I have my grandmother’s eyebrows. No, not like those creepy saint’s relics in the Duomo’s Museo dell’Opera in Florence, where they have the preserved finger of John the Baptist on display in a small glass vial. I obtained my eyebrows the old-fashioned way – I inherited them. They are wild and somewhat devilish in appearance. My daughter sometimes notices when I have missed trimming a stray hair and cringes when I pluck it out on the spot. Truthfully, I wonder how long they would get if I didn’t trim them regularly? I have sometimes considered letting them grow out, should my hairline one day recede too far. They would make for a spectacular and unique comb-over. Once, when I was doing a small TV movie role in Hollywood, I asked the makeup artist if I should have them shaped. He was aghast and said that if I “made it,” they would become my trademark. Since then, I have been rather proud of my genetic gift.
I was very close to my Grandma Clark, whose maiden name was Lola Whittemore. I always thought that Lola was a wonderfully exotic name, which seemed at odds with her early career as a single school teacher in Fort Benton, Montana. Before I knew that, I imagined she had once been some kind of exotic dancer. She married Charles Clark, a lawyer, and moved to Fresno where they bought a house at 839 N. Thorne Avenue. That address is engraved in my memory because my Grandma and I were pen pals. We corresponded regularly, starting from when I was very young, despite only seeing each other at Christmas and maybe one or two other times during the year. We shared a passion for coins and would exchange lists of what years and mint marks were missing from our collections, along with family news. I was pleased to learn that she kept all my letters and I inherited them when she passed on in 1977.
She may have lived far from her children and grandchildren, who settled in the distant San Francisco Bay Area and La Jolla, but she was far from lonely. She regularly took in boarders who attended Fresno State University. These were usually students from China who lent a hand around the house and provided extra income. They also took her along to numerous graduations and weddings, which were often held in traditional costume. It was always fun to see her smiling face, saucy eyebrows and wispy mop of silvery grey hair in the photos.
While Grandma was comfortable among Asians, she was definitely old-school when it came to African Americans, persisting in calling them Negroes, or worse. That made for an awkward situation one time when she accepted a new student over the phone, without meeting him first. She contained her shock when he showed up, all six feet of him with an enormous afro, as was popular at the time. But she was also old-school when it came to honoring her word. Of course it turned out that he was an ideal boarder and provided a much-needed update to Grandma’s race relations.
As she got older, she turned from coin collecting, which required only occasional activity, to word games, which kept her very busy. She subscribed to several puzzle magazines and dutiful mailed in her submissions for anagrams, word-finders, jingles, and the like. She even occasionally won small cash prizes, which made the hunt that much more exciting.
When she reached her eighties, she turned to the Bible. That struck us as an odd transition, since religion had never played a large part in her life. One day, on our way back to Fresno after a visit, my father asked her about it. I remember her response distinctly. She replied without a moment’s hesitation, “Well, don’t you think it’s about time?”
In her final years, I never missed an opportunity to accompany my parents down to Fresno, pushing aside any initial reluctance to making the long, usually sweltering trip (for some inexplicable reason, we never had air conditioning in our family cars). It was always comforting to get reacquainted with the old house and see Grandma again, though she shrank visibly with each passing year. Typically, we would go out for lunch at her favorite café, where she would simply order dessert. She seemed to subsist solely on banana crème pie. Then we would all sit around her living room and catch up, with Grandma ensconced in her favorite blue-green recliner. This chair was an oddity. In my imaginings it was the creation of some inventor from another century. You sat in it, pulled the lever and the thing stretched out like a medieval torture rack. Getting out of it was a Herculean struggle. You pulled and pulled until, suddenly, the chair vaulted into its upright position, nearly giving you whiplash. The only benefit was that you really could lie out flat on its farthest setting, which made it good for afternoon grandma naps.
I saw less of her after I went away to college and it was at the end of my senior year that she took ill for the last time. My mother called me with the news that Grandma had advanced intestinal cancer, which probably explained her nutritional peculiarities. I immediately called her at the hospital and we had a good long chat. Not many minutes after we hung up, the phone rang again. It was my mother calling to say that she had just got off the phone with Grandma, who was eager to share the remarkable report that Mark had called her “all by himself.”
A few days later, following graduation, I left for a long vacation in France, where I received little news from home for several months. (Anyone who has tried to navigate the French phone system will understand why it was just not that easy to keep in touch.) But in August, toward the end of my stay, I got a letter saying that Grandma had died. Apparently, she had asked to leave the hospital for the afternoon to celebrate her 84th birthday at home and, once there, had refused to leave. A home nurse was hired and that is where my beloved Grandma spent her final days, passing away in her sleep in her favorite chair.
Unfortunately, the letter arrived on the same day I was leaving my French home and saying good-bye to my adopted French grand’mere, Madame Cailles. She saw the tears in my eyes and asked me what was wrong. I shared the news and added that it was hard to say good-bye to her, too. She gave me a farewell kiss on both cheeks and then held onto me for a second. Chiding me for my morbidity, she let me know in her shaky voice that she had no intention of dying anytime soon and how was I to know we wouldn’t meet again? That brought a much-needed smile to my face and to my heart.
As I got into the little Renault for the short ride to the train station, I waved good-bye to Grand’mere standing in the cobbled courtyard. Despite her words, it was still painful to leave, since she was 77 and I had no plans to return anytime soon. But, all during the long train ride to Paris, I thought about her and my Grandmother Lola and came to appreciate the wisdom of that final admonition, which seemed to apply to both of them in equal measure. Who can truly say that we will never meet again?
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