This year, I knew what I had to look forward to in terms of the opening night reception of the San Francisco Antique Show, so I was especially excited. As regular readers might remember, it was a food extravaganza composed of all of my favorite foods. And although Jean-Francois didn’t come this time, the delightful Christopher did, and it was a treat to see him.

 

 

 

Another time a woman came by on the same mission and asked my grandmother if she could meet all the children. Dutifully, my grandmother rounded them all up, a handsome and intelligent lot, all of whom eventually graduated from university (with one exception: the eldest, Romaine). “This can’t be all of them!” declared the woman. Why, yes, indeed it was, insisted my grandmother. The woman turned on her, her lips pursed primly. “Where is the family idiot?” she demanded. “Everyone knows that in a family this size, there is always one idiot!”

 

Upon hearing this, my mischievous aunt Celestine designated herself the family “idiot,” and whenever a prim and proper lady came to meet the family henceforth, she would mess up her hair and clothing and stagger into the parlor with her eyes crossed.

 

Maybe political correctness isn’t such a bad idea after all.

 

My grandfather ran for Lieutenant Governor at one point, but lost. I found out after I was grown, from my aunt Connie near the end of her life, that he had been part of the Pendergast machine of Kansas City, a sort of Irish mafia. We had always heard nothing but contempt heaped upon Pendergast from my mother, and we assumed that it was because he was a machine boss, and machine bosses were known to be corrupt. In fact, Tom Pendergast owned a concrete factory, and all of the early downtown KC skyscrapers that were built under his aegis were made of concrete, and a picturesque stream that ran through the toney part of Kansas City, The Plaza (the first shopping center ever built in the United States, with buildings modeled after those in KC’s sister city, Seville, Spain), was completely lined in concrete. Decades later, in 1977, that decision came to haunt Kansas City, when the town received 16 inches of rain in 24 hours. Flooding would no doubt have occurred no matter what, but with the stream bed of Brush Creek lined with concrete, there was nowhere for the water to go but into the streets of The Plaza, wreaking incredible havoc. I remember being impressed that the flood waters broke down the several-inch-thick, fifteen-foot-high doors of Hall’s upscale department store.

 

But after a comment that my 93-year-old aunt Connie let slip, “Father never understood why he lost that election. He did everything that he was supposed to do in order to win,” I began to think that there was another reason behind my mother’s disparagement of Pendergast. Shortly after my grandfather lost the election, the Depression hit, and he was given the presidency of a failing bank. He was the one who was charged with trying to collect on the bad debts of the customers, and my mother told me that one time, as a young teen, she went to visit her father at his office. A stick of horehound candy lay on his desk and she delightedly reached for it to take a lick. He snatched it away from her and told her not to touch it; he had it tested later and found out, as he evidently suspected, that it was poisoned. It had been given to him by the wife of one of the bank’s debtors.

 

My mother firmly believed that this job broke his spirit and led to his death. He died when she was 18 and just starting college at the University of Missouri at Columbia. She told me that she had so little money that she had to decide between buying a dress suit and a winter coat. My mother, ever the fashion maven, chose the dress suit.

 

So I never met my grandfather, though I used to delight in my mother telling me that he would have loved my brown eyes. He himself had brown eyes but I believe that all of his children had the dominant blue eyes of his wife. My mother had the most beautiful cornflower blue eyes that I’ve ever seen.

 

But my grandmother lived with us when I was a little tyke, until my dad had his accident when I was five, the one that landed him in a wheelchair for life. By that time, my grandmother was tired and beat-down. My main memory of her is of her sitting in a green velvet armchair in the living room, drinking her one glass of sherry that she enjoyed before dinner every night. Well, okay, I have another memory, which I wrote about not long ago. It’s eccentric, maybe even a little weird. Okay, maybe very weird. But I think I’ll go ahead and share it, because I think it’s sweet, even though it contains some of the information I mentioned above.

 

Here you go:

 

 

My Grandmother’s Arms

 

 

My grandmother had what would be known today as “kimono arms.” Grandmother Roach had given birth to eleven children and raised fourteen, and by the time I knew her, worn out and considerably overweight, she spent most of her time sitting in one of our living room chairs, staring in front of her with a bewildered expression. A gifted mathematician with a Master’s degree, she must have wondered constantly, “How did I end up with fourteen children?” I had heard stories of how, when my grandfather was the editor and owner of the newspaper in Carthage, Missouri, she worked there, too, bringing each new baby to the office in a basket. But when he became a state senator, he insisted that she stay at home, for appearances. She must have wondered how she ever agreed to that, too. A while back, when I was sorting through my deceased mother’s mementos, I found a letter written by my then-young grandmother to my courting grandfather telling him never to lecture her again. She took six pages to tell him this.

 

Every night, before dinner, she was served a small glass of sherry, which was supposedly administered for health reasons. As no one else in my family drank, I found this to be racy and exotic, especially for someone who spent most of her time simply sitting in a chair. Granted, sometimes she would darn socks, using a giant, polished cowry shell as a darning egg. I loved to look at that egg, its brown speckles and markings reminding me of chocolate. But even better, I liked to stroke its glassy surface. In fact, I was quite a tactilely oriented child. In the same way that a huge portion of a dog’s brain is devoted to their sense of smell, I imagine that a similarly large portion of my brain must be devoted to the sense of touch. My “play” as a child included running my finger down the sides of our water pitcher at dinner, snuggling my cheek into the smooth embrace of my pillow at night, and … well, asking my grandmother if I could feel the fat on the underside of her arms.

 

When I look back on this memory, I cringe at its insensitivity. Who wants to be reminded that they’re fat? And who would want someone coming up and fondling their paunchier parts for entertainment? But the fact is, I genuinely adored the feel of her aged skin. It might sound distasteful to an adult, but to a small child, the tender roll of flesh that hung from her arms was so soft it felt powdery, like a baby’s cheek or rose petal. And I like to think that it would have felt nice to her as well, to have a sweet child respectfully caress her weary arms, which had spent so many years lifting babies and children and tending to their needs.

 

Because she often said, “Well, yes … OK.” And as I carefully traced my fingers along her skin, it seemed to me that sometimes, her bemused expression relaxed into one of contentment.