A letter to Gram, my Ma, on the eve of her 92nd birthday

Dear Gram,

It feels like a long time since I wrote you a letter.  I remember when I went away to college it was a weekly ritual for me.  I love writing, as you well know… but I’m afraid the convenience of a laptop and the regularity of seeing you did diminish my handwritten correspondence to you.  

Regardless of that fact, every year on my birthday you sent me a card.  There was usually something else in it.  Something to help me on a night out to celebrate… or maybe even a clipping of one of my or my friend’s theater experiences.  Usually a note about something – flowers, my mother’s cooking, a cousin… I kept a lot of those cards.  I don’t know what to do with them.  I don’t think I can actually read them just yet.  Even though I look at your handwriting pretty regularly now… it just is different if it’s a note to me.

Anyway, it’s your birthday tomorrow.  Number 92.  I was thinking today as I cleaned up my cellar for a party this weekend that I’d like to think you are having a party with all those friends who used to visit your cellar in Main South.  That Nettie, Junie (or is it Geunie?), John, maybe one of your more favorite of his girlfriends, the Fitzpatricks, the MacLauglins, the ones who owned the toy factory and never brought liquor, Joe Bird (your inhouse paparazzi), the attractive woman with the dog who liked to lie under the clothesline, Rose Alba, Rhea… and Vinny are all singing you a happy birthday with a toast of Wild Turkey.  I like to think that.

I also like to think you know we are all thinking of you, missing you, catching the sentences in our mouths that we instinctively would share with you.  That I don’t have to tell you I painted my kitchen window sill today.  Ladybug red.  Because every time I cook (especially one of your recipe cards) there seems to be one or two ladybugs lingering there.  I feel these breezes coming through my window at the end of a hot day, knowing thunder is on its way… and think how I might talk with you about whether or not our twelve mile distance meant we got the same weather.  Minutiae… but because it was something we talked about, the importance of it seems all the more obvious.

I hope you see Hannah and Lily.  How giddy Lily is when you give her your hands to stand up and walk across the room.  Or how Hannah likes trying frozen peas on her tongue and then lets them drop onto her bib.   I can see your smile.  I can see you with a little chuckle at Ben or Eileen or Simone or wrapped up in your blanket of Aidan, Brendan, Bella, and Emma in the room with AC blaring.  

I see you in the photographs I started going through again this weekend.  I see the plucky spirit of my mother and her siblings.  I see you look at all us grandchildren with the joy my parents now see Hannah and Lily.  I see you at my age rolling your eyes at Vinny, but grinning with the love that must have convinced you to take that ride some 70 years ago.  

I see you.

Sometimes I think I see you better, honestly.  Looking through these pictures and the amusing puzzle pieces left in your cookbooks all make the things you once told me resonate differently.  I do see you as a young mother in her thirties.  I see you as a dashing young woman whose boyfriend took a picture of you in your bathing suit.  I see you as a child of the Depression.  I see the pictures of your mother and her spirit.  Your father and his style.  Your husband.  Your family.  How it all connects to me… and in a totally different way connects to a cousin or an aunt or an uncle who married into this family.  

I think about how every time we got to this time of June in the last several years, it was a celebration because we knew this first one without you was going to come.

And I cry.

Because I miss you.

We all do.

But wouldn’t you know, you made me laugh today.  And made me happy to think it was your birthday.