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| Mom and Grandmother |
All my life, I’ve sought out the grandmothers. Not the sugar and spice and free time
grandmothers on sitcoms and in commercials, but the busy ones. You likely had busy grandmothers as well.
My mother’s mother was the first of these in my life. She worked as a school teacher, first in
elementary school with a cart for a desk and storage area, with her own dining
room as an extension. I watched her grade
artwork done on 12” by 18” paper, providing comments for each student. By the time I was in high school, she was,
too, and she became my art teacher. I
suffered jealousy when she called on others instead of me. I experienced anger when she drew on my
drawings to “correct” them. I felt pride
when she was honored by the rest of the faculty.
Meanwhile, at home, she hired me to sew hems, to polish
piano and chair legs, and to dust photographs and paintings in the vast
Victorian she owned and lived in alone and unafraid. While my mother’s job was us children, super
grandmother gardened, painted, commanded, and drove us, sometimes, crazy. She
never babysat without assuming we were a work force.
Away from home, I found myself drawn to this type of
grandmother figure. I adopted them, old
women with public and private strength, witches in another time and place, with
magic names as my mentors and role models.
One was Mary Hunter Wolf, who led improv workshops through
her very own Shakespeare theatre in Connecticut. Her names all had power. Mary was my grandmother’s name, and both Hunter
and Wolf carried a mythic sense with them.
Another was Ellen Stewart of LaMama Experimental Theatre Club,
the Mama of off-off Broadway and the champion of international diversity on
stage. When she spoke at conferences on
non-traditional casting, she emphasized the importance of making spaces for
theatre from non-European sources, not trying to rewrite white plays. La Mama stages and rehearsal halls were full
of theater from other countries as well as ours. She herself employed international casts—and their
languages—in Shakespearean and ancient Greek plays. At home in La Mama, she and everyone else pitched
in to do the work. One story about her
has a woman asking her about the artistic director of La Mama while she was
cleaning the toilets in the lobby restroom.
Rather than explain all my grandmothers—the Marys and
Ellens, and Bernices and Sojourners, and radicals, and women in high government
offices and everyday neighborhoods, let me say that I longed to be a
grandmother of the adopted kind, as I had no children of my own. I can’t remember if was the writer Tony
Morrison or the historian and musician Bernice Reagon who told me long ago,
that the first thing she did on taking up residence in a new town was to adopt
a grandmother for her son—and for herself.
I don’t know if she meant the busy kind.
But I did the same until very recently when I chose a retirement
community with bunches of grandmothers with stories to tell. I have aged into being a grandmother, too,
and I’m ripe for adoption. I’m no longer
active in society, but I have stories to tell.
