Writer Circle Prompt: Something about Woman

 

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.