Two years ago, on November 26th, one of my grandma's died.
She was something.
I'm still having a difficult time coming to terms with my grandma's death. Yeah. Two years after.
I can't say that she was always pleasant to be around, though from my eulogy (which follows) you'd be hard pressed to find much of anything negative about her. That's probably part of the confliction that's niggling at me now.
Even two years after her death, I'm really having a hard time believing that she's dead. (I typed over that last word more than a half-dozen times. "dead" or "gone." I'm opting for dead because apparently she's not *gone* as far as this narrative is going.
Indulge me, if you will, a bit of reminiscence.
My grandma made the nastiest chop suey that was ever eaten by human beings. If it was a leftover in the fridge, and it didn't (appear to) have anything fungal or microbial growing on it, it was fair game to be cut into very small pieces and mixed with rice to become chop suey.
My grandma had geese, Huey and Louey. On at least a couple of occasions. White geese. They lived on her property and ate grass and goose feed that she would give them. And they shit in the pond. And everywhere else. Geese are, well, how should I put this... Um... they're not very sociable when it comes to other living creatures. In fact, they can be downright mean. And when my brother and I would play out in grandma's yard, they would, if we wandered too close to them, vent their anger, with loud goose hisses and a flurry of flapping wings. Quite terrifying to us, being pre-pubescent and not all that aggressive. But when we would tell Grandma about this, she would remind us that we should probably stay away from the geese because, in essence, they were wild animals. When I was 10, the immediate family clan went to Grandma's for Thanksgiving.
As was already mentioned. Grandma was never mistaken for a gourmet chef. C'mon, eggplants from the garden that she grew should probably never have been sliced and put into spaghetti what was tomato sauce, said eggplants, a bit of leftover catfish head boilings and noodles. I mean, really.
But that's an aside, I guess. Once again, forgive. After obligatory mingling we were invited to the table. For the Thanksgiving Feast.
It was, as I remember it, a wonderful bounty. There was a huge bird, roasted to golden perfection, in the center of main table that my grandpa proceeded to carve up with deft excellence, every slice juicier that the one before. A mound of smashed potatoes higher than my head that steamed to one side. A pile of corn, perfectly boiled and steeping in butter and its own juices, Stuffing nearly falling out of its bowl, the scent making me mad with hunger. Cranberry sauce, gelled and shimmering in its tart tang. Everything. Everything smelling and looking so wonderful. And I was given my helping. And I dove in. And ate with complete relish.
"Wow," and an uncle finally said, "This is so wonderful."
Mind you, we didn't always say that the food was wonderful because it was wonderful. Most times, the food was complimented because it was food. As I've said, Grandma was not a Chef.
"Thank you," my grandma said, smiling.
"This is the best turkey I can remember having," the uncle continued. "Where did you get it?"
"Oh," my grandma answered, "It's not a turkey. It's Huey. Or maybe Louey. Those damned geese kept coming after me whenever I went to feed them, I just got tired of them. I had Hank take care of them."
And Thanksgiving went on from there. I'm sure I had bits and portions of those geese for years to come.
But this was all an aside. Just a bit of reminiscence. Not all that pleasant, but hey, not all of life is pleasant.
I'm thinking of my grandma because she always pressed me. When I stopped going to grad school, she asked me, on quite a few occasions, when I was going to go back and finish my graduate degree.
In 1990, I earned a Bachelor of the Arts in English. I had a minor in philosophy. I went on to graduate school with the (at the time) thought, that I would one day teach in a University environment. Things didn't happen that way and I dropped out of graduate school. And I was never able to explain to my grandma why I didn't finish my graduate degree.
My grandma was a go-getter. She got her degrees like nobody's business. She got a teaching degree that had her teaching art. I remember being a little boy and going to her house for the weekend and having students from her art class come to work on projects, and she had me working (in my own, little boy way) also work the project. And then, years later, I ended up being a student in one of the schools that she had taught at. There was a file cabinet in a classroom that I went to that had her name, in her hand, markered on it.
A number of years after her art teaching spree she went on to law school. She did phenomenally well. And she became a lawyer. It was in her lawyer phase that she actually questioned my stopping going to school. Asking me when I would finish my degree.
I'm not going to finish my degree, Grandma. I never wanted to teach students. I don't have that in me.
But I want to make art, like you did.
I gave you something that I made one time. Very late in your life. It was a compilation/collage kind of thing. I really thought you would like it. I brought it to a party that was being held for someone. I don't remember who the party was for. But I was shy about giving it to you. So when I finally asked you to come to my car so I could present it to you, and then bring it to your car so you could take it with you, I was shivering even though it was summer. Yes, I was, as I probably always will, still yearning for your acceptance.
I gave to you. And you were acceptant. You took my work. And you doted.
Then, not long afterward, you learned you would die.
The gift I had given you was in your garage. I had been since I had given it to you.
You asked, after you knew you were dying, but before you told anyone else, if you could give it away to my cousin, because your garage was getting pretty full. I said yes.
I really miss you, Grandma. So very much.
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My Eulogy for my grandma
Most of this is taken from something I wrote for my for my grandma's journal. She had asked that her sons and grandchildren each write a page for her journal that recounted our personal memories of being a member of this Engels clan. Mnemosyne: She's the ancient Greek goddess of memory and the mythic inventor of words. I'm not real strong when it comes to the ol' memory-department of my early childhood, but here go some words.
I have a number of clear memories from my childhood with my grandma; they range from my sitting on the floor to read a book in front of the chair she was sitting in and having her scratch my scalp and stroke my hair, to her teaching me how to swim by tossing me (wearing one of those orange life vests, of course) into the gently drifting waters of the Kankakee River. I remember nestling on the couch with both Grandma and Grandpa and a huge bowl of stove-popped popcorn to watch All in the Family, Grandma and Grandpa singing their respective parts of the opening theme song.
I remember when their Momence mailbox was at a far corner of their property because the mailman didn't drive any further down the dirt road that led to their driveway. At that time going to get the mail was a wonderful mini adventure; when my brother and I were old enough to make the trip to get the mail without an adult, it was a sign of being one step closer to being grown up. I also remember when we raised worms in a bathtub that was buried beside the house and whenever any of us would find a worm we'd bring it to the worm party. Reading, swimming, sewing projects, tadpoles and bullheads in the pond, wandering in the woods and sitting on the "bench" that was actually a plank between two trees that had grown to hold it into a platform, clearing huge piles of scrub brush from their property and piling it around a fire pit in which I would roast garden grown onions I'd wrapped in aluminum foil. These are just flickers of the many memories that flutter like moths around the flame of whom I've become.
Grandma was a perpetual entrepreneur, in business dealings as well as of life. She taught my brother and me our first lesson on working for wages: She calculated how many hours she thought it would take the two of us to deepen their crawlspace and told us that instead of paying us by the hour she would give us the lump sum on our completion of the task and if we got it done faster than the time she had calculated, she would have another job for us if we wanted, thus giving us the opportunity to earn more money by taking the job on a flat rate basis.
Probably the most important thing that she taught me, though, ultimately stemmed from the Red-Winged Blackbird.
When I was a young boy my brother and I would often spend summer weekends with Grandma and Grandpa. By the time I was seven or so I had already begun to show a slight predilection towards art, drawing in particular. With Grandma having been an art teacher, my brother and I always had supplies for drawing and painting. Now, decades down the road, and with a son of my own, I regret the environmentally spurred switch that grocery stores have made to plastic bags; paper grocery bags were always the best "sketch" paper to work out ideas before committing them to one of our art tablets.
One Saturday it got into my mind to draw red-winged blackbirds. I made some sketches, but was not very happy with them. When I showed them to my grandma to ask for her advice, she didn't comment on the quality of the figures. In essence, her "critique" for me was to pay attention to details. I, of course, was confused. These (self-perceived) misshapen scrawls were a disappointment to me, so I gave up on them.
The next morning we woke as usual with the air filled with the echoing coos of mourning doves and then we went to church. On the drive back from church, Grandma pointed out a number of red-
winged blackbirds and asked me to look at them, paying attention to the details. I did, memorizing each individual as best as my little mind could. When we got back home, grandma asked me to get my drawings from the day before. I had already smushed them up.
I flattened them as best I could and brought them to her. She asked me to look at the pictures and then look in my mind at the memories I had from the drive home and to compare them. I did, and my hopeless lumps were not too encouraging. I said nothing.
After a few minutes Grandma finally said that the drawings themselves were fine and that the only thing she would change is the fact that I had one of my red-winged blackbirds standing on a wire strung between two fence posts. I'm sure I looked more confused so she explained that red-winged blackbirds always perch on verticals. I searched my memories from the morning, and she was right but when I had been drawing them the day before, I hadn't made that connection.
After high school, I packed up my bags and went off to college. Initially I had envisioned myself going into a pre-law program and then going on to law school, following in my grandma's footsteps. As I discovered more and more of myself in college, though, I realized that her steps were not going to be mine in that particular regard. I still carried with me, though, the lesson she taught me of paying attention to detail.
I actually enrolled in an entry level drawing class even though I was not an art student and hadn't had an art class since junior high. I got an A (some of the art majors got grades as low as C-
minuses) and enjoyed the class thoroughly, though by then I had already settled on a course-load focusing mainly on English and, secondarily, Philosophy.
I had already begun to apply the attention to detail to my creative writing and had been told by many that it is one of the strengths of my writing, both fiction and poetry. My stories and poems are positively littered with the shards of memories I have of spending weekends with my grandparents.
I don't think I'll ever square dance or SCUBA dive. I am not a teacher, not a lawyer, nor any sort of entrepreneur. In my life, though, I try, in my own way, to meld some of the things that Grandma did and was. I continue to write stories and poems, paying attention to the details of the world around me. Grandma had a zeal for life that I've never experienced in anyone else. She reached out for and took hold of, with her mind and with her heart, everything within reach and much that was not. She reached the unreachable and attained the unattainable. Thank you, Grandma, for teaching by example. We all miss you.
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