In the spring of my senior year, I decided to play hookie
from study hall and go eat brunch with my friends. I stopped home for some cash and froze when
my grandmother emerged from her bedroom.
Caught, I began mumbling some lie, but she was not hearing it. Instead, she announced that she was off to
Georgia to visit her brother Jimmy and promptly scurried out the door, seeming
afraid that I would do something to stop her if she waited long enough to hear
my response. I’m pretty sure she did not
go to Georgia, but I have no idea where she actually went.
My grandmother loved adventures. She liked to be in motion, but she was a
peculiar traveler. She didn’t
particularly like being in unfamiliar places.
Most of her trips ended in a family member’s living room drinking hot
water (because, she said, tea made her joints ache). Also, for such a seasoned traveler, she was terrible
at packing. She used three or four
pocketbooks in rotation, and what she needed was rarely in the pocketbook she
had brought. Once, when she was beginning
to lose her memory, she arrived at my aunt’s house with an oversized suitcase
that contained some chocolate, a few knickknacks and a pair of sunglasses. We probably should have checked it when we
saw her carrying it out of the assisted living center by herself.
Gram never kept any record of her trips. Unlike my other grandparents, who documented every
vacation in a well-labeled photo album, I don’t believe my grandmother owned a
camera. And she never bored anyone with
stories of her travels or the sights. In
fact, she preferred if no one knew precisely where she had been or for how
long.
She did plan her trips, but these plans had little to no
relationship to the trips themselves.
Return dates were “more honored in the breach,” and agreements to come visit
you were more like possibilities. At a
family funeral, my whispering aunts and uncles discovered she had agreed to
visit three of them at once in the upcoming weeks.
Near the end of her preaching days, my cousin Remle and I
cringed as we heard her confidently deliver a sermon clearly patched together
out of favorite pieces of old sermons we’d heard before, with no regard for
transitions. She wasn’t losing it yet,
just brash enough to do this. I remember most of the sermon. It was about Bilbo Baggins, who needed the
courage to go on trips. Then there was a
part about calendars, a part about Snoopy and a part from Wind in the
Willows. But she closed on leave-taking
again. She said Moses had not wanted to
leave but God told him it was time; he had to move on. I don’t remember that part of the Bible, but
it was a stirring end, which is what Gram would have wanted.
The parishioners, as usual, were too charmed to care and
seemed truly taken in by her spell. Of
course, it wasn’t her church and the next day she’d be off again. But you’re not leaving like Bilbo did, I
thought, or Moses. No, Gram, you’re
Huck. “But I reckon I got to light out
for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt or
sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I
been there before.”
