I sat at my grandmother Joan’s funeral and heard people speak warmly of their experiences with a woman who had stood for them, who’d championed them in some situation or setting, encouraged them to go for the difficult goals or move past obstacles, and had offered them the staunch, hard-won wisdom of someone who’d been through wars both literal and figurative and lived to tell the tale. The woman they admired was intrepid and stalwart, an Eleanor Roosevelt type, maybe; a pioneer of sorts who’d bravely conquered real adversity in a life on three continents.
Oh shit, I thought. I’m at the wrong funeral again.
When I was growing up granny Joan lived near us, and my family would go to her house for many Sunday dinners, sometimes stopping at the bakery on the way (Eat some bread, kids, it’ll soak up the toxins!). A typical menu might be Carr’s water crackers with guava jelly and cream cheese; gelatinous, undercooked Spanish egg and potato tortilla; and chicken bone soup, a pureed, pressure-cooked experience of water, chicken bones with some trimmings, garlic, onions, salt and pepper. It was the texture of the stuff that backs up out of the Dispose-All when you put too much down the sink all at once. The best thing about it was watching newcomers take their first taste, and then knowing they’d have to take their second.
Born and raised in England at the turn of the 20th century, Joan was sent as a teenager to Spain and La Residencia de Señoritas de Madrid, a cutting edge institution promoting the inclusion and participation of women in science, education and the arts. There, she and my grandfather met and married. My grandfather was her professor.
She raised four boys with the judgment of a royal. When there were still only three brothers, she’d give an orange to the older two (my father was the oldest) and tell them each to give half to her favored son. She was widowed shortly after arriving in the States, left with four teenage sons in a new country.
Along with the countless traditional English and Spanish language girl’s names they had at the ready, and with infinite more options due to something researchers call the “playground effect,” wherein girls are far more likely than boys to be given unique, invented names, my parents decided to give me the only name in the world also belonging to Joan’s hated sister Marjorie. I spent the next forty years outrunning her pinching, bruising fingers.
When I was six my cousin pushed me forehead-first into the corner of a coffee table during a game of chase at our granny Joan’s house. She closed the deep gash in my eyebrow by pulling my head backward by my ponytail over the kitchen sink and pouring boiling, salted butter into it to cauterize the wound. Giving credit where credit is due, it stopped bleeding immediately thanks to the blister.
But the sadism was unreliable, and the batshit was strong. When I was a teenager she insisted on trying a “marijuana cigarette” while she and we cousins were with my father at the Harvard Club. She sat in one of the club chairs reading the paper and commenting on how the cigarette was having no effect, until we noticed that she’d dropped the joint at some point and was toking on nothing between her fingers. And that her chair cushion was on fire. I grabbed a glass of water and poured it onto the seat to extinguish it.
“Really, Marjorie, must you always make a scene?”
Every Christmas she gave me the same set of Pentel pens, and I watched the price rise from 95¢ to $2.95. Every birthday she’d give me an unsigned check for $25. (I lost the pile of checks in a move when I was in my thirties, and I think of them often, like a certain box of pieces of string.) At one point in my teens I ran away from home. I was living couch-to-couch, a few nights even on the street. She sent my cousin to find me with a gift from her: a toaster oven, new in the box. On the box she’d rubber cemented a $5 bill.
She had a heavy, strong collection of furniture, art, and books from her life in England, Spain, and Argentina. Her father had built a massive mahogany armoire that I’d play in as a kid, and which I’d later inherit only because I had the only house with a wall big enough to fit it. The original six-foot crown was long since gone, and the mirror that had once been on the wide center door had broken on the ship’s journey from Spain to Argentina. She’d found “an arborist” who’d perfectly matched the wood on the rest of the gargantuan closet to replace it, and I’d sit in the dark sometimes, playing with the hidden safe inside the right-hand compartment, inhaling the scent of the eucalyptus bunches she had in vases throughout her apartment. In her living room she had an embroidered runner that hung over the mantle. It sat under two large candlesticks. I never paid them much attention, but when I got married she gifted me some hair combs that had been her mother’s that I’d never seen before, one of the candlesticks, and half of the mantle runner. She’d cut it with a pair of scissors.
I tried to kill her once by giving her a jar full of dried lentils, barley, and split peas, topped with a little dried parsley, chicken bullion powder, and a note that read, “Enjoy your soup!” with instructions to add far too little water to the mix. I’d read an article that the elderly were dying of unfortunate undercooked bean and legume side effects. It seemed worth a shot. Months later when I dutifully took my toddler sons to visit her I saw her snacking out of a small bowl beside her chair. I realized what it was just as she said in full British disdain, “Marjorie, this potpourri you gave me is terrible.” She’d added no water. You don’t eat potpourri. That wasn’t potpourri anyway.
In her thoughtful Substack piece When Does a Person Become a Character, The Moon’s Wife asks:“I don’t know if it’s right to flatten out someone’s memory. I think we’re kept alive by stories, but at a certain point we can be killed by them. At what point does someone stop being remembered as a person and start being a one-dimensional character in a story?”
There are people who, even while living, are more a collection of events than a complete person to others. Whatever her internal life, I doubt anyone knew my grandmother fully. And we already know she couldn’t be killed.
She died in her nineties with nearly a century of personas and adventures following behind her. There are more stories to tell, because whoever she was, she was, most of all, a character.
Morning Teaistisms
Trigger warning to all my friends in the UK (and Scotland, because it’s Tuesday and I have no idea where things stand with you people on that front), the Isle of Mann, the Channel Islands, and the Republic of Southern Ireland: in the following paragraphs tea will be heated in a microwave.
I like lots of things about English Breakfast tea. Foremost I like the flavor. It’s rich and smoky, but not too smoky which means I can drink a lot of it without getting sick of it, or getting a headache, which both “smoky” and caffeine can do to me.
I like that there are a lot of brands of it, that it’s easily found in most hotels and airports, on planes and in friends’ kitchen cabinets, and that, for the most part, they’re all good enough, even if not great. It’s hard to find a truly terrible English breakfast tea.
I like that it’s available in both regular and decaf packages, because my pesky migraine disease sometimes forbids more than one cup of anything caffeinated without meting out harsh punishment, and so I can satisfy my tea itch without resorting to flowers and bark for the rest of the day. Even on days I’ll have more than one caffeinated cup of anything I usually make a pot of decaf English breakfast and heat up a quick cup throughout the day and as late as I want before bed.
I like that English Breakfast tea is as good with milk and sugar as without.
I like the irony of its name. In the cultural appropriation game it’s hard to beat The Empire, but English breakfast tea, made up of teas from India, Sri Lanka, China and Africa, was developed in the mid-to-late 1800s in the United States. Or maybe Scotland. And then either a tea merchant in 1843 named Richard Davies marketed it to people in the States as “English breakfast tea,” or Queen Victoria declared the 1892 invention of Scottish tea merchant Robert Drysdale as “English breakfast tea” while staying at her little country place in Balmoral.
Certainly nobody was calling it “Assam breakfast tea” or “Sri Lankan Breakfast tea” or anything in any way giving credit to the origins of the tea, so it kind of makes me happy that it’s most likely some New Yorker’s grift that then prompted the Queen to proclaim, “No, we declare this the authentic English breakfast tea ye heathenous American swine - now somebody go get my cousin-husband. Oh, and that Scotsman. This is good shit.”
What English breakfast tea did as a trend was replace ale as the popular morning drink with one’s starter meal of fried and boiled meats. Ale was great for avoiding cholera, but the popularity of tea with breakfast probably spared our species once the industrial revolution arrived, as heading off to the factory with a belly full of ale and only enough fatty meat to get you through til dinner just couldn’t have gone well for us.
This is such a wonderful, meaningful piece of writing!!! I love this line: "There are more stories to tell, because whoever she was, she was, most of all, a character."
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE EVEN