viragette

Last night we were standing around on the deck, watching the guys inspect several steaks very closely for upwards of half an hour, and generally enjoying the balmy weather. I was looking up at the trees behind the house, thinking about climbing them like those scientists who climb the giant redwood trees when I was attacked by the Minnesota state bird.

Getting bitten by a mosquito always reminds my of my Grandma, who is known to us hipsters as G-Lo. When I was little, I would return each summer to the town where my father grew up, in Minnesota, and spend a month with my grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle and cousins. Those were the best times of my childhood.

I took this picture of my grandmother’s house last summer:

If you want to know what an earthly paradise is like for a 9 year old girl, look at that picture and imagine that the air is warm and humid and smells good, like cool black dirt and warm corn stalks and Cherry Kool-Aid. It’s quiet, but the wind in the trees and on the fields makes a special sound, and in the evening on the day you arrive you can’t sleep because the crickets are so loud. Imagine that you can ride your bike anywhere in a 7-block radius (i.e., the entire town) and that everyone smiles and waves. That you can read all the cool magazines your aunt has, or play MacDraw on the IIc, or even watch MTV (if grandma doesn’t walk in during certain videos). That every morning you walk with grandma to the Home Cafe for a Cinnamon Roll, and when the noon whistle sounds everyone meets there again and you can have a cheeseburger and fries. The older men in overalls stop and tell you jokes about how your father was so cool, and the ladies smile kindly and ask after your mother and say how pretty she was when she lived in town and how they remember you when you were so little. Your aunt and grandma and grandpa know everyone, and they talk about grownup stuff and joke and smile with all the people who stop to say hello. Then you spend all afternoon at the neighbor’s pool (”See you later Grandpa, we’re going swimming!” Grandpa: “Don’t get wet!”), screaming like a maniac and swimming underwater from one end to about the middle because only your uncle can make it the whole length underwater. In the evening, after dinner on the screen porch (which is always cool and hip, because the grownups talk and laugh and the table looks like something out of Dwell Magazine, only it’s 1985), you can’t resist going outside again - even with the mosquitos - because it’s so warm and there are fireflies and SO MANY stars. At night, before watching Johnny Carson and Quincy with grandma, you stand in the kitchen and she talks to you while she puts pink Calamine lotion on all those mosquito bites with a cotton ball.

I still love the smell of Calamine lotion.

The first year my little brother came on the yearly trip to Minnesota, he cried the night he arrived. He missed Mom, and was almost inconsolable. He wanted to go home. I think he was about 6 or 7. We all felt sorry, but I remember thinking “Sheesh, get ahold of yourself, we’ll see her in a month and we can call her on Sunday.” I had never cried, and watching The Bug sob into grandma’s shirt, I felt sort of bad because I hadn’t. I mean, I missed Mom and Dad too. On the day we returned home, I loved to see them standing at the gate, Dad was so cool and funny, and Mom was so pretty and kind. We would drive home, laughing and talking, and put our things away in our own rooms. By evening, I usually cried for my grandmother. I cried for the smell of the warm, humid air and the feel of it on my skin and for the sound of crickets. I wanted to go back.

I wonder about alot of things that never occurred to me as a girl about that town - and I wonder how I ended up so much like my grandmother. Of all my family, I think I am most like Grandma L, G-Lo. I wonder if we are just kindred spirits, or if the time I spent with her as a girl made us so alike. My grandma is, in the parlance of today, a total workaholic. She still works every day, although she is now past 80 and has lost her fine vision to macular degeneration. My aunt reports that on cold winter mornings after a blizzard, the only person parked uptown on Main Street is my 80 year old grandmother - no doubt catching up on the book-keeping at the shop. I just “get” Grandma L, and I think she understands me too. I wish I lived closer, so we could hang out.

A few years ago, I was thinking about G-Lo when I had one of my fundamental insights into human nature (the same ones that most people had when they were 12). I realized that everything about a person is a double-edged sword. My grandma is a strong person, who works hard and is more stubborn than God. This characteristic is one of the things that make her such a wonderful, unique person and simultaneously one of the things that make her such a pain in the ass. (Takes one to know one.)

And I began to realize that everyone is like this. My mother is kind and tolerant, but sometimes she has been hurt and lashes back because she sacrificed too much of herself. My father is smart and funny, but sometimes his teasing intelligence cuts you like a knife.

This must be what it means to not wish to change those you love. How can a person take away what drives you crazy about them, when to do so would also take away what makes you love them so?