enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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play it with drama

Fun NYT piece.

I have never bought a lottery ticket. Not because I am more rational than others or anything else that is sensible, but because I find it embarrassing. When I was a girl and my mother would buy a ticket I always felt that it was a public admission of poverty. I wanted to shrink into and under myself, the way that I did when my mother would take me to buy my school clothes in second-hand shops. (Only after a while, of course, I saw the magic potential of second-hand shops; not so, lotteries. :))

I was listening to a piece on the radio this morning about the shortage of geriatric specialists in Canada. It's particularly difficult to convince people to go into this specialty, since unless the doctor is able to find a salaried position at a teaching hospital, he or she cannot make much money (unlike those in pretty much all other specialties). This is largely because long-term, careful, holistic care of an aging person isn't easily billable in a system founded largely on treatment or procedural billing to the central payer.

The piece was obviously all about something that is going to need to change to match changing demographics. And it was about the way that economic outcomes in the medical system reflect the shortsightedness of the population, and the basic value that we put on elder care vs., say, cosmetic surgery or dermatology.

Anyhow. So the thing that struck me in this piece was a lovely statement by an older doctor (I suspect a draft dodger) originally from Brooklyn, who now heads up geriatrics at a major teaching hospital in Toronto. When he was growing up he lived in a one bedroom apartment with his parents, sister and grandmother (until her death when he was twelve). He has realized subsequently the depth of the relationship that he had with his grandmother as a child as a result of this proximity of living, and that this influenced him in choosing his specialty. He believes that most people who choose geriatrics do so because they similarly experienced a strong relationship with an elderly person as a child.

I find this interesting because when I do volunteer work I am always most attracted to volunteer work with elderly people. I've been going to the food bank because it fits well with the current flux of my life, and because my friend had already taken the initiative to start working there. But I'd really prefer to work with seniors directly.

So the lightbulb went on this morning as I listened to this and realized that when I was a kid my grandmother was the only one who gave me physical affection. I mean, my parents loved me and I knew that. But they were never affectionate. My grandmother, on the other hand, required hugs. She was my emotional touchstone until she died when I was 23.

And then, just now, I was listening to a radio program on which someone was playing the piano. Whenever I hear piano music I need to turn up the radio, draw nearer. And this, too, is because my grandmother was an incredible painist. I'm sure I've written about this but as a teenager during the depression she won a gold medal at the Chicago World's Fair. She was tremendous. Her fingers would fly across the keys. Neither my mother nor I ever achieved half her level of proficiency, and this even though I completed my Grade 10 Royal Conservatory training when I was in school, and my mother her ARCT. My mother taught music for nearly thirty years, accompanied musicals, etc., etc... And still, she could never produce my grandmother's magic on the piano. If I close my eyes I can hear the drama of her playing. And in my mind's eye I can see her buxom body swaying as her fingers manipulate the piano at her will. She was a tiny woman with a large bosom and silver-white hair, who always dressed in violet. She loved butterscotch ripple ice cream, colourful jewelry, sang at the top of her lungs, and rode her bicycle--in spite of her arthritis--as fast as she could peddle, all through my childhood.

My grandmother also loved to shop, much to my very frugal grandfather's dismay. Throughout her life she would buy and hide items. At her funeral I had a laugh with a former neighbour of theirs, who told me that when my grandfather was a young professor at the agricultural university in the 1950s, my grandmother had bought an entire suite of patio furniture and had hidden it in the neighbour's garage. Her strategy was to gradually bring it out piece by piece, under my grandfather's *shopping radar*. When my mother and I were cleaning out her cupboards after her death, too, we found about ten years' worth of unusused--usually with tickets on it--knitting and weaving materials. :) I suspect that she was always a little bit bored, having given up a big city teaching job and accompanist's career to raise four kids and mind house. My grandfather has never been a good or generous communicator. I think that I am only now beginning to understand the loneliness and despair that she likely felt at times, and filled with bought items.

(Thesis: Seriously, did shop-a-holism, the attraction of commercial culture originate in this removal of women from other spheres in which they had begun to gain influence in the 1940s? I firmly believe that it originates in a culture of boredom and detachment. Surely the underlying economic factors that made it easier and cheaper to produce and distribute consumer goods, plus rapidly rising levels of prosperity were only part of this; buying as a way of life was surely fueled by the boredom of women in the domestic sphere...(thinking out loud).)

I often forget the great gift that my grandmother was to my life, particularly as my grandmother was also often a difficult and opinionated person who did not respect others' privacy. When I was a teenager and in university she would pressure me about finding a husband. And I'll never forget the time that our two stubborn wills did battle--I was about 13--and she said, "You can't always be the leader you know." She also said at some point, more damagingly, that, "You're the most selfish person whom I've ever met!" (That was the pot calling the kettle black... :))

My grandmother though was the one who taught me the importance of memory. When she was a little girl her mother would pin adages and inspirational quotes to the curtains in the kitchen so that as my grandmother did the dishes she could learn and reflect on ideas that she felt were useful and important. When I was a teenager my grandmother, who had collected these statements, wrote them out for me and gave them to me in a tiny little binder (with her own additions).

At home, in one of my mother's flat-to-the-wall cupboards I have the petit point china that my grandmother gave to me, place setting by place setting, on each of my birthdays from the time that I was about ten. She knew that I loved it. I don't love it so much now as an adult, but I still love it as the girl loved it.

I also still have the ridiculous pillow case that she had me embroider with the following statement: "Life is what happens when you are making other plans!" (Why would anyone want to sleep on an embroidered pillow case? :))

I own her grand piano, though my mother keeps it for me, as a result of my transient lifestyle. I worry that she'd be terribly disappointed in my choices, had she lived.

I remember her yelling after my grandfather when in his chauvinism he would not take a girl fishing: "Bob! Bob! Take your granddaughter fishing! She loves to fish and she has caught her own minnows!" (Of course she had assisted me in building the trap. :))

I'll have to get my mother to send me a copy of my grandparents' wedding picture. My grandparents were married at Christmas in 1945, immediately after my grandfather returned from the war. Whenever people see the picture of them in the church, flanked by pointsettias, my grandmother's hair dark and her face pale and serious, they exclaim that it's a picture of me (minus the rolled hairdo :)). And I have that tiny lace wedding dress that she wore and it fits me like a glove. It's stained with rust and age, particularly along and around the hundred covered buttons that close the back and the sleeves. I don't think it can be repaired.

So, anyhow. This morning reminded me of the power of one or two things, of even one single person, to build preferences into the perpetual fabric of one's life and one's decision-making processes. I am my grandmother. That is not such a bad thing.

12:56 p.m. - 2007-03-11

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