Granny
I’m not sure who that screaming lady on the left is, but the one with the little smirk and the raised eyebrows, that’s my Granny. She was an adventurous sort. And we were a huge part of each other’s lives.
My grandfather died when he was just 51, leaving Granny a widow at 52. She nursed both he and his father when they had tuberculosis in the 1950s. Neither man survived very long after that. My father was Granny’s only child, so we were her whole world.
She was a workin’ girl, packing boxes at Aetna Shirt Company in Baltimore. She had this little box of buttons from the factory that I loved to bury my fingers in and play with. She never had a driver’s license so she walked or took the city bus everywhere, including to work. It was only a 20-minute drive, but according to the bus schedules today, it takes 90 minutes on public transit.
We ate Sunday lunch with her almost every week, but it was always called “dinner” on Sundays. She made the same thing every time - beef pot pie and macaroni & cheese, which had tomatoes in it that I always relocated to the side of my plate (now I know she probably was making some version of Amatriciana which I LOVE). Her kitchen was in the basement of her tiny rowhouse, but she set a fine table and hauled the food up the stairs to serve us each week.
There were 0.0 toys at her house, and yet we always found something to do after lunch, while the grownups took a nap on the couch to the background noise of a Colts game. One of my favorite things to do was to poke around my grandfather’s workbench, which was as he left it when he died. There were all kinds of unusual things, but my favorite was the vial of liquid mercury he had. (Why did he have liquid mercury in his basement?) We would remove the cork from the vial, and pour the mercury on our palms and watch it roll into a little ball. We would push the tiny balls together to make a bigger ball, but it was always a ball. Never a puddle. The idea of liquid metal was fascinating. No one seemed to be worried that it wasn’t good for us. I wonder sometimes if I could have scored higher on my SAT’s if I hadn’t played with that mercury.
Her house was built in the 1940s and the main return air duct was a giant grate in the middle of the floor. I was terrified of that grate, what might live under it. It made a horrendous noise when the heat kicked on. The house was so tiny; a current Zillow estimate says it is 1424 square feet on two floors, 3 bedrooms and 1.5 baths, and valued at a little over $200,000. Amazing, as I’m sure Granny didn’t pay more than $10,000 for it in the 1950s. She lived on the main floor and the basement; she rented the second floor which had its own kitchen, bath, bedroom and living room (or another bedroom). Her entry hall had a steep, narrow staircase up to the second floor apartment, and we could sometimes hear her renters coming and going. My parents lived there briefly after they got married, and I was born during that time. Apparently Granny sometimes came up to their room to wake my dad up for work. I mean, he was only 18, so maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea?
Her kitchen was spartan, as was most of her life. She made the same food all the time and we looked forward to the familiar. Her sugar cookies at Christmas time were legendary. She rolled them as thin as a potato chip, and made scads of them. She’d load them into a cotton sack that filled a huge tin she kept in a cupboard at the bottom of the stairs. She knew we would be there every Sunday at least and she needed a good supply. No other special treats were offered at Christmas time. Nothing else. Just the thin sugar cookies. No icing. No sprinkles. Just plain. She always ran out.
She also made dough-cakes for breakfast when we spent the night, which seemed often. (My parents had a pretty good thing going there, now that I think about it.) Dough-cakes were just a flat doughnut - homemade bread dough, fried in oil, smothered in butter and sprinkled with “10x sugar” as she called it.
To my childhood memory, she had an enormous dresser with no pulls. It was an art deco style that had grooves cut into each end of the drawers. My little kid arms couldn’t reach both ends at the same time, so I would pull one side, then the other. I almost always made a bee-line for her dresser, because tucked inside the top drawer was a thin sliding section that held all her jewelry. She had pins, and brooches, and necklaces and bracelets and rings. But I went for the cameo ring every time. It was a delicate solid gold ring with a filagree pattern around the cameo’s setting. A faded light pink lady’s profile was barely visible. Her father had given each of his daughters a ring when they turned 16 and this was hers. I loved that ring and tried it on. She always let me, as long as I only played with the jewelry right there at the dresser. When I turned 16, she gave me that cameo. I have since passed it on to one of my daughters who also loved cameos. I now have a collection of Granny’s other cameos and mine in a shadow box.
Not only did we stay overnight with her often, but she also took us to Betterton, MD every summer for a week without my parents. She was brave. We had a grand time, doing all the things kids love at an old school bayside beach “resort” town. I think it was in its glory days when we were kids. I have fond memories of walking to town with her after a day on the beach playing in the water. We would eat dinner at a diner or a restaurant, then go to the pier to play arcade games, skee-ball being my favorite. We always earned tickets that we could spend on trinkets and prizes or candy. I never had enough tickets to buy the beautiful jewelry box made out of seashells, but I was always able to take something special home.
One summer, Granny had an admirer, named Dewey. We must have met him at the diner, and she made an impression. I clearly remember our room at the little inn, and where I was sleeping. There was a knock on our door around two in the morning. Granny got up with her silk bonnet on, bravely walked across the room to the door, and loudly whispered, “who is it?” It was Dewey! She whisper-shouted, “go away, there is no one here!” He persisted, and she should have called the police, but she just kept saying, “go away Dewey!” Eventually he did. I think he was drunk. We have told and re-told that story so many times. She never heard the end of the teasing about Dewey for the rest of her life. Every time we mentioned Dewey, she would just softly say, “oh my.” She knew she probably dodged a bullet.
She was a woman of routine. She went to Janie’s Beauty Shop every Friday to have her hair “done.” “Done” meant washed and set and not to be touched for a week. Helmet hair. But this was a big weekly ritual for her and nothing would change that appointment. All her girlfriends went on that same day. She always had stories to tell about the others’ families. She played on a duckpin bowling league every Tuesday. There is a super funny story about her one night when she got to laughing about something and her false teeth went flying out of her mouth and down the lane behind the ball. She said she wet her pants a little that night, too. She did her laundry every week at the same time, hanging her clothes on a washing line outside. She attended church every Sunday. After I moved away and started my own family, she was extremely reluctant to come and visit with my parents because she had to do her laundry on Saturdays. It was very hard to convince her to change her schedule.
She retired at 65 or so and traveled a little. That picture of her in the barrel at Niagara Falls was from one of her “bus” trips. I’m not sure where all she visited but she was always on a bus trip. One time, she even went to Spain! It was probably her first and only time on an airplane.
She never remarried, and she never got a driver’s license. She was with our family for every holiday, birthday party, and vacation. She lived on her meager pension and her social security and made it work. She had very little, but she was always generous. She deposited money in her Christmas fund at her bank every week, so she had enough for gifts. She bought savings bonds for us when we were little, and was able to give us thousands of dollars when we graduated from high school. When I decided to teach school in Haiti, she was the first to step up and offer to buy my plane ticket. I told Kirk about her and her generosity when we first started dating and said that I wanted my life to be marked by a generosity like hers.
Gladys Marie Leach Brackett was a wonderful human being. I am grateful for the influence she had on my life. I know she would love to meet all the little people who now call me “Nana.” But I could never be the Granny she was.