Lullabies and Time Travel

There is a bright pink bar of carbolic soap that sits on the ledge of the sink in our laundry room. Andrew has a friend in Hastings that sends the bars of soap to us, so we always have a supply. Andrew likes to keep it on hand because he remembers using carbolic soap at his grandparents’ house –the feeling of stretching up to the big utility sink to lather his small hands and breathe in the pleasing, bracing scent that now fills our laundry room when we wash up.  He has very scant memories from childhood; the early loss of his mother erased a lot, but sometimes a scent or a sound brings something to the surface. I love the idea of this pink stuff propelling him, momentarily, back in time.

I, too, have enjoyed some trips in a time machine lately, thanks to our seven-month-old baby, Skye. I sing her lullabies as part of the bedtime routine, and though I try to throw in some variation to keep us both entertained, I always return to the lullabies my Granny Thomas sang to me as a child. Nightly, as I bathe Skye, I think of my granny’s hands washing my hair, wonder at where her mind might have been in those moments thirty-five, forty years ago. As I revisit the songs now, I have become more curious about where the songs came from - when they were popular and entered her life. I think of them as her songs, rather than popular music from her youth, not so different from me singing Michael Buble or Beyonce. Granny always added her own flourishes - one of our favorites was “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and when she’d sing “Let me hear you whisper that you love me too…” my sister and I would whisper in her ear “I love you! I love you!” like the backup singers.

After I put Skye to bed the other night, I sat down in the rocking chair and listened to Bing Crosby sing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” in 1932, the velvety voice and crackling recording seeming better suited issuing from a Victrola than my iPhone . I had only ever heard my granny’s version, and I noted the small differences in lyrics and rhythm. Now, I’ve gone back to listen to “Highways are Happy Ways (When They Lead the Way to Home),” first recorded in 1926, and I wonder if Granny sang “And when you travel along those ribbons of grace,” or if I just misunderstood her (the real lyric is “ribbons of grey,” but I prefer “grace”).

The memory comes roaring back, and I can smell her Tea Rose perfume, see the gold chain hanging from her neck, and she is present with me again, sitting on the floor of my bathroom in Switzerland. After nearly 30 years of being away, I hear her voice in mine, remember being the little one in bed listening, and it moves me to think of this music, now 100 years old, soothing Skye to sleep a continent and era away.

I’ve also been thinking about my granny on my morning commute.

She died 26 years ago in a head-on collision with a truck. The driver passed illegally, crossing a double yellow to get ahead of a slow driver on a two-late highway, and hit my grandmother and great aunt – her identical twin sister - killing them nearly instantly. I still think of the two of them, driving home from Atlanta, maybe planning what they’d fix for dinner. I hope there was only a second of surprise before their lives ended in a flash.

While I tend to embrace risk in most areas of my life, I often think of them while driving, anxious to pass on a two-lane, even if I’m behind a tractor going 20 miles an hour, even if there’s a pretty clear view of the road ahead. When I’m a passenger and someone else is driving, speeding and passing, I find myself judging them, anxiously, holding my tongue before I say: “You know, you could kill somebody.” (Somebody important. Somebody’s granny.)

This was first experience of grief. My grandmother doted on me (while my great-aunt had a special bond with my sister), and her loss was a shock. I remember holding my knees close, curling into a ball in the passenger seat of my mom’s Toyota station wagon after she picked me up from school and told me what had happened. I was wearing knee-high athletic socks with red and blue stripes, and I remember closing my eyes and trying to will their deaths into unreality: opening my eyes again and seeing the socks and knowing it was real.

As clear as my memories of my grandmother and her death may appear to be to me, memory is slippery and diffuse, its nature unreliable and its fabric compromised by time and a desire to “make sense of things” for ourselves. Time distorts memory, and extreme events or tragedy may blot it out entirely, as Andrew has experienced. We also alter events to serve our needs and our narrative, whether we do it with awareness or unwittingly.

As a young person, I confused my place in the story of my granny’s death. In my memory, my father was on a business trip to Washington, D.C. when the accident took place. Mom told him to come home, but she didn’t tell him what had happened. In my mind, I was home alone after school when dad returned, and I had to tell him his mother died and listened to him cry out, trying to console him. According to my parents, this isn’t what happened (Maybe I heard him crying later? Maybe I was home alone after school crying imagining my dad’s reaction?). Perhaps my brain has created this narrative to put me at the center of a story that felt so central to my life, when the fact is, I was a secondary character, a grandchild, when my father was the one that lost his mom that day.

While Granny Thomas died when I was still a kid, I’ve had the blessed opportunity to really get to know my other grandmother – my mom’s mom – as an adult. We formed a friendship when I lived with her in Key West when I was in my early 30s and she in her early 90s. I talked to her about dating and loneliness, frustration with my writing, my desire to be a parent. She told me stories of her youth, her ambitions and education, her early days after meeting Granddad. Strangely, a version of what I imagined in my adolescence came gravely true when I reached my 30s. When her youngest son, my uncle Brian, died of a heart attack on Easter morning in 2017, I had to tell her. I remember watching the features of her face blotted out - an avalanche of grief. She walked around the neighborhood, trancelike, trying to process it.

It made me marvel at my subconscious compulsion to mentally rearrange the events of my granny’s death to be more central. It underlined to me how much we miss in others’ lives, because we are the principal character of our own story. Of course, that is a child’s way of thinking – our mother is “Mom,” and there is a strange novelty when we learn her first name. We use it like a taboo, an alter-ego – “Lisa!” elicits a different response, but really, she’s “Mom.”

Not long ago, The New York Times published an op-ed called “Our Mothers As We Never Saw Them.” The author, inspired by a book project, put out a call on social media for people to send in photos of their mothers before they were mothers. She reflects on a photo of her mother, blonde and carefree, on her honeymoon in Mexico, before so many things happened, including her own birth. It certainly brought to mind my own beautiful mother, grinning in bell bottoms, but it also brought to mind Granny Thomas, often with her hair tied back, big gold hoop earrings, a mischevious look in her eye – in front of an ornate door in China, gawking at the size of it, holding her sister’s hand and laughing, on her wedding day, smiling shyly at my grandfather. I began to imagine the scope of this woman that, in the overlap of our lifetimes, I only thought of in relation to me – the voice that sang me to sleep, the hands that showed me to peel carrots, the lap on which I sought comfort.

My adult relationship with Granny Jane prompted me to seek the same understanding of Granny Thomas retrospectively, to imagine her full life and consciousness, her hopes and dreams and disappointments. She had my father at 38, nearly unheard of in the 1950s, and at each mention of my “geriatric” pregnancy at 39, I thought of her, imagining a mid-century overlay, a male doctor, maybe smoking a cigarette, telling her sagely that she was too old to have a baby, after her second miscarriage.

But she persevered. She was resilient, determined, driven. She did not work outside of the home, but she worked hard. She had a master’s degree in home economics, and as my father often said, she would have made an exceptional COO or general. In her time, she was COO of her family. She overdid it, as that line of my family are wont to do – her fried chicken had to be perfectly crisp or she couldn’t enjoy the meal; her Christmas decorations had to rival the window at Macy’s, her boys had to make straight As. She had incredibly high expectations and doted on and disciplined her children in equal (extreme) measures. I imagine her frustrations with the limitations of her time, pouring her efforts and ambitions into her two sons. I think of the things about her that I didn’t understand as a child. I remember her wearing a colorful tube top, white shorts, and pretty jewelry as she worked in her garden or read the mail on the back porch. I remember wondering why a woman her age, especially on a farm, bothered dressing up like that, looking stylish and even girlish.

My grandfather had a brain tumor before I was born, and he miraculously survived the surgery with little obvious damage. But as the years wore on, the scar tissue from its removal grew in his brain, causing dementia that mimicked the symptons of Alzheimer’s. My grandmother struggled with her new role as caretaker. This was a woman that, 40 years earlier, had set her sights on the handsome young UT law student from Alabama. Instead of pursuing him outright, she compromised her role as a teaching fellow and asked a colleague who worked in the law school office to check his file for his IQ and test scores before approaching him.

In the empire she had built of her home, he was the emporer that had begun to lose his mind. She strained against being tethered to him, and the farm, a life and a man that began to feel more claustrophobic as the years passed. She had traveled extensively with Aunt Gladys in South East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, often shipping home furniture and rugs which distinguished their homes from any others I grew up visiting. Granddad’s declining state kept her more at home on the farm, surrounded by the memories of her farflung, full life. My father’s decision to move our family, her only grandchildren, away from our small hometown to Washington, D.C., was an incredible blow, one she bemoaned to my father. For her, it left a silence where there was once laughter – worse yet, the laughter of children, which I have only recently learned burrows into one’s heart with particular tenacity.  

I think of her now, the fountain of her energy, the hard edges of her perfection, the pain of her pregnancy loss, the curtailing of her ambitions, the slow, creeping loss of her dashing, brilliant husband. While it feels good to add depth and complexity to my solipsistic image of Granny, stubbornly, her most enduring quality in my memory was her quiet, steadfast dedication to me.

Often outshined by my more outgoing and popular older sister, my grandmother sometimes said, “You just wait and see” about me. This was an enigmatic promise – that something unknown was going to come into my life, whether it was poise or confidence that eluded me as an adolescent realized, or some hidden variable only visible to her. She’d wink at me, as though we were in on the secret together. She had faith in the future version of me that I didn’t have, that I couldn’t see, but it made me, in my awkward ordinariness, feel promised, chosen by this glamorous woman of the world. At low moments in my life, of professional or romantic disapointment, in the aftermath of some embarassment or bad judgment, I think of my grandmother’s words, You just wait, and they buoy me into imagining a future version of me that promises to be different, better.

There is a Buddhist koan that Thich Nhat Hanh posits as “What did your face look like before your grandmother was born?” On one hand, it emphasizes our impermanence – I was not here, just as I will not be here when Skye’s granddaughter is is born. I have the me of this moment. It also is meant to prompt a person to think of their essence, their singularity – from what have I manifested in this world, and what am I made of? Thich Nhat Hanh often posits that our spirits are a continuation of our ancestors, and our bodies are comprised of matter that will continue to exist after our death. Sometimes, I think my grandmother had a strong sense of this spiritual inheritance. Just as scripture promises that God knew us before we were formed in our mother’s womb, I wonder if she somehow knew my essence. Not just knowing my face before I was born, but knowing my face after she would die, knowing who I would become, and trusting that vision.

Skye will be christened on June 4, at our church in Lausanne, and the reverend asked if we had any hymn requests. I have requested “The Love of God,” my grandmother’s favorite hymn, which my sister and I sang at her and Aunt Gladys’s funeral, to a church that was packed with the many people that loved them. This moment of my life feels so full and magical. My relationship is happy; my baby is healthy; my job is fulfilling; my writing is going well. My mom and dad are flying over for Skye’s christening. I feel so blessed, and I am careful to thank God every day, because I know that a heart attack, or a brain tumor, or a tired truck driver, impatient to get home, could change all of that in an instant.

But for now, life is beautiful. I don’t know if I believe in heaven. Sometimes, my granny comes to me in my dreams, and I tell her how much I miss her, and this feels a bit like heaven and a bit like cheating death. Sometimes, I want to tell her that I really see her now, that I know what she was like, what it was like for her, but that wouldn’t entirely be true. Mostly, I want to tell her thank you. That a small part of me believed her – to just wait and see – and she was right. I have just waited, and it was so worth waiting for. More fantastic than I could have imagined. But somehow, she imagined it for me.