Body and Soul

Body and Soul January 5 2009


A birthday makes me wonder

How we manage to evolve

Within a body.

Our spirit self feels ageless,

Follows its own fiddler,

Thrums to its connections, its intuition,

Its understanding of what’s going on;

Our body marches to the ticking clock

Of hours and of years,

Wrinkling, stiffening, twinging here and there ,

Reshaping itself constantly – cytoplasmic riddle

With its own reasons, its own rhythms, its order and its disarray.

How do such disparate parts

Remain merged as one person for a life?



Reflection:

I remember Grandma. She was my mother’s mother, the only one of my grandparents whose life overlapped with mine. I remember her as a sturdy, ageless woman, although she aged very quickly in her late 60s and died before reaching 70. She seemed ancient, as I suppose grandparents are obliged to appear to their grandchildren. But I’ve seen pictures of her when she must have been in her 50s, and I was a very tiny child. To me now, she actually looks old in those photos. As one of my sisters said to me a couple of days ago when wishing me a “Happy 71st birthday,” “Grandma died when she was 69, but she was OLD!”

Grandma lived in a third floor flat – which we called a “tenement” when I was little. The house was frame, with a three story bay window, a flat roof, and a pleasant double wide lot with grass and trees surrounded by a chain link fence. It was in Pawtucket, RI, the city where we had also lived during my early childhood. The house was on a corner. Across the street in one direction lay a city playground with a shallow wading pool, swings, and a dirt play area. The playground pulsed with raucous children during summer days when I was often at Grandma’s house. We were not allowed to use the pool, because of the polio scares in the middle and late 40s. It was a terrible disease, often causing paralysis and dramatic disability, and no one really understood how it was transmitted. One important theory was that children caught it from each other at swimming pools.

I spent hours sitting in the third floor bay window of Grandma’s house, next to the open, screenless windows, looking down wistfully at those happy children screaming and splashing in the pool. It was fascinating to watch them, to see who were siblings and who playmates, and how the boys and the girls behaved differently toward each other. When they left to go home, I pictured where they might be going, what their houses might look like, and how they were greeted when they arrived home, still wearing their woolen bathing suits or trunks -- the girls with rubber bathing caps -- all of them refreshed from hours playing in the water. There was no air conditioning at that time. I was sweating and limply hot as I looked at the splashing kids across the street. I envied them.

Across the side street from Grandma’s house, what sounded like hundreds of looms in a brick textile factory clicked and clacked in synch, 60 times a minute, 24 hours a day. The noise was loud – a “racket,” a din. We learned to sleep to its cadence, windows open in summer to let in any breath of cool air that might arise during the night. That brisk rhythm paced our breaths and heartbeats during every second we spent at Grandma’s.

A pulley clothesline stretched across the large back yard from Grandma’s third floor kitchen window to an enormous tree. Every morning, Grandma put out peanuts in their shells, caching them neatly in the metal pulley cover. At the same time every day, her “pet” squirrel would scamper across the yard, a clothesline tightrope runner; it would gratefully seek out its daily ration of peanuts, sitting on its haunches on the windowsill, devouring the nuts, as Grandma sat less than two feet away, watching it with a smile. Later in the morning, her “pet” blue jay would also come by for its own stash of peanuts, which it would take, one by one, through the open window, from her hand.

Grandma grew the peanuts in one section of the grassy yard. We were fascinated to watch the peanut life cycle, helping her scratch the seed nuts into the thin, sandy soil, and happily helping to reap the harvest several weeks later, when the legumes had ripened attached to the roots of the plants.

When we stayed over at Grandma’s, we slept on a “Morris chair.” This was a classic piece of turn of the 20th century furniture, a mission style wooden invention with a shiny, hard, slippery leather seat and back cover. A metal bar across the back could be removed from metal brackets, to allow the seat back to lie flat so someone could recline on it as if on a bed. It was hard, with a gap between the seat and the back when it was reclined – a dramatically uncomfortable place to sleep, even for a child.

On summer evenings, Grandma would sit at one open window, rocking in her rocking chair. I would stand and look out the window with her, or sit cross legged on the floor while she told from memory (or made up) Victorian stories of young girls struggling through blizzards and cold winds, responding to some duty, and being lured off the path to their deaths by eerie, disembodied, evil ghosts. There were always morals to these gruesome tales, but I’m afraid I was too terrorized by the brutal ways in which the stories ended to pay attention or remember the cautionary admonitions they were supposed to illustrate.



Although the original gas jets for lights still protruded from the walls in all the rooms, and gas radiators stood before the windows, the apartment had not been modernized. There was no heat, aside from the coal stove that was also the cooking stove in the kitchen. The gas jets had been replaced by a single 20 watt bulb hanging down on a long wire from the middie of the ceilings in the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, dining room and living room. There was no other electricity. Grandma had an ice box on the landing outside the kitchen, and it was always fascinating to watch the debilitated state in which the ice man arrived, red faced and puffing, after hauling a 30 or 40 pound block of ice on his back up the three flights of stairs. Grandma herself slid the large melt tray out from under the ice box daily, and teetered across the kitchen with it sloshing, to dump it into the tub in her bathroom. That was the only use that the tub received, as there was no hot water in the flat. There was a flush toilet, however, a true “throne.” The porcelain base sat on a platform. The seat was made of oak. The porcelain tank was suspended over the toilet, just under the ceiling, with a long pull chain serving as the “flush” mechanism. Grandma had been extremely frugal, and there was no reason to covet “modern” conveniences. She seemed unreflectingly content with things as they had always been, and as they remained until her death in 1957.

Grandma had raised her daughters in this house, a single mother whose husband, an alcoholic, had been banned from the family forever after just a few years of marriage. She remained staunchly single till her death. Her friends were all women – coupled with other women, spinsters, or widows. She visited often with these friends, and often went off on bus tours to various places with one of another of them. If she had a sex life, it was successfully hidden from us children.

Grandma worked in stores as a bookkeeper or accounting clerk. For a while, she was employed at a jewelry store. What I heard was that she turned 60 and was supposed to retire. So she retired, turned back the odometer, as it were – telling the next prospective employer that she was 55. Her last job was working at a department store in the “cage,” the locked wire enclosure in the basement where all payments were shuttled via pneumatic tubes, and change returned pneumatically to the station from which the payments had originated.

As a child, I found it fascinating to arrive early to meet Grandma after work, and then sit outside the cage, gaping up at the clanking network of tubes transporting, disgorging, and resorbing the shuttle containers. Grandma and her colleagues in the cage functioned as a single human cash register for the whole three story department store. These women flew around the cage, retrieving canisters, making instant change, and sending the shuttles back to their place of origin. I wondered how they could keep track of the multiple tubes and where they went, never mind how they could make change so quickly that it seemed like only a second or two. They prided themselves on their unerring arithmetic accuracy, and Grandma was reputed to be the fastest and best of them all.

Grandma walked both ways to and from work, a distance of about two miles. It was hard for me to keep up with her when accompanying her. I had to run to stay abreast of her rapid pace.

I admired Grandma for her willingness to be bold and to do the unexpected. In her closet was a large framed picture of about 100 women at an organization’s meeting around 1900. The women were dressed in long dark dresses, and were wearing dark stockings with high-topped leather shoes, broad brimmed, elaborately trimmed hats and white gloves. Except for Charlie Chaplin, that is. There “he” was, in his bowler hat, his little mustache, his turned out toes, his ill-fitting swallow-tail coat. That was Grandma. At the other end of her life, the last photo we have of her is a lovely studio portrait of Grandma, in her 60s, with her dyed black hair rolled into a bun, wearing a big smile – as she sits on Santa’s lap in the department store where she worked.

I remember lying in bed, watching Grandma get ready for bed, dressed in her modest ankle length nightgown, letting her long hair down and brushing it out precisely 100 times, folding her rimless glasses to put them on the dresser; I wondered how anyone could be so old – what that could possibly feel like. Yet I’m two years older now than she lived to be. That makes me ancient, I guess. But although the birthday number awes me, I – like everyone else – am not conscious of age in my inner life. I just am, timeless. Only my body suffers the effect of accumulating years. My spirit feels young and adventurous, ready for new opportunities to grow and learn.