Family rituals and fading memories

This morning I woke up, made coffee, toasted a bagel, and sat down to watch CBS Sunday Morning. As I sipped my coffee and learned about chuck close, the youngest big city mayor, david stienberg, and old people roller skating my mind began to wander and I started thinking about my grandma.

At some point in my childhood, my grandma put a little black and white TV in her kitchen so she could watch the news while she cooked. Soon after she complained that she needed a color TV for the kitchen so she could get the full effect of the nature scenes on Sunday Morning. (The "moment of zen" on the Daily Show is a parody of the end of Sunday Morning where they show nature scenes.) My grandma was a woman of rituals. CBS Sunday Morning was a ritual for her. She would get up, make her black coffee, and watch and learn about the world around her.

Most people would call her a woman of habit, but I like to think of her life as classier than just habit. She held everything together through her rituals. She made the same style of dinner for my pop-pop every night. A cup of canned fruit, the meal, and then ice cream in a custard dish. She told the same stories at the same time of the year; birthdays, holidays, summer vacations, election years, etc. She read me the same bedtime story until well into my elementary school years. She made the same date nut bread holiday season. This consistency I am convinced at this point in time held my father's family together. Even today, the holidays with them are not complete until someone makes candied yams in the blue pot like she did every year. When she died and no one was there to tell her stories, make her food, continue the traditions the way she did, my father's family couldn't deal with it. Grandma's rituals and her consistency stay with me, in a way that I desperately wish I could emulate. I long for the ability to oganize the way she did, and keep the same rituals alive. I just don't have that strength and that discipline.

The realization of exactly how much my family depended on her didn't hit me until I was sitting on the couch watching sunday morning smiling and wishing that I had a sunday copy of the Washington Post as well. The problem is that the aniversary of grandma's death is a little under three weeks away, and my memory of her house, her life, and my childhood is slowly fading. There are somethings I will never forget. But for as much as I remember, the edges are starting to get fuzzy. Her voice stays with me, but her apperance slowly blends into pictures that span decades. The layout of her house, the furinture, the smell all slowly melt and move together and I can't remember what was the most recent.

Grandma passed away from colon cancer on March 3o, 1998. I was 15. Her death was increibly hard for me to deal with. As I sit her now on this sunday morning, thinking about our rituals and stories I can't help but hope that where ever my grandmother is now that she can see me and is proud of the person I've become.