Pam Colby - Grandma’s Ghosts

 

When I was growing up, often my family would drive the long slow roads from northern Minnesota to Minneapolis to visit my grandma. I loved the visits, but the drive was hell. Sitting in the backseat among my sisters, trying to sit still, keep my hands to myself. [audience chuckles] By the time we arrived, I was a wound-up spring ready to pop. [audience chuckles] Sometimes when my grandma saw me coming, she looked afraid. [audience laughter]

 

See, a few years back when I was flying through her living room, I crashed into her, knocking her to the floor. [audience chuckles] As I came out of my imaginary world, I saw her down there, [audience chuckles] awkward, unable to get up, embarrassment in the air as the adults came scrambling to get her to her feet. [audience laughter] See, back in 1938, when she was just 28, she was struck with the polio virus, and she was paralyzed from the neck down within 24 hours. It took her years to regain her muscles, but she learned to walk again, kind of like Roosevelt. It was more of a balancing act. But she looked like she could walk. [audience laughter]

 

What she lacked in her walking, she made up in her talking. [audience laughter] I loved to listen to her tell stories, and I could stay up late in the night listening to my mom and my grandma talk. I'd wait, I'd want to hear the ghost stories. My eyes getting wider, like, how when great grandma died, Aunt Olga saw her spirit walk right out of her body. [audience laughter] Or, then there were the ghost stories from Sweden that always involved a rocking chair that rocked after the person had died like, "I'm still here, y'all, [audience laughter] back and forth without a soul in sight.”

 

But really, when I graduated from college, I decided to move to Minneapolis, really because my grandma was here. But also, because I knew there was a lesbian community here. [audience chuckles] It was the early 1980s, and I wasn't really out, especially to my grandma. [audience chuckles] But she seemed to get me, like, praising me when I cut off my long hippie hair and going back to my tomboy look. We didn't really communicate through eye contact. Nobody in my family used eye contact. [audience laughter] That would be too intimate. [audience laughter] But when I brought my new girlfriend over for dinner, she served us on the good China. [audience chuckles] And in 1990, when my lesbian partner and I decided to have a child, and me, the butchy one, became pregnant, [audience laughter] my aunt and my grandma gave us a baby shower. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause] 

 

When baby Joel was born, my grandma was no longer able to walk into the hospital, but she came in her wheelchair, and we set him down in her lap. She held onto him tight. About four years after that, on the most beautiful day in Minnesota, the birds were singing. It was April. Spring finally. Daffodils, tulips. I was out running errands with Joel, and I decided to swing by and see her. She was in a nursing home now, falling due to the secondary effects of polio. We stopped in. She wasn't in her chair, which my son liked to push her around in. She was in bed. I visited her often, and I said, "How you doing, Grandma?" And she said, "All right."

 

There was a big plate of food and a piece of cherry pie. And Joel said, "Great Grandma, can I have your cherry pie?" And she said, "Yeah." And then, I watched her watch him eat it. She was smiling, which was nice, because she hadn't been very happy lately. And then, suddenly, full on eye contact. [audience laughter] "You know, I really don't have an appetite anymore." I said, "Yeah, it's okay, Grandma. You don't have to eat. You've had a good, long life." 

 

The next morning, I was at work and I got the call. She died. I went, and I said goodbye to her body, and then I went home. I felt kind of like a big old stone sitting on the couch, that cloud of loneliness and sadness coming down and thinking about her not being in my life anymore. Then I looked across the room at the rocking chair, [audience chuckles] and it was moving [audience laughter] ever so slightly without a soul in sight. Thank you.