Mary Ida

(left to right) Mary Ida, Wendy, Violet. My two grandmas. I definately take after Mary Ida and my sister, Kelly, takes after Vi.

Thursday, October 5th
Big GrandmaMary Ida was my big grandma, she was married to Marvin, my little grandpa. Although they acted like they hated each other, every time one of them filed for divorce, Mary Ida got pregnant and divorce matters dissolved into the air of their tiny home, with the perfumed smell of body powder, my grandpa’s cigars, and bacon fat. They had four children over a twenty year period. My father was their youngest..Because grandma was a big woman and legend whispered that she breast fed her children passed three years of age, she always had breast milk, and in an age decades before baby formula, became a wet nurse for neighborhood newborns who’s mothers had run dry and desperate.One Christmas season my husband and I were visiting my family in Michigan and stopped by grandma’s house to visit. She was quite elderly and nearly blind and I noticed a stack of Christmas cards next to her chair, still sealed in their envelopes, patiently waiting for someone to read them to her. When I recited the return address of first card, grandma couldn’t recall who the sender was. Inside the card was a handwritten letter; I settled back on the same couch that was as much an icon as my grandma and began to read to her. The letter was from a man who wrote of his entire life; surviving childhood, where he went to school, his Air Force career during World War II, marriage, children and now his own grandchildren. He said that he didn’t remember Mary Ida, but that his entire life he had been reminded numerous times just how important she had been in his life. My grandma asked me his name again and said in her thick Kentucky accent, "I recall him...he was a sickly lil’ baby...I saved ‘is life!" Before we said good-bye, while my husband was waiting for me on her front porch, I knelt down on my knees and laid my upper body across grandma’s lap, stroking the paper thin, soft skin of her forearms. My entire life I had been witness to so many cruel jokes about her size, about her not leaving her house for twenty years, about a woman who wasted her life, the entire time believing and now experiencing that Mary Ida was greater than all of us.Have a wonderful day and check back tomorrow for Big Grandma Part II, Mary Ida the modern day bag lady and her granddaughter (me) sidekick.

Friday, October 6th
Big Grandma Part II
When I was four, Mary Ida was really big. For the most part, she sat in a rocking upholstered chair that faced the front door, so there was no missing her. The front door was always unlocked and when you opened it, there she was sitting in her chair watching her little televison next to her on a metal TV tray. Also next to her chair was a gold overnight bag, with satiny lining and a little mirror inside the top of the case. This luggage was always packed with wads of money; it was never organized, the paper bills were just thrown in.She got around just fine, waking up each day, opening her front door so that fresh air could come through the screen. She might vacuum, but because she was so big, she had an electric broom in at least two different rooms of her very tiny house. She could sweep the livingroom without moving her feet, prop the electric broom against the wall, walk three steps into the dining room, use another electric broom to sweep, without moving her feet. Her domestic duties were limited to this and when one of my two aunts, Norma or Gladys, came to clean the rest of the house, she took great pride in telling them they didn’t have to sweep, because she had done it that morning. The money she kept in her little piece of luggage was for when she heard the neighborhood kids playing outside and she would yell for them. The woman had a set of pipes and the kids would come running and she would ask them to go down to the corner to buy a gallon of milk, or a coffeecake from the bakery that my Aunt Illeen worked at next to the grocery. She would ask the kids how much they thought that would cost and they didn’t know, just as much as she didn’t, so she would reach her hand into the case and grab a wad of money and give it to them. There was never any change. The kids would come running back with her requests, their pockets loaded with candy; they would be breathless, having difficulty sucking air with a huge jaw-breaker in their cheeks.In the mid 1960's, long before Salvation Army or Goodwill stores, people threw everything out. Once a week, my grandma would drive her station wagon up and down the streets of Berkley, looking for treasures. Sometimes, if she was babysitting me, I got to go. I would stand on the middle bench seat and lean over the front seat, at my grandmas right shoulder and help her scout the curbside. Often she would drive the wrong way down a one-way street and as if it were a sign of things to come, even at three years old, I would say "Grandma you are on the wrong SIDE!" Which she replied, "Thank you baby." She found a lot of junk and would get great pleasure sorting it all out; forever giving her finds to every member of our family. When anyone walked in the front door, it was like she was a psychic, she always had just the right thing next to her chair.When I was four she gave me, what my family continues to call "Thee Majorette Boots." Nancy Sinatra’s song, These Boots Are Made for Walking, was all the rage and when my grandma gifted me a worn out pair of someone else’s majorette boots with leather tassels, in my mind, I now had go-go boots like the lady on the album cover in my parents collection. The boots were not allowed in the house and one day my mother pulled off many of her "disappearance stunts" where anything grandma had found in the trash, suddenly vanished in some sort of Wonder Years neighborhood theft ring. I remember crying a lot. As I got older, and we would visit grandma, my parents always made me go in the door first because the first person was the one who had something from grandma’s stash flung at them. Onetime it was a huge bra that she assured my parents I would grow into (I was seven at the most.) Another time, I opened the door and a book hit me in the chest and dropped on the floor. Without even saying hello, grandma yelled "read page 68!" I would oblige. My parents would rush to me with panicked expressions, and check the book, as if I was about to be exposed to the world of Kama Sutra, with photos, when, in fact, it was a lecture on why not to eat eggs with cracked shells.In many ways, I am Mary Ida's granddaughter. That woman would have loved eBay.