What I Learned about God and Life from My Grandmother’s Boobs
I learned more about God, life and wisdom from my grandmother’s boobs than I did from Sunday School.
At the age of 10 I looked at my grandmother who was at least 60 if not more and thought “she is old”.
When I looked at her I saw a mass of wrinkled ideas shaped by a mix of religion and superstition.
It was from her that I learned to turn my shoes upside down at night so I wouldn’t get leg cramps and to never put so much as a piece of paper on top of a bible because God would be mad. And Gram seemed to know all about God.
I didn’t argue. If God was anything like my grandmother I didn’t want to take a chance on divine wrath.
At 5 foot tall and fully 99 pounds Gram was the undisputed general of the troops under her roof.
She seldom had to raise her voice, though, because she had earned the respect of family and friends everywhere with a generous heart that served the poor, fed the hungry and cared for the sick.
Uninterested in fashion, Gram never did like the idea of wearing a bra.
Her breasts were corralled by a sleeveless white t-shirt beneath her cotton print house dress covered by an apron with important paraphenalia pouring out of deep pockets.
Her feet were shod with black shoes with low clunky heels and laces that thred through many eyelets to hold them like army boots on her tiny feet.
Her short cropped grey hair framed a face that needed ironing. It was as if the God-given twinkle in her eyes had spread over her entire body like a firework display.
My earliest memory of my grandmother’s breasts was when we changed to go swimming at her camp.
I was perhaps 6 at the time and totally mesmorized by these long wrinkled sagging parts of her anatomy.
Not at all the perky round breasts I had seen on my mother, but then my mother wasn’t yet old. This would be my first major distiction between young and old, at least for women.
One day when I was perhaps eighteen, my sister and I went to visit Gram at home following a double mastectomy for breast cancer.
She was the first person in my life to have such a serious illness and the spectre of death rattled my bones. She also was the first person to teach me about the fun in ‘OLD.’
My grandfather had died a few years earlier. I hadn’t been close to him, and I filed his death as the inevitable conclusion of old age.
My grandmother was also in the category of ‘the elderly’, at least in my life at that time, and I only knew I didn’t want to lose her.
Would she get sick, go to a hospital and disappear like my grandfather? Are there no points in between being productive like my parents and being dead a few years later?
I arrived with my sister at her house a few days after her surgery.
Silence filled the car as we drove over the bridge to her house. We didn’t dare talk because we both knew that cancer was a killer disease and we were scared.
What do you say to someone who is OLD and has had a double mastectomy.
I could see her feet moving towards the grave and I needed to hold my fears and feelings in check, lest my thoughts become reality.
How do you handle that kind of power?
Pulling a chair up along side Gram I glanced at the bookcase with the glass doors that slid up like gargae doors on each shelf.
It was here, sitting on the floor as a little kid that I read the book titled “How to build Your Own House for $3000”, complete with house plans and material lists.
I started to smile as I remembered the plans I had made to take this book and create my first home.
Gram can’t die now! I haven’t read all the other books in this bookcase!
I remember just staring at her flat chest, horrible scenarios of what was to come crowding into my mind. How would I handle her decline and what am I supposed to say?
My mind wandered until the sounds of conversation snapped me back to Gram’s sitting room with the tall victorian windows covered with sheer curtains that filtered the late afternoon light.
How long had we been here? Where would this lead? It is time to go before I start seeing Gram sitting in a corner babbling as the sun sets on her life.
“Well, what do you think?” asked Gram as she looked proudly at her flat chest. “Do you think I can still get me a man?”
Her eyes twinkled as every wrinkle in her face stretched into a broad smile.
Did she just say what I think she said?
Here is my religious, hard-working, OLD grandmother and she is talking about finding a date?!!
Do old people date?
Do they have sex?
Do they have any fun at all?
Suddenly I had a new idea to file under under OLD. The idea of FUN. Maybe growing old isn’t as bad as I thought.
And with that I sat back in the wooden rocker where I had been perched precariously on the edge of the seat and listened to stories from Gram about the uselessness of breasts once all seven of her children were weaned.
No wonder they looked empty.!
“Boobs are such a bother! Always in the way. I’d give them up for an extra arm any day.”
I chuckled at the image of an Octopus grandmother’.
“That isn’t going to be very attractive to a man!”
“No, but very handy, if you know what I mean”
I didn’t, really, but I laughed anyway.
I developed my definition for what was old from observing my tiny world. Mothers were always in their 40’s. Grandparents were in their 60’s and almost no one lived much beyond 70.
OLD defined those years before death.
OLD was a foreign land that I did not have a passport for because I was still exploring the landscape of adolsecence.
I depended on the travelors in the land of OLD to teach me, and the one who did the clearest job of that was my grandmother.
So here I sat, laughing along with my sister at Gram’s stories of life without boobs and took mental notes of a discussion of how to arrange coleus and cactus in a single display for some future day when my green thumb would come of age.
I leaned back and absorbed the aroma of yeast bread baking in the kitchen. I would have to rethink this whole boob thing, as well as my ideas of life, death and God.
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