The essays I write here about my parents and my childhood are by no means meant to suggest I had a difficult or unhappy upbringing. I had one of the best childhoods of anyone I ever knew. In fact, you may not see too many more of these pieces because I've dredged up darn near every fight or problem I can think of, those being the most entertaining tales to tell.
My parents were great. So were my aunts and uncles, though they were a bit quirkier and more colorful. My grandparents on my father's side both died before I was born. I believe they both did this deliberately just so I wouldn't know them and therefore couldn't write about them on the Internet.
My Grandmother on my mother's side was born in 1900 and came darned close to spanning the century. She made it to 97.
At the age of 16, she married but that had presumably ended by 1920 because that's when she married again. This time it was to a rather tall man and she then gave birth to my mother…in 1922. She never discussed the prior marriage with my mother who assumed, as you might, that her mother was then on her first marriage. The genes of the tall man, by the way, may be the reason I am 6'3".
He died in 1931 when my mother was nine. My grandmother married for the final time in 1935 and they were happy together until this spouse passed away in 1984 at the age of 88. We used to tell people that my grandmother was married for 49 years to her second husband…and we were wrong.
After Grandma passed away at 97 in '97, my mother and I flew back to Connecticut for the burial. When we went to the church to arrange for the services, an official showed us a draft of the headstone for our approval and owing to church records, it listed all three husbands. That's how my mother found out that her father was her mother's second husband…and that my grandmother had actually been married for 49 years to her third one.
But I'm getting way ahead of the story here…
Grandma was a lovely woman without a hint of selfishness or meanness in her body. I cannot imagine her ever raising her voice or speaking ill of another human being. If someone were to accurately portray her in a movie, you would think it was pure fiction; that no one could be as nice as that person. Grandma was, at least when I knew her. My mother once said, "When she was raising me, she wasn't quite like that." Still, Grandma and the man I knew as Grandpa were a very happy couple for those 49 years.
My mother took me back to see them when I was a year old and then again when I was seven. Thereafter, they'd come out to California every three or four years for a week or two each time.
In 1970 when I was eighteen, I made my first trip east since age seven and my first ever in a plane without my mother. (My father had bad memories of his life in Connecticut and after he moved out to California in 1950, never went back, not even for a brief visit.) I was at that point getting involved with the comic book industry and the expedition that year involved visiting the DC and Marvel offices in New York and attending that year's big comic convention there…but I took one day to make a quick bus trip up to Hartford to see my grandparents.
Grandma was waiting for me at the station when I got off the bus and she spent about the first five minutes hugging me. Then we walked a few blocks to a restaurant where Grandpa was going to meet us for lunch. He worked in the shipping and receiving department, as he had for most of his life, at G. Fox & Co., a famous department store founded in Hartford in 1847. That is not a typo. I had a good turkey sandwich, a scoop of mediocre potato salad and several glasses of milk. (I have since learned not to drink milk and not to order potato salad unless I'm in a delicatessen.)
If it seems odd that I remember what I ate close to 44 years later…okay, it's odd but I recall every detail of that day. We talked — which mostly consisted of them getting me to tell them everything I could about myself and how I was doing. I was a working professional writer making a decent living, and that just amazed them because the last time they'd seen me, I was in high school. They seemed to have figured out and were impressed by the fact that Mark had turned into an adult. Not all my relatives would so readily grasp that fact or be that impressed.
Finally, Grandpa had to scurry back to work so I said goodbye to him. We had about two hours before my bus back to Manhattan would be departing so Grandma and I got in a cab and we went to her home in East Hartford, the home my mother had grown up in. I had been to that house when I was seven but not since. In the intervening years, I had gotten much larger and it, of course, had gotten much smaller.
The home had a tiny front porch and on it were a large, decorative rocking chair and a small wooden chair that I think had come from some otherwise-discarded dining room set. Grandma wanted us to sit out there and talk so I tried to take the wooden chair and give her the rocker. "No, no," she said. "You have to sit in the rocking chair." When I attempted to decline, she said, "Ever since you wrote that you were coming, all I could think of is how wonderful it would be for the two of us to sit out here on the porch and just take it easy and talk. And as I thought about it, I thought about you in the rocking chair and I thought how wonderful it would be to see you in that rocking chair."
So I sat in the rocking chair. She knitted. I rocked and told her stories and all I could think of was that I'd turned into Sheriff Andy Taylor. I almost addressed her as Aunt Bee.
When it got to be time to head for the bus station, I tried to get her to let me go alone but she wouldn't hear of it. Wouldn't let me pay the cab driver, either. Just before I got on the bus, she was hugging me and crying. I asked her why she was crying and she said, "Because I might never see you again."
I told her that wasn't so; that she and Grandpa were coming out to Los Angeles again the following summer. She said, "Well, that's the plan but you never know. After all, I'm 70 and he's 74."
"I'll see you next year," I told her…and I did. And many times thereafter for the next 27 years. She came out two more times with Grandpa. Then after he passed, she came out three or four more times and repeatedly declined our offers to move her out to stay. "My life is in Hartford," she'd say. "My home is in Hartford." Sometimes when I had to go to New York on business, I'd triangulate my trip. From L.A., I'd fly to New York and do what I had to do there. Then I'd fly to Hartford, hire a car and driver for the day (that so impressed and delighted her) and go see Grandma and take her out to lunch. Then I'd have the driver take me back to the airport and I'd fly home.
Around the time she hit 89, a friend of hers called to tell my mother that Grandma was having trouble with day-to-day activities. We called her doctor who agreed it was time she stopped living all alone in that house. He recommended an assisted living facility in Manchester, which was about six miles from her home. It was a beautiful, well-managed place, he said, and several of her friends were now living there. Then my mother and I jointly phoned Grandma and lovingly broached the subject.
She was not horrified at the notion. In fact, she seemed to be glad someone had suggested it because she wasn't in much control of her life. "I can barely get around this house," she said. We arranged for a family friend to take her to Manchester the next day for a tour. She loved the place and she loved seeing several of her friends. The evening after the tour, she said, "I would like to live there the rest of my life."
The perfect solution? Well, it would have been if the facility in Manchester had had room for her. The next day when I called to try and arrange her admission, I was told, "I'm afraid we're full-up at the moment and we have a waiting list."
I asked, "Well, how long might it be before you have a place for my grandmother?"
The woman said, "Well, I can't be certain…you know, you're asking us to guess when the people staying here might pass away. But we seem to have an opening about every four months."
I said, "I see. Now, if my grandmother went on your wait list for those rooms, where would she be on that list?"
"Let's see…she'd be one…two…then I have these six…then…" Finally, she said, "Number thirteen."
"Thirteen?" I probably sounded like Shaggy on Scooby Doo with my voice cracking.
"You're not superstitious, are you?"
I said, "Usually not…but if you only have three or so openings a year…and my grandmother is close to ninety…she can't wait four years to get in there."
"Well," the woman said. "It might not be quite that long. People on the wait list sometimes pass away —"
"I'm sure they do," I interrupted. "I don't want my grandmother to be one of them."
"I'm sorry but this establishment is very popular. All the same reasons you have for wanting her to be here…other people have those reasons, as well."
I thanked her for the information and ended the call. Then I sat here for a few minutes and thought — again, like someone in a cartoon show or about half the movies that have ever been made — "There's got to be way to get her in there."
And as it turned out, there was. But you're not going to hear what it was until next time. Please imagine the voice of Don LaFontaine in your head as I tell you to join us here in the next week or so for more (cue the echo:) Tales of My Grandmother!!!