A Woman We All Call Baba

For ten minutes after my grandfather passed away in December 2001, I did nothing but lean over the side of his hospital bed and smell his hands.  I had always been infatuated by the sheer amount of long white hair that protruded from his forearm and carpeted its way down to his wide knuckles.  They were good hands. Carpenter hands. Swollen in spots, but sturdy in touch and they were still warm when I tried to memorize his scent.  Honey cough drops.  Brut aftershave.  Oatmeal.  I hovered over him and begged God to give me four more years with Baba, my grandma, and his wife for 19,645 sunsets.

‘I’m only asking for four,’ I rationalized in my own head.  By then she will be the same age as Grandpa.  It only seemed fair.  I would be twenty-five in four years.  Surely old enough to go on without her. ‘Please don’t take her,’ I pleaded to anyone with any power over the universe. ‘I still need her.’

Baba is not your average granny.  Granted, she whips up delicious stews and soups out of bones from the freezer.  Sure, she is a miracle seamstress who can transform a size 4 bridesmaid dress into a gown that will accommodate a seven-month pregnant belly and bust.  Without question, she boils water on the stove instead of in the microwave, and makes her own soap.  Of course, her blooming orchids stop traffic from the side window.  But, it is more than that.  There is a long-standing joke in our family that if you could bring three things with you to a deserted island, one of them should without question be Baba. Then, perhaps the fresh water.  But, Baba would find a way – god dangit - to keep you alive.  There is an unapologetic gumption in her that likely stemmed from surviving two wars, an alcoholic father, and immigrating to America at twenty-one without knowing a breath of English.  Like so many from that generation, she had a hard life, worked with her hands, made things from scratch and never ever complained.  Hell, she persevered without paper towels, epidurals and Dove bars.  This woman is solid oak.

But, she is also a pretty cool cat.  My brother and sister used to drunk-dial her on occasion from Cornell because she relished the fanfare of all the party-goers as they passed the phone around like a flask.  I remember her doling out shots of apricot brandy for stomach-aches (even to minors) and she has yet to flinch whenever I swear.  The woman also has genuine mystical psychic powers.  To the degree of annoyance.  She knows when you have plucked an innocuous pickle teetering on the edge of the deli tray before supper or when you have spit a piece of food in your napkin.  Even with her back turned.  She knows you are cold, especially on nights when you dismissed her multiple warnings to bring a coat. And she knows you are being polite when you insist the soup is perfect and doesn’t need more salt.  This is a Baba who can see through bullshit.  A Baba who knew I was attempting to throw my first (and consequently last) high school kegger when my parents were out of town because she casually stopped by that afternoon and caught me straightening the basement pillows.  A Baba who knows you are lying about the sale price of strawberries and sour cream as she digs in her wallet to stubbornly “settle” her bill.

She is her own beautiful tapestry of nouns, verbs and contradictions.  English lavender soap, chicory coffee, Humphrey Bogart movies, Aldi groceries, yellow fingernails, dumpling soup, adorable mispronunciations, hairnets, lily of the valley bouquets, poppy seeds, cold-sores, sun hats, crusty butts of rye bread, blouses with bows, doilies, ripened tomatoes, crisp dollar bills, kolachy, war-briding, limping, sewing, egg-painting, back-scratching, White-Zin guzzling, dress-catalog admiring, real-butter eating, Czech-song singing, gardening, restaurant sugar-snatching, love ‘em and leave ‘em lady.

Eleven years and five months have gone by since that night in the hospital and I think each time that anniversary passes that I have been given such an impossibly sacred gift.  During that time, Baba was there for so many summers, perched on her deck chair in Michigan to help us brush the sand from our shins and scold us for not wearing proper hats.  She was there in California to watch me advance across the stage in my ill-fitting cap and gown with tears in her eyes and hands up in victory.  She was there to answer the phone when I called from a pebbled beach in Nice after I had dyed all of my backpacking clothes pink and missed my train to Bayonne and was desperate to hear a familiar voice from home.  She was there to bid me congratulations on my first real job and there to kiss me goodbye as my U-Haul pulled out of the driveway en route to St. Louis.  She was there, suffering alongside me, when I moved back home, heartbroken and betrayed. She was there, sipping champagne in Napa Valley when I married the love of my life.  She was there when I sat her down at the kitchen table with the calendar open in front of us and asked her if she would be available to meet her new great-grandchild on November 11th.  She was there to hum Czech lullabies to my daughter on the day she was born and there to chase her around the house with a cane to squeals of toddler delight.

This week was Baba’s 88th birthday.

My hope is that she will be here for many milestones to come, but at 88, I soberly recognize that the sand is likely getting low at the top.  Baba has in every way been as present in my life as my left arm.  It is inconceivable to think of her as anything but a permanent fixture of love in every scene yet to be written.

I realize now - that twenty-one year old girl was naïve, asking for four more years.  The truth is when it comes to love, we are all greedy.  The truth is I have been more than blessed to have her in my life for more than thirty-two years.  Many don’t have that kind of time with their own mothers, let alone grandmothers. But, I will always want more.  I will never really be ready and I realize that is how it is supposed to be.  It isn’t supposed to be easy.  She is supposed to feel like an indelible part of me, an imprint, a tattoo.  It means this woman has been ferociously, whole-heartedly, muscle-achingly loved.

Last month, we all ventured to the local photography studio to have a photo taken.  Baba, my mom, my daughter and me.  Four generation of females, bound by anemic blood and fair eczematic skin.  They used that very picture in their mail piece the next week to advertise their Memorial Day special.  It is a precious keepsake of a moment in time that my daughter will never remember, but that she will ask about in the years to come.  And I will sit down beside her with that image in hand, brush the fine hair from her face, and tell her about a woman who we all called Baba.  A woman whose hands smelled like English Lavender.