I picked up Juliet early from college this morning. We got out of there in time to be past Cloquet before the snowflakes began hitting our windshield like we were in the Millennium Falcon just hitting hyperspeed. Plan successful. On the way home after listening to Juliet’s playlist for a while, she put her earbuds in and concentrated on getting some homework done.
Yeah. Homework over Thanksgiving break.
I put on some Greg Brown who we once saw play live in the Washington Auditorium circa 1996 I believe.
Thanksgiving has me thinking about my grandma’s pumpkin pie and the Crisco that made her crust flaky and the little cans of Milnot she used.
Melmac coffee cups on plastic tablecloths with the felt underneath so that they were always a little squishy. So easy to clean up anything. Anything usually spilt by me.
I’ve been thinking about doing some more Performance Poetry. I don’t have my partner in crime Joey Kenig around, so this would be a solo show. Something I’ve always wanted to do, but lately, I’ve been thinking that it should be centered around story- telling with a few poems carefully sewn in place here and there. I wrote my first poem for my grandma when I was around five years old and when I was a kid, right up until the time that I left for college, Grandma was just about the best friend I had.
When I left for college, she wrote me letters and poems and I still have some of those. Grandma gave me my first sip of coffee, she shook the first drops of Frank’s Red Hot sauce on my plate, after school she’d make me a couple dozen molasses cookies with white sugar like little stars sprinkled on top, bowl after bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese covered in black pepper and too much table salt.
She taught me how to cook, bake, fish, drive a car and she was my first barber. Some of these things got her in trouble in more ways than one and I was usually to blame.
She rolled down the snowy hills, when I needed a path for my sled.
She bought my first saplings that I picked (from her backyard) and that I planted in coffee cans that came from her root cellar, with sand from the sandbox in her yard. Quarter a piece, I think. Late at night we watched shows on her little 13-inch black and white television like Taxi and Mel’s Diner and Alice and Kojak. We walked in the woods and collected wildflowers and we hunted for morel mushrooms and battered them with corn meal.
We battered and fried catfish and carp too.
In the last three and a half decades without her I’ve written quite a bit about her, and I’ve come to realize that there are some really great stories there. Not stories that necessarily need to be written down and digested on your own time, but stories that need to be shared, in person. They’d make a great show I think. I’ve been listening to Greg Brown’s song “Canned Goods” quite a bit lately and right down to the chicken gravy and the yellow porch light, it makes me think of my own grandma.
She could make me laugh, she could make me cry, she could make me mad, and she could make me cry in other ways than the first, for other reasons. She still can. She was tough, but just like the old orange cat that she had that always scratched her and bit her when she walked through the unused dining room where he sat by the window -- although she never gave him any reason to do so -- if you belonged to her, she was all-in for you. She loved you no matter what.
She was my champion, my biggest fan, my loyal friend, even when I got too big for my britches as she would have said. I regret college years and post-college times when I didn’t have time for her. And… as often happens, those times went by fast and in the blink of an eye, they ran short and the phone rang one day at work… No letters, no too-quick visits, no more holidays, no more Turtles in my Christmas stocking or iced sugar cookies or Butterfingers in the drawer. No Fanta, no hugs that somehow always hugged all of me and no one to stop my endless nosebleeds. No molasses cookies dropped from Heaven like little drops of perfection. No pumpkin pie. I should have learned that just like her Ford Falcon, sometimes you can drive until the frame rusts off and then the heart just quits.
Lots of memories though. Plenty of those. And recipes, not just for food, but for how to share a life with someone you loved. How to be a grandparent. How to be a good person. What friendship should look like.
I think her story would make a good show. It’s my story, well, the beginning of it anyway, the seed of who I am today and the soil and the water and the sunlight that made me grow.
Not exclusively, life doesn’t work that way and I have great parents, but that is something different entirely. Not everyone grows up with a Grandma like I had, and, if you were lucky enough to do so, you’ll know exactly what I mean. It’s a good story and like Greg Brown sings, “the canned goods I buy at the store, don’t have the summer in them anymore.”
