How do you begin talking about the most wonderful woman you have ever known? The kindest, funniest, hardest working, most loving, genuine woman, period..
…I guess I just start.
My grandmother was an amazing woman. She worked hard for her family when she was a child and continued working hard as she became a woman, wife, & mother. She was born in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles, CA, as a child.
She was the best storyteller! Her animated and energetic personality made the stories just come to life!
She would act out a baseball skit that was so funny. It will be so hard to express how hilarious it was on paper. Remember she was a bigger lady, and over 80 years old.
(She was always proud of herself and loved telling everyone where she shopped when they complimented her clothing or jewelry. It was a little boutique called More To Love, near her home on Stearns Drive.)
But back to her baseball skit…
She would begin the story saying, “Once upon a time I was at a baseball game,” and the performance would begin.
She would bend her knees and squat down, as a pitcher would do to read a sign from his catcher. She would vigorously shake her head from side to side…NO, then NO again, usually the third time, with the squint of her right eye and little nod YES, she would stand up, shaking her tush a bit, and getting in place on the “pitcher’s mound”. She would be acting as if she was chewing a wad of gum, or chew. She would pretend to spit out the side of her mouth a couple of times to give us the impression that the saliva from the gum or chew was building up in her mouth. She would adjust her baseball cap, usually having it end up facing backward on her head, grab her crotch to ‘re-adjust’, wind her arm around a few times and let the ball F L Y…. she would stay in the throwing position for a few seconds, then as the ball passed over Homeplate, for a strike, she would jump up and down in celebration, and walk off the mound, as if she had just struck out the last player of the game, and her team won!
She always made people smile. She wanted everyone around her to feel joy and happiness. She absolutely filled my soul with joy and happiness! She was my favorite human…ever.
As a child, I would go to grandma and grandpa’s house on every occasion I could, Easter break, Christmas break, Passover, Hannukah, Summer break, long weekends, and for no reason at all. I could never get enough time with them…A kind of love I can not explain or ever replicate.
I would go with them to their Senior Citizen Meetings so often that the group made me an honorary member of The Happy Wanderers. I was thrilled. The youngest Happy Wanderer in the group’s history… I loved being with them!
She was telling me on one occasion how when she was a teenager she worked in their family butcher shop and she would always press her finger down on the meat scale, just a little, to increase the weight of the product the customer was purchasing. Her family was struggling, and she figured that the people coming into the butcher shop, buying choice cuts of meat, probably wouldn’t mind paying just a little more for their product, and it would help her family, ever so slightly. She said that she never was proud of that, but that she thought if it was helping her family, she could justify it, somehow.
As a young woman, her friend set my grandma up on a date. They would go as couples, together, on this blind date.
They went to eat and met at the restaurant. My grandma met her date, and her girlfriend introduced her male friend to my grandmother. The dinner started, progressed and ended. No real sparks flying, between my grandma and her date…HOWEVER, their were unspoken sparks between my grandmother and her girlfriend’s date.
Once the double-date ended, my grandmother and this “other” man, met up and spent time together. I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but I do know a few, short weeks later my grandmother and this man left Brooklyn, to get married, secretly. They eloped. They left Brooklyn and crossed over into another town because the newspapers, in that time, would print all of the marriages in the paper for their town… and they could not have that happen. No one could know!
My grandmother cleaned up and got dressed in a gas station bathroom, married my grandfather and they each went home to their separate family homes, like nothing had happened.
What neither of them expected, was that one of my great-grandmother’s friends lived in the town they got married in…and it was printed in her newspaper!
It had been only a few days, and my great-grandmother approached my grandma and said…”You do know that it is unlucky to stay apart from your husband, once you are married…” (Yep great-grandma’s friend called to congratulate her on my grandmother’s marriage… and that is how it all began.
My grandmother and grandfather were married for 60 years. She ALWAYS told me that she wanted to be married for 60 years. She passed away on their 60th wedding anniversary.
My sister and I wrote the eulogy.
That story, to come in a different post.
This is my story. You may have all of it, some of it, or none of it.