Well, it's been a lousy coupla months, so I'm glad it's over. Things will get better, I guess. Record heat wave, too much work, the news all sucks, air conditioning in Brooksie was on the fritz, then the real bad news - my Grandma fell and cracked her hip joint, so she's been laid up in hospital for a while. I s'pose we've been lucky - at least 18 poor souls were killed by the heat this summer in Arizona where she lives, (something I had been expecting lately, that's why I moved out 25 years ago!), but I guess I depended on my Gran's perpetual charmed life to keep her from harm. Oh, she's had her share of troubles in her 96 years, the vast majority minor, but this is the second incident in the last few years that have scared the crap outta me. She's the family touchstone to the past now, the last of her generation from before the Great War.
Her mother was brought west in, yup, a covered wagon, and as a boy, I vividly remember my great-grandmother's tales of helping her mother bake bread all nite to keep marauding Chiricahuas ,who jumped the reservation, happy 'till they left in the morning, like ghosts; or travelling for days over wagon trails in the desert; or marrying her sweetheart against her family's wishes - he was a travelling Harley-Davidson racer, so it was a bit scandalous. The "Wild One" always reminds me me of our biker antecedants. They settled down and raised a family in Colorado on a farm, back when it was really the great outdoors. Gran's one-room schoolhouse had about six kids of varying ages; the entire school at that time, mind you, posed for a picture once - if you look careful my gramma's the little dark-haired girl on the right. The only girl, at the time. ;-)
A few years later, a very pretty lady who was staying nearby for the country air would come and buy fresh eggs from my gramma's chickens every morning, and when Gran's dog had puppies, the lady fell in love with one in particular and bought it on the spot. Mary Pickford, who was indeed the pretty lady, became my gramma's favorite movie star right then and there. One day my gramma was amazed to see a long funeral procession passing by on the main road; Buffalo Bill Cody was on his final journey to Lookout Mountain, and damned if he wasn't a showman to the end and beyond. She spoke of that parade for years after - I think she felt it was part of the Wild West Show in a way. ;-)
Anyway, she's been around for two World Wars, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and been lucky enough to see my grandfather and my dad both go off to 2 wars and make it back, raise a family of her own, and I guess we've mostly turned out pretty darn good. My son Sean, who is the MINI Cooper 'S' driver in the family now, when we drove over to Scottsdale to see my the family and show off his new MINI, Cassandra, why Gran was the first to get a check ride, and had the biggest smile when she got out! She finds a way to enjoy life, and isn't afraid to travel as far as Guatamala to see my where my cousin found the love of his life, or travel to Europe with my Dad recently. She fell off a horse ten years ago, and other than bruises, her ego included, she came out in fine shape - the doc thought she was in her sixties, and advised her to give up horseback riding at her age. Like that would happen without a fight. HeHe! She's a tough old gal, and I'm glad she's got the constitution of a farm girl - it makes things look brighter for the future.
Intimations of mortality are all in the news, and when you reach an age where they seem to be lurking around the corners, corners where your loved ones and friends pass daily, you start lookin' over your shoulder a little. I really don't want to see anything there, but lately a flicker or two is just out of peripheral vision. Lost my friend Christy in the huge fires here a few years ago, lost a friend's nephew right at the start of the latest brew-up in Iraq - I remember him standing next to my 1275S Mini at the San Diego Automobile Museum so long ago. Then that so long ago seems not quite that - my Gran's met veterans of the Civil War, for chissake, what do I know about the passage of time? I can only hope to live such a long and quietly glorious life as my grandmother, and look forward to more trips in my MINI, Brooksie, and Sean's Cassandra to visit her at her house. The last dinner at my Dad's, I fetched her in Brooksie, and when I opened her door, she had to take a moment to get her cane, (a fairly recent need), get set and when I held her hand to help her out, I could tell she was a litle annoyed at her own frailty. She tells me, "You know, Rob, when you get to be 96, you slow down a little."
I should be so lucky.
