Exuberant & Precise

Let me tell you about my grandmothers.

The donor wall at SPACES: one of the ritziest things I’ve ever done is donate enough to get a plaque on a wall. I hope artists see it while in residence and are inspired to push their work, to tap into a reserve of energy and refine it just that little bit more. It’s the sort of thing I’d love to find on a wall in a space where I was making. I was really happy that I could max out the character number on both lines: Aggie would be proud “I got my money’s worth” of letters and spaces.

My dad’s mother, Elnora, was a paragon of discipline. Well into her 90’s, she made a point to get herself up onto her stationary bicycle and go. For a few years in college, she agreed to let me store some art in the upstairs of her condo, and so I got a few afternoons of one on one time with her. It was a weird time for us both; we were both evaluating our lives and wondering how we ended up where we had ended up. At first I didn’t really know what to talk about, and she was so good at sitting there in silence if you let her.

I don’t believe she was a naturally quiet person, I believe she trained herself to keep her wild thoughts locked up tight and silent. In her last few years, she confided all sorts of crazy things to my dad, some things that had been kept under wraps for so long, dad couldn’t even figure out whose secret it had been and why it had been kept all these years.

As I would sit there with her in the living room of her condo, sun streaming in through the blinds, picking at the piping of her uncomfortably rough, burlapy couch and chattering about anything and everything that came to mind, I would watch her closely to see if anything at all I said sparked interest. She did warm up a little over time. I don’t remember anything specific that she told me, only that I was able to shift the mood and connect with her. About three visits in, talking to her started to feel like talking to my sister Courtney very far in the future; I started to recognize some of her facial expressions, especially that distinctive smirk she’d make if I said something “outrageous.” The time I remember most vividly, I asked Elnora if she ever stopped and talked to the man I always saw out walking, and if he was single. She’d give a sort of incredulous grunt and tried to wave away the idea with her hands, but she’d have that smirk that let me know she maybe didn’t mind the idea that I’d imagined all the men in the complex were pining after her.

The other thing I remember most about those visits is the way she organized her space. She had been a professional seamstress once upon a time, when she was single and living in St. Louis. She never told me about it, my father did. I wish I had asked her more about that time myself, about how she fell in love with my grandfather whom she had known since childhood. They celebrated their 50th Anniversary before he died.

After a near century on this earth, she had collected some really interesting little knick knacks, but there were few enough of them that I knew each must have some story, maybe ten stories each, and I wondered what they were. Objects were less important to her than papers: she had piles of notes on her coffee table and dining room table both: to do lists and grocery lists in the same small, precise, super legible handwriting that she used to take down everyone’s birthday in the front of her Bible. And then there were pages, and pages, and pages of sermon notes that she took down listening to WCRF, or from reading pamphlets and devotionals sent to her from Moody Bible Institute, or televangelists on TV.

She had volunteered at her church since well before I was born. Toward the end, she couldn’t drive but still wanted to help, so a friend would drop off plastic bags that they collected and Elnora would fold them. Once, I went over had she had filled up a full couch cushion of her loveseat with bricks of folded bags. The pile had a footprint of at least 2 ft. by 2ft., and stood about a foot high, probably 200 bricks of meticulously folded plastic shopping bags, rubber banded together in sets of ten or twelve. She probably had 2,500 bags, folded so perfectly I thought it was money when I first walked in. It looked like a drug raid photo’s worth of money.

I said, “Grandma, I didn’t know plastic bags could be folded so meticulously!” and she looked me dead in the eye, and said in a tone that conveyed she was worried about the way the world was headed that I’d have to be told something so obvious, “Everything can be folded.”

***

My mom’s mother, Agnes, was a figure of mythical proportions when I was growing up. She ran a candy store over by the original Stickland’s, you could look out the storefront window and see the Goodyear Blimp Hanger. Even after the store closed, she made candy for people out of her house, filling orders and donating baskets of bizzare confections to local charities for fundraising events.

In later years, she became obsessed with molding chocolate into the form of a baby’s shoe. I think it started with a basket she designed for a baby shower, but then she just thought it was so cute, she’d make babies’ shoes at scale in chocolate for other things. She also made chocolate lollipops in the shapes of footballs, baseballs, basketballs, and soccer balls, and she’d stand them up inside actual baby’s shoes. “Look at these Browns shoes I found at the Duffsh!” she’d exclaim, holding up a single child’s Browns shoe filled with little chocolate footballs and chocolate football helmets on sticks, bundled so that they’d explode out of the mouth of the shoe, and wrapped in cellophane like a gift basket.

The melting chocolate she used to make the molded chocolate was waxy. It came in disc-shaped chips, the size of poker chips, and domed. It came in every color, and she had bags of it around. When it would get old, it wouldn’t melt right, and she’d give us handfuls of it. I remember being maybe 13 or 14 and realizing with surprise as I bit down into one that it was so waxy; I’d been eating it my whole life and never noticed.

She also made large sheet cakes that she’d cut the tops off of with a large serrated knife so that they’d be perfectly flat, and she always had a pan of cake tops around to eat. It was a grandkid’s dream, like a grandmother in a fairy tale, always ready with confections.

And jewelry. She like to bring us into her room and open her costume jewelry box and tell my sister and I to pick out a piece of jewelry. I still have some strange broaches, cross necklaces, fake gold roses with set with fake rubies, a jaguar ring with fake emerald eyes, broken Mickey Mouse watches, etc. She loved novelty purses as well, shaped like animals or, of course, shoes; covered in sequins and rhinestones.

They were great conversations starters, and that had immeasurable value to Aggie. She made friends with EVERYONE. Nearly every visit, someone would stop by to ask for her advice or blessing about some extremely involved, personal-sounding matter, or else to fix something somewhere in her house for her. She taught herself to drive after my grandfather died, and would make her rounds, checking in on an incalculable and rotating cast of colorful characters with which she was constantly making various arrangements and deals.

In college, she didn’t drive as much, and would have me pick her up and we’d stop at multiple flea markets and people at the booths would shout, “Aggie’s here” and all start pulling out expired cake mixes and sprinkles and other goods they had on hold for her. Sometimes she seemed like she was going to sweet talk them into paying her to take the stuff!

I remember one year picking her up to take her across town for Easter, and she insisted on stopping at every drug store we passed to see if they had “bubble shirts,” these awful, popcorn-textured fitted shirts that were supposed to be one-size-fits-most, like someone had seen Marty’s jacket in Back to The Future II and thought, we could do that with tube tops. CVS had them on sale that week, but she was confident she could get Rite Aids and Walgreens to price-match, and then flip them to her flea market client-friends. After the 3rd stop, I said, “Grandma, we’re already an hour late, we can’t keep stopping!” and she laughed and rolled her eyes at me and said, “You think they’re gonna start without ME?”