Y’all like to post old pictures of your family members. This picture has always stuck in my head. This is my mother’s mother, the German side of the family. Grandma looks a little ornery here, or maybe she’s squinting in the sunlight for the photo, but I always knew Grandma as the plump, smiling, cookie making grandma with the accented English. She was married to the skinny, active man I knew as Grandpa.
[Note: Mom told me that while they spoke German to each other occasionally – usually when they didn’t want the kids to understand – they spoke only English the rest of the time, and insisted the children speak only English. Grandma helping Mom with her homework was an issue, especially the language arts stuff. It seems Grandma’s strong German accent was causing some confusion for Mom in class. From what I understand, my Dad’s father did the same thing: as soon as his feet hit American soil, he assimilated and his whole family did, too. Dad’s father Americanized his Italian name, and I never saw his birth name on any legal document or census report. Kids only spoke English. How things have changed!]
I never differentiated between sets of grandparents, as I had only one set that I knew. Dad’s parents were both deceased by the time I was a toddler. I actually grew up thinking that everyone only had one set – it was my reality, and I never had any cause to think about it. I was 13 and babysitting for a family when the mother told her kids “It’s time to get ready to go see Grandma Finklestein (not her real name).” I remember wondering why the name after the title of Grandma, and then it hit me. It was kind of the same reason I never realized my large family was anything unusual until my friend’s mother commented on it. It was just my normal.
So when I look at this picture of Grandma, and I remember the stories of Grandpa vaporizing skunk spray with his lantern one night in the barn, I also have to remember that the Grandma and Grandpa I knew were from years after this picture was taken. This was probably in the Hill Country of Texas, where I still have distant family ties. This was the Grandma I never knew, before the one who would years later give birth to five children and lose a few more, marry a Texas A&M Engineer, and one day, make me cookies and give me plump hugs.