the koi fish in her pond, trimming a bonsai tree. She never threw away stale bread, but saved it to feed the birds. Life thrived in her presence.
And there are lessons from her I will remember: She never underestimated me. Even at five years old, it never occurred to me that she saw me as anything but an intellectual equal. She fell in love and remarried at seventy-two years old. She was traveling the world, still, just months before her death. You are never too young or too old to do anything. Each day after lunch at the gallery, she would bring up a bag of cookies, usually white chocolate with macadamia nuts, and she would eat just one. All things in moderation. She reused things other people would throw away, like the cardboard backing of legal pads, which perfectly fit in large envelopes and keep the contents from folding. Everything has not just one purpose, but many. She was strong, stubborn, but graceful. I remember her telling me that when she met Maya Angelou, her presence could be felt when she walked in the room. My grandmother had this sort of presence. She held her head up, her mannerisms natural, but an elegant perfection and suggested that when she spoke, it was a good idea to listen.
I am proud of her. She went to sleep late and woke up before the sun rose. The last time I spoke to her, I was calling from Phoenix, Arizona. I asked her if I had caught her in the middle of anything and she replied, "oh, Sugah, I am always in the middle of something." Still, whatever it was, she set it aside long enough for us to catch up.
She exuded what poet James Dickey called, "The strength of fields." It's a humble strength, a consistent strength, one that is best explained in his words:
Wild hope can always spring
from tended strength. Everything is in that.
That and nothing but kindness. More kindness, dear Lord,
of the renewing green. That is where it all has to start:
With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less
Than save every sleeping one and night-walking one of us.
My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.
She did what she could. She always did what she could. It sounds
simple, but which of us truly has, in all of our moments, done what
we could? I will miss her, would break the bigger end of every
wishbone in the world if I could have more time with her, but she has
left so much for me to learn, to live up to, that I will always be
learning from her. I will
always be getting to know her more, deriving strength from her
example. She did what she could, and with turquoise rings on her fingers,
colorful scarves around her neck, her head high, and her eyes always
looking forward to what she could do next.
