While cleaning out my basement, I found a letter (an e-mail actually), sent to me from my father back in 2000. Shortly prior to this, a cherished member of our family had passed. I spent most of my time with her at my grandparents lake condo, and her and her husband Rip owned the condo right next to my grandparents. She was my great-grandmothers sister, and although that might seem very removed from my immediate family, the mysteries and stories described here, were my bed time stories as a kid. My dad would sit by my bedside and tell stories of the Great Depression or the Dance Hall. To this day, I have a jar of relish in my kitchen cabinet that says “Dance Hall Relish”. So, This is some of my family heritage, and I found it very appropriate for GrowingUpMudra.
Joe,
Thought you might like to read this. Billie’s granddaughter wrote this to be read at her funeral and it really does capture some of the mystery and glamour that was Billie. Of course Irene is my grandmother and Donna as the third of the Smith girls. Grandma was the oldest and would now be 100 years old if she had lived to see this day. They are all now buried side by side or at most within a short stroll from each other – in McPherson’s on route 20 – as they planned and talked about so often – “Beside the road where they can watch the trucks go by” and just down the road from Kellogg’s farm implement store and Mrs. Smiths Upstairs Dance Hall.
I love you
Dad
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About Billie
For as much as many of us loved my grandmother, Billie, my guess is that none of us truly understood her – or the reasons for the sense of sadness that, to me, seemed to sometimes sit on her shoulder.
Billie was so strongly tied to the past – to her past. To me, it was as if she was living out of a time and place for which she was better suited. Memories of her father’s dance hall, for example, always swirled around her.
The slips and dresses of all those “eager young girls” that she spoke of would practically rustle audibly behind her as recounted those days. She could recall every particular of her childhood in detailed reverence. Oddly, she even seemed to have happy recollections about the Great Depression. She adored the movies when she was young. I can exactly remember the wistful tone in her voice when she’d talk about the celebrities of her youth: Pola Negri, Clark Gable, Bette Davis, and Valentino. Honestly, she could not say “Valentino” without sighing a little.
Admittedly, as an adult I have had little direct contact with her. My memories are confined to those of my childhood.
Her purse, for one thing, held my interest anytime we were all in the car together. When opened, it unleashed a faint, perfectly grandmotherly aroma that I can still distinctly remember – a mixture of peppermints, face powder, and Double Mint gum. That purse always contained an artifact of particular interest to me – an accordion-folded, clear plastic, rain kerchief. No matter how you opened it, or wrinkled it up, one quick pull on the narrow ties on each end of that thing made it snap back into a thin strip of plastic that would fold into eighths and then fit into a little carrying case. There were at least a few occasions when quick pulls from me on those two narrow ties unfortunately ripped those rain bonnets apart for good.
I remember the types of things that all grandchildren remember and cherish about their grandmothers: baking cookies together; Christmas mornings; how hot that little kitchen would get while dinner was cooking when we visited, and how she would prop herself up on her forearms against the kitchen door jam while waiting for the meal to be done. There were the orange flowers on the trumpet vine outside the kitchen on Jackson Street, the Hummel’s in the cabinet, and that beloved little dog of theirs, Schatzi.
But it was hearing her memories that always held me at rapt attention: The Spiritualist meetings, the farm implement store, Grampa Debo – the Captain on the Great Lakes – who, by the way, could yodel, the red Maxwell that Billie rode in, the action. Because of her remarkable ability to tell a story, that stain left on the parlor floor by the embalming fluids is as vivid to me as if I’d seen it myself.
It made me sad to think that sometimes, to her, the present just hadn’t panned out in a way that allowed it to compete with that romantic and magical past. I so often wondered what it was that the memories so clear to her, and her longing for those former times so powerful. Understanding that would have helped me to know her.
And so, I am left to mourn the loss of the person I did know, but also that part of her that I did not know or understand. Truth be told, I think I’ve been missing the part I didn’t understand a long time before this. Maybe we all have.
But, if the mysteries of the universe have unfolded to her, as they should, Billie is now finally enjoying a reunion with Alma, and Alexis Kellog, and Grama and Grampa Debo, and Donn and Ireen, and of course Rip.
And who knows with any luck maybe Pola Negri, Bettie Davis and Valentino as well.
