My friend uses a clever term of endearment when he speaks of the older folks in his life. He calls them the “elderlies,” as in: “We’re going to drive over and take the elderlies out for lunch and pie.”
He is in his 70s and his lunching companions, the elderlies, in their 90s. The very lucky among us have elderlies in our lives. My own grandma is 93 and sitting in the morning light in Sunnyvale, way out in California, watching the small blue lizard run along the handrail in the backyard, watching the young black squirrel, watching the lemons that look ready but are not.
Her father, my great-grandfather, was called Vovo by all us kids. He was born in the Azore Islands and raised in Northern California. Visitor candy was on the coffee table in a pink carnival-glass bowl. He kept cookies and candy bars and Juicy Fruit gum sealed up in twist-tie bags and ferreted away in drawers.
He bought root beer in brown bottles and lined them up in his icebox, so when we pulled the door open, the bottles clinked together.
His pancakes were never round; they were animals, or swirls, or stars — and when we were too young to know all our words, he helped us name the shapes.
When his wife, my great-grandmother, died, it was dark and sudden. At the funeral, Vovo was not stoic; he moaned and sobbed. His pain was palpable. But, in the midst of his crying out, I saw him eyeing the flowers family members were sorting through and culling. He unfolded from a deep stoop of grief, pointed his shaking finger and said: “Keep those and those. I can make cuttings and plant them; they’ll grow again.” Then he curled back into his loss. Some lesson took hold in me then, though it was years before I could name it.
Vovo went home alone, and poked about for months until, out of necessity, he shaped a rhythm for himself. He listened to his radio, stirred heaps of sugar into his coffee, checked his hydrangeas and tomatoes, sat in his olive green chair to say his rosary, every day, without fail.
And then, in his early 90s, after a lifetime of praying, he put his rosary away, cold turkey. He plopped the black beads, literally worn down and shiny from years of rolling them between the pads of his fingers, into an old, amber colored ashtray from a casino in Reno. He refused to pick it up again.
This was a man of sound mind, sharp as a tack, smart as a whip. And, he was very practical. He told his daughter he was mad at God for making him live so long — he figured it was his time to move on. This spat with God may have been ongoing, or a depending-on-his-mood kind of battle. I know not. He died at 94.
Which brings me to my grandmother, his daughter, who is now 93. I know she is tired. I hear it in her voice. And, I know her deep belief in God leaves her fearless about what journey is to come.
I have never been her equal. This is a great gift; it is something all children should have, long into their adult years. She attends to me, she checks on me, monitors my progress and wishes and moods. Even though I have tried, she will not allow me to do the same for her, not in the same way. With me, she is the grown-up.
So I have some childish insistences to make. The lesson I learned the day Vovo saved the flowers had to do with continuation and survival. He was a practical man.
You, too, are a practical woman. You teach us daily about continuation and survival — and humor, patience, gentleness and feistiness. You bind us together — the sticky glue, the mending thread, the duct tape. You’re still at the hub for us. We are glad for it.
I don’t know if you’re mad at God. Surely he can take it if you are — we both know that. But I am lucky to still have you here. I don’t want you to feel you’ve survived too long.
I’m coming soon to take you for lunch and pie. I’m bringing the boys with me. We love your continuation. We love you.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
