An Attempted Portrait Essay of My Grandmother (Creative Nonfiction II 09-12-12)

Joseph Melanson
Creative Nonfiction II
Prof. Cahan
21 August 2012

My Grandmother - A Portrait

My grandmother is eighty-two years old, one of the last of the two surviving members of our two person family, and one of the last two of her own large brood. Born in Del Rio, Texas she grew up in stories she told me, of Catholic school which seemed uneventful, as well as being one of two girls in a family of six brothers.

She tells me she thinks her father may have been Native American, as well as old Mexican, now new American, as many became after we won the Spanish-American War in the early 1900's, winning from our mostly Hispanic neighbor the great state of Texas, as well as other bits and pieces of our now southern states.

She speaks Spanish and English, inspiring me to learn more about these two languages, hoping that some day I could master both.

            She cooks the best food that I have ever eaten, causing me to carry extra weight, and being heavy for the majority of my life. Recently I was told I have high cholesterol and am pre-diabetic. I don’t stay away from her food, I only choose to exercise more so I can keep enjoying it.

In 1988 grandfather died, my father died several months later, her mother, my great-grandmother died when I was in high school in the early nineties, and her only child, my mother Dolores died in 2009. Together my grandmother and I have watched death come and go all of our lives it seems.

            My grandmother met my grandfather and they married, my grandfather staying in the Air Force, finally retiring in the seventies, and they ended up staying in Syracuse, N.Y. because my grandfather’s last station was Hancock Air Force Base, which is now nothing more than an industrial park for a few small businesses, and dilapidated apartments that are now homes for animals and insects, occasionally being trespassed by neighborhood vandals, and the occasional person who wanders through imagining what life was like for the people who lived here so many years ago. Before my grandfather retired they crossed the world, being stationed in San Antonio, Germany, Japan, my mother being born in San Antonio.

I have watched her go from a strong, tough able-bodied woman, to an aged, elderly state, as I floated through the past few decades in my own smoldering cemetery.

She gets several checks a month that enables our lifestyle. I have been living with her for the past several years, unable to find any kind of tolerable job that would allow me to depend upon for a steady paycheck to find a place of my own. I am unconcerned, as I have a girlfriend who loves me, and a grandmother who enjoys my company. We are not the same people that we were when we were young, we have gone through too much together for me to be so ready to abandon the nest.

I think she used weight loss pills in the late eighties as she used to have these extreme mood swings or inappropriately intense reactions to inconsequential things, or go maudlin telling me “Oh God, I wish I was dead”, alternated occasionally with “I wish I could crawl into a hold and die”. I gave up trying to please her, or have any contact with her, as her low level of mental functioning or lack of the desire to increase her mental capacity, caused me to understand any real attempt at being understood and appreciated as I needed to be at the time, only left me with the burning sense of frustration as conversations with her took bizarre tangents, unjustified reasoning, and strange lines of thinking, concepts. When I had the clarity to see through the fog of her befuddlement, knowing that she made no sense at all, she would remark that talking to me was like “talking to a brick wall”. I realized at a young age that I was essentially home alone.

            She lost her wedding ring having put it in a wadded up Kleenex, then one day having taken it out and forgetting that anything was in it, or just cleaning up around the house one day, she thinks that she threw her diamond ring in the trash.
            She drove a 1997 Chevrolet Celebrity, long after it had been completely replaced piece by piece, after mechanical breakdown after mechanical breakdown, long after it had been completely devalued for any kind of trade-in value, long after my mother and I had given up trying to get her to replace it. When she finally sold it to some unfortunate kid who either was too broke to afford anything else, or had no sense about cars, he bought it off of her for a measly five hundred dollars. To this day she thinks the kid got a good deal. If the kid was smart he would have driven the worthless piece of crap to the scrap yard and made more money off of the metal.
            My grandmother does the jumble in the paper every day, generally completing it that day, her mind figuring out its words. I tried to tell her a few times how to more easily solve it by collecting the letters of the words that she had already solved, and use them to plug into the final answer at the bottom, thus giving her a means to solve the other remaining words. She sticks to her own method, as it has always worked for her before.      
            She enjoys gardening, and has always had a colorful yard and maintained a garden. The past few years though, she has slowed down, a garden is a lot of work, and these new summers with their consistent days of ninety degree weather, against the rigors of aging has made the act an ordeal. Now instead of tomatoes, cucumbers, and the occasional watermelon, she limits herself to flowers which are a a lot less of a chore, and less likely to be afflicted by the bugs and the squirrels.
           
Joseph, this is a fine capstone for your course writing portfolio this term! I enjoyed reading your essay and how you lock in reader interest from the outset with your engaging narrative voice. From there, you do quite well blending factual with emotional truth and vivid specific descriptions, personal impressions, facts, examples, reasons and explanations to support your impressions of your grandmother. (Were you to revise I’d suggest adding even more dialogue to help create a sense of scene and characterization unfolding before the readers’ eyes, rather than mainly telling about what happened.) Your flowing and rhythmic writing style controls the conventions of the writing system, while the important themes you explore command reader interest with their universal implications of aging and surviving/overcoming challenges of life – excellent. Grade for Essay 4 is A-. 90% - Prof. Cahan.