Grandma Phyllis
My entire life my Grandma Phyllis has cultivated my creativity. She is an artist and writer, although she’d scoff and tell you she’s not really. I have spent countless afternoons at her house painting. Watercolors and acrylics have been painted onto paper, old barn wood, and thousands of rocks found along Lake Michigan over the course of my life.
Today was no different. First, we had to have lunch, egg salad on toasted wheat bread with slightly wilted lettuce, and 4 pringles each. She doesn’t eat her crust and when I ask her why, she says she’s old enough to only eat the parts she likes, and nobody died from throwing crust away anyway. She follows it up with strawberry shortcake for dessert, as well as a plate of the thinnest Oreo’s I’ve ever seen. “That way you can have three guiltlessly” she tells me knowingly. Nevermind that we just had strawberry shortcake. She will never offer you water to drink, and if you request it, she will scrunch up her nose and say, “boring old water?!” like you’ve offended her to her core.
Once lunch was over, we assemble our paints, brushes, pencils, masking tape, bowls of water, newspaper to cover the table, and the rest of our supplies. Of course, we must put on The Andrews Sisters Pandora station. Ella Fitzgerald, Louie Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, and of course, The Andrews Sisters, her favorite, fill the air as we get to work. Grandma knows every song and will tell me stories they bring to mind as we paint the afternoon away. This is one of my favorite ways to hear her stories. Something about music jogs the memory in a way like nothing else.
The chocolate and Diet A&W flow as freely as our conversation. One thing she taught me early on is that good chocolate is imperative for the creative process, and I have followed this advice my entire life. Even in the lulls, we are both comfortable and preoccupied with our paintings. She prefers acrylic paint, I prefer watercolor. I show her how I use rubber cement instead of frisk, and she marvels at how well it works, not to mention how much money she’s going to save not buying frisk. She tells me she has a problem with buying acrylic paints in colors she already owns, and that she has too many paints. I tell her when she dies, at her funeral we can give everyone a tube of paint. “And a rock from my bin for them to paint!” she replies laughing at the thought.
I ask her how it feels being old enough to have two daughters who need hip replacements and a granddaughter who now wears reading glasses. She sighs deeply and simply says “old”. Then the song Bongo, Bongo, Bongo comes on and she lights up as she tells me again how her and her childhood best friend Rae snuck into the basement to listen to her older sisters’ records when she was out on a date. She had forbidden Grandma from listening to her records, afraid she’d break them. That turned out to be a reasonable fear because while caught up in the music, Grandma climbed on top of the big stack of records to have a seat and cracked several of them. In The Mood plays next and she lights up as she tells me about so many dances at The Southport Beach House and how she loved dancing to this song.
Moments of silence as we paint are broken up by her saying “oh shoot” or “oh fudge” every time she messes something up, followed by her saying at least with acrylic she can paint over her mistakes. But mostly we talk. About family, friends, memories. We laugh at nothing and everything. She tells me if I wasn’t over she’d have fallen asleep in her chair about half an hour ago. She encourages me in my writing, in my painting, in my baking, in my photography, and as she does almost every time I see her, she tells me she misses my cooking videos on Facebook. She asks me if I want to see a picture of a naughty tree. I’m not sure I heard her correctly, so I ask if she meant knotty or naughty. She blushes and giggles and says “both” as she pulls out her phone to show me. We continue painting, her singing and humming along to the songs in her low voice, me soaking in every moment painfully aware of how precious these times are.
Before I go, she gives me yet another rock she has painted. “For your patio garden”, she says. She gives me a big, long hug as she exclaims “Isn’t it wonderful to hug again!”.
And it is.
