The Creative Act

This is another section of my slowly developing book of role-models I have known. this one is about my grandmother, I hope you like, luckily I know she will.

(yes Sean I know it is long, but are you really so busy?)

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My grandmother Gabrielle Clarke (née Goulet) has always been a special person in my life. When I was a child and my family lived comfortably under the poverty line, phone calls from my grandmother were a blessing. She called regularly for my parents but the calls I remember most fondly took place in the spring and were directed towards me. You see, there was a park near our house and each fall the picnic tables where the parents sat while the children played were removed and stored away for the winter. When spring finally reminded us of the beauty of life someone would take them back out and place them in the heat bearing sun. My grandmother knew this and would call regularly to see if the picnic tables were out yet. A four-year-old version of me put down the phone and ran to the park as fast as my little legs could carry me. A twenty-minute return trip if I really did run though perhaps I did it on a little bike, which was too big, and thus shortened my time.  My mother noticing the phone off the hook would realize what was happening, pick it up and learn about the health and the goings on of our many relatives. Grandma always knows how everyone is, what he or she are up to and loves to keep everyone up-to-date. On returning home gasping and out of breath I would happily proclaim to the woman we called Grandma Pizza that the tables were there and I would wait for her to proclaim the magic words “I’ll be there this afternoon.”

The name came from the fact that she always brought us little pizzas to eat. These were the greatest of her many treats. Like most grandmothers she brought chocolates, cookies and other such things, but unlike them she always had little frozen pizzas for us (not to mention she taught us that bacon dippers were invented to be dipped into pineapple cream cheese!). These pizzas did not seem little to us and though I now know they are cheap and their crusts taste more like cardboard then anything else we eat they were the greatest food we ever received, the tastiest most sought after and looked-forward to meal of them all. Far better were those little pizzas then anything we ever got during the holidays, except maybe the Easter chocolates.

The spring phone call was such a big deal to me because on the day the tables were first noticed to be renewing our park she would come straight away with a picnic all prepared. Part of the excitement of this stemmed from my grandparents being snowbirds, so we did not see them all winter and as such looked extra-forward to seeing as much of them as we could when they got back. For her part she loved coming back to the old neighborhood and her family.

I should mention that my grandmother had deep roots in our neighborhood and like my dad she seemed to know everyone. In fact, she had played a crucial role in the development of the neighborhood when it was community of families just trying to get by in the post-world war-two world. When she was young Gabrielle looked forward to everything life had in store for her, the good and the bad with a wonderful charisma and faith.

I can see my grandfather starting a career and family at the same time, the war had just ended and there was a real housing crunch on when the men returned. He was part of a group that got together to discuss their biggest daily issues, a support network of sorts. “Gentleman” he started “my family needs a better home. I sleep in the main room with my son, two of my children share our ’second bedroom’ which is little more then a den, and my wife sleeps on a couch with another child and a final one sleeps in a basket on the table. There is just not enough space.” Many others shared similar stories and worries about their housing options, none could afford to buy and there was nothing big enough for rent. It was decided that the men would form a committee and study how to make a housing co-op work. In the end the men made 50 houses on an oval shaped road that they called Oval Drive, at least their solution to the housing issue was creative. When the houses were built the families held a lottery to choose who got which house. My grandparents traded the one they got by shaking hands…a house my father, their youngest, bought from them when I, his oldest, was conceived.

Once our picnic was over the serious business could start. Grandma was in the process of teaching me to count. I didn’t realize it at the time but that is what she was doing, tricking me into liking it. She taught me so many card games I cannot remember most of their names. One in particular sticks out in my mind “queen of spades” a game I no longer know how to play. I do remember that I loved playing with her and many afternoons and evenings flew by while we played together. In these games she taught me fair play, never allowing me (or any of my cousins or brothers that happened to be playing) to cheat, and she could see everything. She was gentle in her reprimands but all her grandchildren learned not to take what wasn’t ours and to own up to any wrongs we had committed. I no longer remember if I won often, I suspect she did, but the reason I don’t recall the record is simply that winning was never the point, the purpose was in the playing, the enjoying of the ever elusive “quality-time” together, and, of course, learning to count.

As I grew older I came to have a love for hockey, a game I only played in my backyard, not in a league. I collected hockey cards and stacked them higher then I was tall, proud of the sheer quantity. For Easter one year my parents gave me a bible as a gift…I wanted to cry, that was not at all what I wanted. Maybe grandma knew this was going to happen so she arranged for me to receive a whole whack of hockey cards. When my parents finally left to go visiting other family and friends grandma and I began our card game. This would be no ordinary one though. In Queen of Spades, the queen herself was worth a whooping 13 points, by far the most valuable card, until my grandmother changed the game. Suddenly, Mario Lemieux was worth 50, Wayne Gretzky 100, and my favorite player Patrick Roy an incredible 500 points! I told her about this a few years ago and she gave a surprised smile and proclaimed “well I must have been so creative back then!” To me back then is just yesterday, and yes, you were. She did not remember this, but for me the game went on forever and is one of my favorite childhood memories.

My grandparents knew about hard economic times, their early marriage living conditions were nothing compared to what they had witnessed in the Great Depression, which really wasn’t all that great. They never forgot what they learned then, sayings like waste not want not were more real to them then anyone I have ever met. She taught me to save everything; she made arts and crafts out of the most mundane things. I realize much of what she made was not valuable, was actually really humdrum “old lady” type things. I think people who speak meanly about such items don’t understand that in the creation of the things it is the time spent together and the making of it that counted, not the final product.

That said she has gained quite the reputation for her towels.  She crochets a button on a little seasonal towel so that they can hang off a stove serving a useful function but also decorating the kitchen. They cost her a single dollar to make because she gets buttons from anyone that has found some and she only buys the little towels when she finds them on sale after the season is over, say a Christmas towel purchased in January for use the following year. She sells them for two dollars to other people and gives the profit to charity. She was flabbergasted to hear that some people were reselling them at church charity events for five or even six dollars for charity. Who, she asked, would dare to make so much profit from one item, and who would pay so much for something they could easily make? At 84 she is making more towels then ever and has taught some of the younger women in the family the trick of not only making the towels but enjoying the process of it, from the making to the giving away (family members pay for them in the form of vigilance regarding buttons) so that the towels will live on.

She has never stopped counting everything and is routine in ways that boggle the mind. Like the time an aunt of mine bought a personal scale and wanted grandma to ensure it was accurate and grandma refused because she weighs herself Saturday morning, any other time is out of the question; she wouldn’t know if it was accurate, though her weight hasn’t changed in at least 30 years. I think these routines have helped her to live so long and well. It is because of her that my breakfast has a routine based on the day of the week. Her and her husband of 60 years have had many routines and stuck to them as they raised their six children in a three-bedroom house. The regularity, I suppose, was a safety blanket, a method of defending against the ghastly aspects of life they had witnessed in the 1930s and during the second war to end all wars. In their predictability they found peace and, with the right attitude, happiness.

They have a new routine now. Grandpa is very sick. A long standing routine of theirs has been that grandpa plays golf on certain days, he has the trophies of holes in one and the like to prove it, while grandma would knit or shop or just walk around enjoying the sounds and sites of everyday life. His health slowly deteriorated and one day Grandpa could no longer golf, it was too much for him, making him dizzy. That year he won a mini putt championship at their motel complex in Florida earning himself a free pass for the following summer to the mini putt course. The win was a small but significant feat in a place where so many men who golfed lived out their final strokes. He never made it back to claim his prize.

Slowly but inexorably he is deteriorating. My grandmother watches on helpless to stop this like a calm stream in a forest fire. He has Alzheimer’s and when he first learned it he wrote her a touching letter. He wanted her to be able to read it in her moments of doubt, of sadness, of fear, and need. It reassures her that he loves her, that he needs her and always did, even if sometimes he is indifferent or even mean towards her it would not be, he wrote, him that was behaving in such a way, but rather the decease. I hope she takes solace in this letter and I know she is aware of how important she is to him, to all of us. She visits 6 days a week, takes Friday off for dentist and doctor appointments and such. He is in a home where he can receive the more intensive care he needs. She visits him for lunch and helps him prepare for an afternoon nap. I am not sure what they talk about or how much he remembers of their 60 years together. She goes anyway, reads the letter and knows that it is the going that is important.