Small Talk

A couple of posts ago, my nephew IM’d me on Facebook:

“Hi Uncle, nice story today! But I have a request? I love the stories that I know a little about soooo how about a gramma nobutt and gramps story, maybe one about Xmas eve, God I miss that more then anything! Thanks! Hope everything is looking up in the job hunting 😉, love ya”

I replied, “Can do.” And left it at that. The gramma nobutt he is referring to is, of course, his grandmother (my mother … who had a working butt, but it was flat as a pancake). He called her gramma nobutt but around the house we generally referred to her as pancake ass.

It was an endearment.

The gramps he is referring to is his grandfather (my father). Both of whom have been featured in many, many posts. So, not wanting to completely disappoint my nephew, who is actually more like a younger brother to me than a nephew … I’m only six years his senior … I turned my thoughts this morning to my grandmother. Emma. Who would have been 124 today. She’s been gone for 22 years, and though this little snippet I wrote awhile back wouldn’t prove it, I miss her dearly. So … Nephew … this is for all of us.

Small Talk

My grandmother wasn’t much for sharing. Born in 1888 and raised in northern Minnesota, she lived in a sod house as a child, yet her family came to be one of the wealthiest families in the Red River Valley. As a young girl she worked at a milliner’s in Duluth. Once, when she was at work, a neighbor who worked for the railroad came into the store and asked her what her name was.

“Emma,” she said.

“Well, Emma, I’m Walt,” he said. “And I was just strolling down the other side of the street and I looked over here and saw you in the window. I told my friend out there—his name is Shorty—I told him that you were the girl I was going to marry,” Walt said.

“Well, it’s a good thing you introduced yourself,” she said.

When Grandma went home and told her folks that she was marrying Walt they disowned her. At her 100^th birthday party her 96-year-old sister showed up with her 75-year-old nephew. This was the first time we’d seen anyone from Grandma’s side of the family. She and her sister had seen each other in 80 years. They didn’t say much to each other. We could tell they were rich and we weren’t. All because of Walt. But Grandma never talked about that.

Grandma never talked about anything.

As kids, we always thought we’d done something wrong. Everyone’s grandmothers would smother them with attention. Tell them stories. As teenagers, my sister and I thought Grandma was sweet, but still a little scary. My mom and dad would make us visit with her. They called it ‘small talk.’ After a few minutes of remarkably forced conversation, we were excused, and Grandma would sit and watch television, or read. Sometimes she’d knit. She was like that. But she didn’t mean to be. She thought she was talking. She lived to be 102 or 103, and I’ll bet that now, at the age of 39, I’ve said more than she did her entire life.

I used to spend Tuesday afternoons with her when she and I lived in the same town. I was encouraged by my family to spend time with her because—according to them—she liked me. She talked to me, they said. So, I’d leave work at around eleven in the morning and stay with her a couple of hours in her apartment in what my friends called the “Old Folks High Rise,” which, in Missoula, Montana was a retirement home that was five stories tall.

A typical conversation went something like this:

“Grandma, what was it like growing up?” I’d ask.

“Cold,” she’d say.

“What did you do for fun?” I’d ask.

“Worked,” she’d say.

“What was Grandpa like?”

“Funny,” she’d say after a few seconds hesitation.

“What was the best thing that ever happened to you?”

“I got a new car once.”

“What was the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

“Your Aunt Lola hit a cow and ruined my new car.”

This, my family considered to be small talk. One Tuesday afternoon I simply had a breakdown in her apartment. It had been a tough afternoon for me. Both of my parents had died within months of each other and I had just survived Hepatitis B, which had kept me quarantined for six weeks. I was 26 years old. Grandma didn’t say anything for quite a while that afternoon, she just sat there and handed me Kleenex. We’d been through some pretty tough patches together, what with me wanting her to talk and she not talking, but this afternoon I was about at the end of my rope. I think I was just about ready to give up trying to get her to talk to me. I could still visit her and sit silently. It would have been a bit of a stand-off, but I was fed up.

After a few moments of listening to me weep, she said:

“When Walt and I were about twenty years into it—around 1928 or so—Walt decided he was going to stop working for the railroad and start a farm. We sold everything we had and bought this farm outside of East Grand Forks. It was a bad spot. We didn’t know it at the time, and we spent a good deal making a go of it. We had to borrow furniture from the neighbors and grow our own food. One day the bank came and took the farm from us. They told us we had a few weeks to make what we could at auction and leave the rest. It was the middle of winter, and we had three or four kids by then. The morning we were about to set off, your dad pulled me over to the chest of drawers and opened up the bottom drawer. A mother mouse had just had babies. He and I watched this mouse make a nest that would keep her babies warm. She would run from one side of the drawer to the other with wood chips she’d pulled from the drawer. Your dad and I tore up newspaper and dropped it in her path to help her.”

Apparently this process took several hours. When I asked Grandma why she took the time to do this, she said “I admired her courage.”

The morning my Aunt Betty called and told me that Grandma had passed away in her sleep, I didn’t think at all about what Grandma had said—or not said—during her life. I did, however, think about that mouse.