The color of twilight

Horseradish

By Michael Sitzman, Columnist

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

-- Dylan Thomas

She has always been Grandma to me, even though my dad's real mother, Martha, died before I was born. Long before my grandfather married either one, just as he was to go off to college, life intervened. The Great Depression forced him to leave New York for California to help his uncle in his shoe store. Things used to be like that, I'm told. But while in Los Angeles, he met my biological grandmother, and that's why you're reading this.

After she died prematurely, Grandpa Ben met Lucille, the grandmother I have always known. Longing to return to California, he brought her there to live. He has been gone for some time now, and Grandma has remained there. And when he died, I vowed to stay in touch and never let the miles separate us. I keep the promise.

"Hi, Grandma! It's Michael. How are you?... Yes, still at school, having a wonderful time... Sure, and the family's all well... O.K.; I'll give them your regards. And have you been feeling well and playing golf? ...I love you too." Month after month, year after year, I keep the promise. It follows just this way. Almost.

As years pass, I see a different promise being fulfilled. I didn't make this one; it was made for all of us. Answer this question, my friends: What's the one thing that's absolutely guaranteed? What is the one and only thing that is indisputably true? I guess I've dropped enough hints already. I'll let it be.

Some of those we love are taken from us without warning. Others leave us slowly. The greatest heartbreak is that they know it as it happens. From one minute to the next, Grandma slips in and out of the world we know, moving effortlessly, helplessly, from clarity to confusion. So she asks about school, the newspaper I write for, and the family. In case she's misplaced them, I give her my address and both phone numbers to write down. And then she asks my name.

As soon as I tell her, she laughs it off: "I was just kidding..." She knows she's forgetting. Control of her world, her own thoughts, all accumulated wisdom, indeed time itself: It's slipping away. But not steadily; it first disappears without warning, hides mockingly, then shows itself once more in a perpetual act of playful cruelty. "I am memory," it says. "You can't catch me; one day I'll run away for good."

You don't need to have a biological bond to be a grandson. There is no gene that codes for love. I know Grandma feels that way. Time after time, as a kid, when the other kids picked on me, she'd say that if they didn't want to be my friends, they just didn't know what they were missing. She still says it, in new ways. Like when I called her last year, standing in a quiet, blowing blizzard outside of Chum's coffeehouse, and, as she does on rare occasions, asked if I had "met" anyone...

Now friends, don't you love how grandmothers always say the same thing? (Well, I think they probably do in all cultures...) It goes something like: "Oh, what kind of girl wouldn't just die for a handsome, intelligent, young man like you?" Honest, now, I'd like to know if you all haven't heard that countless times before.

So I told her times had changed, and "meeting" people just wasn't an easy game anymore (if ever it was). A fellow could in fact get into trouble, I said, being even the least bit friendly. "Well, in that case," said Grandma, "if any of those girls give you any trouble, you just give them my number and have them call me; I'll straighten them out."

That's right, ladies, you heard Grandma say it: You'd better be nice.

So she asked my name last week, and then went on to talk about Aunt Didi, my dad's sister, and my other grandmother, Dora. It so happens that I don't have any family by those names; I think she was talking about her first husband's family. "No, Grandma," I said, "my dad's sister is Leslie. I'm Ben's grandson." It didn't clear anything up. She just said, "Well, no matter; you just come on over some time and we'll figure it out."

I hope I get one more chance.

What does it feel like to live in a world where everything you know, and everyone you have ever loved, can suddenly run away on a whim? How does it feel to suddenly discover that you are not where you thought you were a moment ago? When memory's light begins to fade, what does your world become? What is the color of twilight?

The answers may be ours to know one day, if we are among those who are taken slowly. Yet now, as I remain here watching, I am left with another question that I cannot answer: When, and how, do you say goodbye?

I love you, Grandma.

"I am heading for a place of quiet
Where the sage and sweetgrass grow
By a lake of sacred water
From the mountain's melted snow."

-- Paul Simon

horseradish

Friday January 27, 2006