I just got off the phone with Grandma. It was a wonderful 45-minute conversation (my next best substitute for being there today, since I've been sneezing since I woke up).

I am usually very careful not to visit Grandma when I have recently been exposed to icky, possibly contagious illnesses. It's been a long, careful struggle to build up her sense of well-being to the point where she can go out for dinner (Thanksgiving). And Feb. 18th, she was even able to join many of her children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren in a celebration in Albany, almost 2 hours away.

Gran'ma Enid happily remembers going down to Uncle Paul's with us last weekend. She also thinks she went to Uncle Phil's since then and has come back. Uncle Phil and the other 5 members of his household were staying with Grandma last week, but usually live in Palo Alto, CA.

I asked her, did she mean when we visited Uncle Paul? No, that was last weekend.
or when Phil visited her?

No, she distinctly remembers being in Uncle Phil's house.

But she's back now.

What wonderful stamina she's developing!

* * *

As Grandma's memory gets sketchier, we are discovering all kinds of new memory-books.
Ernie and I found her slide projector in the bottom of a closet a few weeks ago.
Uncle Phil found Grandpa's scrapbook and photo album (from Ray's Navy days before their courtship).
Grandma also found her childhood scrapbook (from when all the girls would gather in her big upstairs room to work on craft projects).

I am soaking up the stories as fast as I can.
The little Amdahl boy who let her borrow his brand-new shoes to go to a wedding, after she'd lost hers fighting over raspberries with Lenore in the pasture (Lenore was eating them all out of the bucket, but guess who got in trouble when they got home? Not Lenore... Enie with the missing shoes.)
There was a wedding everyone was excited to go to, but Mrs. McCaffery said she wasn't taking any barefoot child to a wedding. Enid was disconsolate (she now wonders why nobody sent anybody back to the pasture to look for them, but who knows). The Amdahl boy (Ambrose?) from across the street had a pair of brand-new shoes he'd been saving for Sunday, he hadn't even worn them yet, but he offered to let Enid borrow them. That's just the kind of person he was.
That boy (who'd now be over eighty) was the grandson of Mr. Amdahl, the old man who continued to drive a horse and buggy long after all of his neighbors had automobiles.

* * *

Other stories are too pathetic to tell, of neighbors bullied, embarassing accidents, secrets Enid helped protect, mistakes made and forgiven that she wouldn't have me write here.

But along the way, I'm listening. The complicated details of Victorian romances and dramatic plotting sloughs away, and the stories that still ring clear in her are like crystals grown of one element, lustrous examples built on a single grain of truth.

The no-good motherless boy at school, who defied expectations by walking her home in a blizzard (the teacher had asked him only to see her to her own road, but he took her almost the whole way and wouldn't desert her until her big brother appeared) and then ran off too quick to be thanked.

The neighbor who, after thirty years, Enid still tries to tell that "If you want a man to do anything, you have to let him do it his way."

The day the neighborhood girls went for "a walk," twelve or thirteen of them with a few little cousins for camoflage, and busted up the dam that was causing grown men's tempers to fray dangerously in the drought.

* * *

In telling Grandma about books I've recently enjoyed, I am honing my ability to relate "the human condition." Not that Grandma's the ultimate arbiter, but at eight-one and counting, she's a pretty good yardstick.

Straightforward ironies, mischief, tales of money-chasing foolery and youthful bravado, people fumbling over themselves to live up to their goals and ideals, set her to chuckling in sympathetic humor. Complex puns that depend on the mis-spelling of a word, do not. Nor do earnest political causes of the day, nor intricate logicistics. Anything beyond three steps, tends to lose her.

When Grandma gets bored, I know I've strayed from simple truth. Or from clarity. And when Grandma whoops with laughter, I know I've hit a lode of humanity bright and pure, a gem sound enough to hold its value for another 80 years.

* * *