Helen After 97

Finding Home: #3 (A pocket-sized album of memories)

1.

“He’s a real looker. You got yourself a good one there, kiddo. Yes sir-ee. I know a good man when I see ‘im.”

Ninety-seven and still easily charmed by the opposite sex, Grandma Munson eyed my handsome fiancé all the way up and down.

She, who had toiled and studied and bounced away her teenage days alongside the cloud of The Great Depression, bestowed these words upon me.

“Don’t screw it up!”

2.

One hundred years old, she rocked Beer Barrel Polka on the keys, her whole body into the music, shaking the piano. Cheeky flourishes, classic runs, she commanded her instrument, used it to communicate. The message was loud and clear. She was front and center.

The rest of us listened and laughed, dancing along to the style that was unique to her, unable to imagine a world without her joyous vigorous talent.

3.

“Mom, you have to drink something other than coffee”, my own mother complained of Grandma Munson’s all day coffee drinking routine.

“Like heck, I do! I’m one-hundred and one. The gal down at the rest-runt says these eighty-year-olds oughta be takin’ a page out of my book. I look better than them any day of the week. Sheesh.”

4.

The last time I went to her house was strange. I didn’t have any way of knowing it was the last time. She was always trying to guilt us into things by saying she’d die before this or that. But on this occasion, I felt it. I spent a long time looking at things, smelling things, trying to memorize her in her house where she’d lived for sixty plus years, the grandma and the house mixed in my memories. I was moving across the country, heading west, where her young husband had once prospected for gems and gold. She was halfway through her one hundred and second year.

I wanted to spend the night. Maybe then I could ask her to make me crepes with cheese and tell me a wild bedtime story. Wake up late and drink loads of coffee and critique American Bandstand together. Later, we’d shop the afternoon away.

She looked tired, her hip hurt and I was forty-five.

I gave her a hug on my way out. I was relieved when she asked for one more hug and came outside on the porch to watch me leave, the way she had every other visit of my life.

5.

I wrote her detailed letters about what the “new west” was like. We talked on the phone and FaceTime. She was more comfortable with it than I was. She’d always kept up with technology, having taken a college computer class in her eighties.

I wrote her a story about my big white fluffy dog. Our last real conversation was about dogs. She laughed about giving her big white fluffy dog a bath back in the day. “Don’t you dare shake in the house. Don’t you dare!” She laughed and got choked up all in one half-hour talk.

6.

She passed right before the global pandemic at one-hundred and four and then some. I gave my funeral speech on FaceTime. She would have loved the speech. She would have hated it that I didn’t go through all the travel woes to be at her final show. She would have wanted more.

An insatiable spirit, she always wanted more. More from me, more from others, more from life itself. More time, more romance, more indulgent chocolate. More spotlight. She could be a real pistol, mean, moody and melodramatic. But when the sun set, what she really wanted was simple: More music. More dancing.

The lady was onto something.

Helen in her nineties. I have this photo framed in my office. My friend Freddy calls it The One with The Legs. Helen would be delighted.

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Click the links for part one and part two of my series: Finding Home. Thanks for being here!