my grandmother

I have to talk about my grandmother. I've been immersed in two and a half days alone with her, as companion and caregiver, and there is no other world right now. She's 87, strong of will and and voice with a mind in flight - yes like a songbird - that alights on a precarious perch precisely between vivacious, enthusiastic youth and weary indifferent age...between flawless decades of memory and instant, invincible forgetting... She's surprisingly healthy, considering. She's an unconditional, loving constant, and a constant, exhausting surprise. My sister's her full-time caregiver, and has been for 2 1/2 years. My grandmother's only visiting here for the week. And I happened to be the only family able to spend Christmas with her. As well as her birthday, which was Christmas Eve.

It's a mellow sidestep out of time, in her company. She didn't miss the Christmas with the fanfare, like I feared she would. Which was a big relief. For me, the holiday has quietly, acquiescently lost its hold and its hype, over the last few years. Right now, it's mostly a welcome day off work. A chance to be still. A blessed quieting of the consumptive energies, when the stores close and the traffic slows and the collective wishful thinking, for the majority if not all, is (at least) momentarily satisfied. I don't have to serve Christmas, like I did in younger life. No gifts, no obligations, no more traditions. I do think, this week, about the lonely, the imprisoned (in whatever sense), the estranged. I ponder a little the year's darkness receding, and the tide of days shifting toward light. I sit still, gratefully, and listen to the earth breathe, audible at last when the people quiet themselves. And that's how the two of us celebrated, this week. Sitting. Quiet. Grateful.

It's depleting, wondering, dreamlike to be around someone with mental unraveling in progress. You forgo expectations. You distill vocabulary, syntax down to the essential, the momentary, the shared. You exercise imagination, seeking a dozen creative answers to the same repeated question. And you fire up new brain cells, as wonderfully irrational exchanges set out on unexpected, sometimes poetic paths of their own. You experience deja vu a lot. You forget about outside commitments, goals, needs, agendas. You bank the fire and nurture only the hottest, most essential coals. You willingly lose track of time. You comment more often on the God in the details. You practice deep, time-less patience.

She always teaches me. She always stretches me to the limit, and then returns me to total acceptance. She steeps me in the lack of need for segues, rationales, justifications...

For example of that, here's my favorite remark from her this week: I built a fire in the evening, in the cold house where we were staying. As she started to feel its warmth she gratefully exclaimed: "God bless you! You AND America..."