My grandmother, Jewel lived with us most of my childhood and teen years. We faced a daily uneasiness rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of who the other was. She was not your average "cookie baking, sweet spirited granny". She was a good, generous woman who had lived a life full of very hard work. She raised her children alone supporting the family as a waitress and cook and did her time on the factory floor. Men had not been kind and she lived within her well earned independence.
Her passions, in this order, were cigarettes, baseball, roller derby and politics. Whenever I think of her I can see her sitting under the maple tree in her green and white strap lawn chair smoking her Pall Malls, sipping on Pabst Blue Ribbon and listening to the Indians game on her small transistor radio. Her every movement accompanied by the continuous click of her long glossy red polished nails and the jangling of the multiple bracelets on both arms.
Everything stopped on Saturday afternoon for roller derby. You could hear her yelling at her TV downstairs in my room in the farthest corner of the house. She was also fond of big time wrestling and pulled me in to watch with her, telling me the stories behind each match and trying to convince me that "this was not fake". She and my father used to sit under the maple tree and argue politics past dusk on summer evenings. She was a personality which filled any room she ever walked into.
Since I was the youngest and both my parents worked , it was just me and Grandma every day, all day in the summer. We had a tentative relationship regardless off all the time we spent together. In my 11th year she announced to my parents that she thought I was "weird" because I spent so much time in my room drawing. (well, yeah?) She saw art as a waste of time and the resistance she consistently communicated could not help but feel personal. In the end, her attitude made no difference. I found my way on my circuitous journey.
I had such mixed feelings about my grandmother growing up that it really wasn't until after her death that I made peace with the incongruities and realized what a strong woman she was. She loved fiercely in her own way, even “the weird one.” I return to something when I am faced with someone I just don’t understand. We do the best we can with the place we are in our life and our heart. Nothing is more complex than life itself. I learned much from her as she showed me how a woman can walk strongly through a biased and not always easy world.