Walking across 16th Street this perfect fall afternoon, I noticed an elderly couple in the front seat of a wide, gray Lincoln parked at the light. The woman, small and fragile in that unmistakably grandmother way, with her white hair done in that characteristically beauty parlor perm, with the big black sunglasses wrapped around her regular glasses, dressed still in what seemed to be church attire, being driven south, for whatever reason, down 16th street this Sunday afternoon. Her husband, driving, in his white Members Only jacket, that seems clearly to me a thing of the mid 1990s, his hair thinning and jaw slightly open, giving him a look of confusion or boredom. But the woman was the one that fascinated me.
Old woman. Old grandmother.
She reminded me of my late grandmother, “Nana” to us. Whose patience and love were oceanic and eternal. Her little mannerisms, her expressions, her fragility and the lightness of her when you pressed up against her to “give her some love,” the bones that seemed like a bird’s, weightless and airy. The way she dressed, in that prim, controlled, proper style. Her biweekly trips to the beauty parlor to get her perm. The big gray Lincoln she drove, that battleship of a car that would cross lanes with a slow, wide drift. The car everyone of her generation seemed to drive.
And I thought: these people. These grandmothers of ours. They are going away, their lightness and beauty and love blown away like these dry, colorful leaves. The women who dressed like that, who were raised like that, who talked in that way in that time that was the 1930s in South Carolina. Or Anywhere, America. The little pleasures of her life, the candy of her childhood, the firm discipline of her mothering, the warm drawling love of her grandmotherhood. Her church dinners and county fairs and school dances. Her courtship and her marriage, her living and her loving.
And her dying. That unexpected last journey we all take. Death is the unexpected trip. It leaves behind human things: the dirty dishes in the sink, the food in the fridge, the clothes needing a wash. The gas tank of the car in the “carport” (a term I’ve only heard used by Nana and Grandad) still there registering some level of empty. The rolls of paper towel in the closet that will never be used. The towels she cleaned but never would dirty. Like she walked away from everything, took a trip. And never came home.
And the leaves of their lives are blowing away, this whole generation. Whose hands soldered bolts onto battleships and repaired the aircraft and built the guns when the whole world had gone wild with war. People whose childhoods were formed in the Great Depression, who heard Roosevelt’s fireside chats, who fought and won the war and thrived in the idyllic golden years of the 1950s, with their Ford motorcars and automatic washers and driers and mixers, all made wondrous and magical with electricity at prices they could afford. Then their hesitation and fear during the 60s, the protests and sex and race riots and drugs that turned everything they knew was sacred on its head.
These ones are fading fast and there are few women of my Nana’s generation left. Their places will be filled by those who grew up during or after the war. They will dress differently, talk differently, act differently. The Baby Boomers, my parents, will become the new grandparents. Even these Columbia Heights hipsters, with their tight jeans, asymmetric haircuts and elaborate tattoos will become grandmothers to generations yet unborn.
And we will all be blown along, floating in the air, dry and beautiful and fragile, until we at last also find our resting spot amid those who arrived before.
