Crafts or Lovemaking: A Quandary (“Country” 16)
Tags: Drinking, Memoir, Family, Love, Vermont

My grandmother, age 80.

My grandmother Lena came to visit me when I lived in a Vermont log cabin with R and the two children. A secular Jew rooted in Germany, she’d exited her homeland around 1938 for safety in England. In a large house in Woking, outside London, throughout World War II she managed the flow of family and refugees, including accessing food through everyone’s ration cards, and keeping her own chickens for eggs. I can never cook scrambled eggs without recalling how she’d scrape every precious yellow fleck out of the pan when I was a kid.

She was nearly 80 when she visited us at the log cabin. I collected her from the airport in my aging VW, which had very poor or no heat, so I brought with me several blankets, and tucked them around my slender grandmother in the car; she beamed and said “Just like the old days!”

While staying at the cabin, she took a daily walk, with her cane. Bear in mind, this was February, and the snow was more than a foot deep, the temperatures often below zero. But she’d head out on her own (my companionship declined), down the snowy road, and back again.

At Dad’s city home — Dad, plus my grandmother and me, and the kids. I made that dress. Sigh.

The first afternoon, after her walk, she settled in a chair and asked, “So where is your mending?” I knew just what she meant — I pulled out my basket of clothing on which I was sewing patches, stitching new hems, replacing buttons, and we set to work.

Today that probably sounds odd. But I grew up stitching and mending. It was part of what my mother taught me, as part of normal life. I never questioned it, and if my skills at the sewing machine never reached professional in putting together garments using paper patterns, they still were decent.

“Do as I Say, Not as I Do”

My father’s favorite instruction to us five kids was the announcement “Do as I say, not as I do.” In general, we managed to ignore that, and at least four of us could be recognized today as patterning ourselves after his life in ways either helpful or painful. I might be the worst — or maybe I just see it most clearly in myself. If I regret any of the past, it’s mostly regret that I copied Dad’s examples so relentlessly.

Mom was easier to track, for me: I did what she taught, by word and deed, in all the crafts and domestic ventures, including childrearing. (Can’t count how many times I read “Blueberries for Sal” and “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” to kids, mine and others.) So my grandmother’s visit felt easy, natural — we made meals, we mended clothes, we held children and encouraged them. I wish I’d asked her about the behavior of the men in our family, because it’s clear that my father reprised his own father’s behavior. Unfortunately.

The other area I never asked my grandmother about was the role of women in families where the men “cheat.” Or anything about sex or making love. And of course not about the war years — my father’s firm example of “don’t ask, don’t tell” for the Holocaust had settled into me. I didn’t know until I was 60 that my father’s few revealed details were riddled with lies. As the French say, désolée. Sorry about that.

But I took Mom’s “sex advice” to heart. What was it? One, sex can smell bad but if you love someone it’s better. Well, since I didn’t experience sex as smelling bad, I assumed that I loved the people I was “making love” with. Bad syllogism.

Two, Mom said you mustn’t discriminate — if someone seems handicapped, cut them extra slack and treat them as warmly as anyone else. I can’t tell you how much trouble that got me into, in the strangest ways. Somehow I interpreted it as, if someone doesn’t grasp how to treat others kindly, I had an assignment to stick with them and help them change. Hint to others who try to accept such an assignment: It hardly ever works that way.

Follow the Leader

Surely, I followed Mom’s examples and lessons in “homemaking” and seasonal crafts. Lots of centerpieces with pinecones! Homemade cards! And, though I only just came to realize it, my own passion for writing comes from hers — her poems were rhymed and awkwardly metered, but she loved writing them, and she sang folk songs and ballads and instilled them in me as the baseline for stories and poetry. Thank you, thank you, Mom — this is my bedrock, and I owe it in part to your start (and my own persistence and love for it).

Also, although I thought for years that I was following Dad’s instructions about drinking — since he was the one who repeatedly advised, “Eat olives before drinking alcohol and you won’t get drunk” (that one didn’t work for me) and “know the difference between port and sherry” and “become educated in vintages when you have time” — last week a different clarity came to me:

In drinking, I followed my mother’s example, amplified by the way Dad used to maintain the liquor stock, even in the decades when we all “knew” Mom was drinking excessively. It took me 25 years of drinking-on-the-side to reach a time when I had to quit, or else.

Or else what? Or else die, actually. But that was not part of either parent’s story, or my grandmother’s. So I’ll tell it another time.

Today, I am able to stitch an outrageously sturdy and artsy patch on any pair of pants or sweater elbow. For country life, it’s a skill I’d recommend.

Along with tracking the past, and coming to terms.

A painting by my grandmother. She, Mom, and I have all painted. So do my sons. Hmm.

This is “Country” story number 16. You can see number 1 here, number 2 here, number 3 here, number 4 here, number 5 here, number 6 here, number 7 here, number 8 here, number 9 here, number 10 here, number 11 here, number 12 here, number 13 here, number 14 here, number 15 here. More, of course, to come!