Re: visiting Mum-Mum

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother lately. She had a debilitating stroke more than a decade ago and has hung on past her 90th birthday, which we all marked from a distance a few months ago. I recently spoke with my aunt, who is her primary caregiver, and it got me thinking about this tribute that I wrote on my grandmother’s 88th birthday, in August of 2018. Very few of us have visited her enough over the years, and it sadly seems increasingly likely that none of us will be able to visit her again…

Now, just as then, I don’t get there enough.

Today is Virginia’s 88th birthday. Virginia is my grandmother. My mom’s mom. My Mum-Mum. I’m far from alone in being able to call her that, of course, so the ‘my’ is every bit as appropriate-in-that-way-where-you-almost-enunciate-the-italics-to-claim-someone-who-is-special-to-you-as-your-own as it is hilariously incomplete. Virginia has seven children and *19* of us who have known her as Mum-Mum, and that’s just counting blood relatives. Nineteen grandkids. Her first is 42 years old now, the youngest just 20.

Every summer when I was a kid, my parents would load the three, and then the four of us once Tom came along, into the blue Ford Escort, or the silver Mercury Sable, or the blue again Dodge Caravan, and we’d make the 90-some-minute drive from New Tripoli down to Aston, PA. My memories of those drives all blur together now, sepia-toned smudges from Reagan’s ’80s, blurred and bending in on themselves like sun-touched Polaroids: Listening to the Beach Boys on my Walkman in the Sable; my mother folding and unfolding maps made of actual paper lined with red highway arteries and black side road veins; my chin propped against my arm propped against the window as the countryside became the highway became the suburbs became Mum-Mum’s driveway.

Each of those summers, we’d make that one trip, and each time we’d stay for two entire weeks. Where we slept and whether we brushed our teeth and even what we ate was incidental to the frenzy of activity into which we catapulted ourselves as soon as we walked in the door, like we had been holding it in all year knowing that the right time would arrive precisely at the same moment WE did in Aston. The house, the same one where our mom and aunts and uncles had grown up, was a trove of possibilities for us. A movie room and a pool table and a sandbox and an inground pool with a SLIDE and a basketball hoop and a shuffleboard court and a picnic area and a neighborhood calm enough that we could run right out into the street and ride bikes and scooters and play football. If you couldn’t find something to do at Mum-Mum’s house, you weren’t looking.

All the while, my grandmother herself was a steady, calm, welcoming presence, one who presided over everything we did there while maintaining a distance that was somehow simultaneously reassuring and freeing. It was like she was the conscience of the property. We’d talk, of course, but when you’re a kid you’re looking for the next cool thing to do or game to play, so after she hugged us and asked how school was going for us it was AAAAA LET’S GO CRAZY AAAAAAA. For the most part during those stays, the adults would do their thing, and the kids would do ours. Mum-Mum let us have our space while she was sharing hers. Looking back now I realize with more than a little regret that I thought of her in those days more as a *concept* than a living and breathing person with feelings and goals and responsibilities. I remember being 5 or 6 and thinking it was weird that she had a job, for example. It was HER house and SHE was there smiling and talking, but coupled with the dense and complex air formed by the mingling of the memories and mysteries and adventure and imagination her home held for us, Mum-Mum was to me (all too often, it feels now) an actual woman only in the abstract. I think that’s why now one of my favorite memories from those visits doesn’t come from the basketball court or the pool or a McDonald’s sundae run. It is simply of hearing her up late one night watching TV in her living room, talking back to the local news. Like a PERSON.

We spent two weeks there every year, and then the next fifty looking forward to doing it again, until we all grew up and suddenly there was no again, and we wanted it back. When you’re a kid you don’t have the foresight to understand how much you’ll miss the things later that you’re taking for granted now, and by the time you’re old enough to finally grasp it most of what had been before you is now BEFORE. I spent my childhood ducking the affection of older loved ones, and I’ve spent my adulthood just hoping they understood the feeling was mutual.

Nineteen grandkids. Years ago I was able to rattle our names off in chronological order, like I was listing the planets in the solar system, but that was before a lot of my cousins were even born. Just now here I sat and wrote all of our names down, and in the process realized that I can’t remember the last time I saw most of them. I don’t know what their lives are like, or in most cases where they live, their kids’ names or whether they even *have* kids. But it’s not sad. It’s not. It’s nothing to regret or resent, much less something to make any attempt to alter, not now. It’s just life. If things change gradually enough, it feels like nothing is changing, and eventually it’s like the change never began at all.

But Mum-Mum, we have in common. Mum-Mum is our shared star. For two weeks every summer decades ago, my orbit took me closer to her, and I think of those days often, even as the expansion of life has pulled us all inexorably apart. She has always been there, warm and supportive and abiding, and regardless of how well or poorly I may know them and no matter how well any of the 19 of us may know HER as a person I think I can safely speak on behalf of the rest of her grandchildren when I say that in ways astronomic and microscopic there has always been a part of each of us that has been sustained by the very fact of her presence.

Happy birthday, Mum-Mum. There are a lot of us out here, and we love you.