I wrote a Diaryland survey today. It was fairly slow at work so I took a few moments and made one up. Those surveys are harder than you’d think to create. I kept wanting to put questions on it like, ‘So, uh, what color socks do you have on today?’ and the like. Crazy.
But one question that I asked, and then later answered, was ‘If you could go back in time and relive one day in history, what would you do, where would you go, and why?’ I said that I would go back to some random day in what would have been the summer of 1981 and spend the day at my great grandparent’s house with them.
Some people undoubtedly would rather choose something important, like to march on Washington next to Dr. King, or something heroic, like going back to 1926 and killing Adolph Hitler, but me, I can think of nothing I’d rather do than go back and be ten years old again and sit on the perfectly manicured cool grass in the shade of my grandmother’s crab apple tree and make up stories about my dime store plastic farm animals. That’s pretty much what I did every summer. Each had names, personalities. The apple red horse was always the tempestuous one, the snowy white one was always the hero, because it didn’t have a saddle and thus couldn’t be tamed. The blue horse was always testing the white horse’s authority. They had languid romances, mainly between the white horse and the black horse, whose saddle was molded onto his body, reminding me of military epaulets. They would take long runs through the grass, where the white horse was always just a little faster than the black horse, because it seemed nobler if she were fast and spirited. Strangely, even though I had seen many a horse mating by that time, I don’t think I ever had the sexual couplings that I would inflict my Barbies back home. I think I didn’t want my grandparents to know that I knew of such things. Perhaps they hadn’t heard about sex yet. I didn’t want to blow their innocence the way my babysitter had messed with mine.
I spent a lot of my time with my grandparents because they were retired and because they had a yard and air conditioning. What is more, they adored me. It was the only time in my childhood when I was the favored child, preferable over cuter, curlier, younger, smaller Mo. My grandmother doted upon me in a way that I might even think was one of the few experiences of unconditional love I’ve ever been blessed with.
Every once in awhile, I’ll get a whiff of her clean cotton sheets or a breeze will blow just perfectly and sound the way that it did in her back yard, through the white picket fence and canopy of maples. I long to hear a wooden screen door ease open and see a woman emerge wearing a sleeveless cotton gingham shirt, her floppy grandma underarms folded under like errant angel wings, wiping her hands on a worn dishtowel. She’d call me inside to eat a cold lunch of boiled ham sandwiches with Miracle Whip, cottage cheese, pickled beets, pineapple chunks and ice cold frothy milk, taken from a glass jar stored in the coldest part of the refrigerator, while we listened to Paul Harvey and waited to hear the tuberculin muffle of my grandfather’s Chevy pull up the driveway.
He was a church elder and spent his days running around his church, supervising maintenance, planting flowers, and painting handicapped symbols in parking spaces. I would sit across from him as he ate silently, a big jowly German man. He was my grandmother’s second husband, no actual genetic relation to us, but he was always Grandpa to me. He was missing a finger on one of his hands, a victim of a paper mill accident. I’m certain that legions of children at our church were always puzzling over which reindeer took a bite of Santa’s finger.
He died on July 13, 1985, the day of Live Aid when I was 14. He had his third and final heart attack while he had been outside mowing the lawn on an extremely warm day. I remember that we got the phone call when Mick Jagger and David Bowie were singing ‘Dancing in the Streets’. Whenever I think of Live Aid, I think of how it never seemed to end, just like that day, how it went on and on, like some kind of insane musical marathon, the kind where people can’t stop dancing until they fall over. I spent the remaining summer of 1985 living with my grandmother, sleeping in the room that overlooked the spot where he had taken his last breath; near a bench he had crafted himself, that sat in the shade of the red maple. My grandmother lived on her own for another seven years before Alzheimer’s began to seriously take its toll. However, given my jaded teenage years, it was never really the same. I suppose it never really is for anyone.
Thus, if given a chance, I would go back and be ten again and tell them how wonderful they were, how much they meant to me. Maybe I could even catch a glimpse of some of the incredible creativity I had then, when I could engage myself for hours with my plastic barnyard dramas. And maybe if I was really lucky, my mom would let me sleep over that night and I would be able to sleep in Grandma’s room and listen to her soft breathing next to me as a picture of Jesus watched over us from above, safe and secure in my place in the world, knowing that at that moment, at that place in time, I was perfect and exactly who I was supposed to be. I can’t even begin to tell you what I would give to have that back.
Take the survey. Have a safe and happy Fourth of July, and tell your relatives that you love them.
