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GrandmaNovember 13, 2009 Another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem, in memory of my paternal grandmother, Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis Little. She was born on November 13, 1895. Grandma had a stroke less than two months after I returned from England at the end of November 1975. She died ten days later. It was February 1976. I was twenty-five. At her funeral, at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Newton Lower Falls, which she rarely attended but of which her brother Roger had once been pastor, the minister said that Family had been important to her. At the time I heard the capital "F" so clearly that today I have no idea whether the minister's intonation underscored the word; could he actually have said, "Family with a capital 'F'?" Probably not, but however he said it, I knew what he meant. To Grandma, Family was what located you in time, and in history. Small "f" family -- emotional connection and commitment -- came in a distant second. Both my grandmothers belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Grandmummie also belonged to the Daughters of the Confederacy and the National Society of Colonial Dames, Grandma to the Mayflower Descendants. During my first forays into American history, I took the "founding fathers" for my literal ancestors, and not without reason, because many of their names were literally familiar. So were many of the iconic places: Concord, Lexington, Bunker Hill, Old North Church, and the rest. American history was the history of New England, the history of my Family. Only gradually, as I moved into adulthood, did I learn that not all Americans saw it the same way. After a while, neither did I. But estrangement was overlaid on an assumption of belonging that I drew from both my grandmothers. Especially Grandma. Not surprisingly, I've never felt impelled to trace my family tree: on both sides it had already been done. I might not know exactly who and where I'd come from, but someone did, and that was enough for me. The legacy that has fascinated and obsessed me all these years is one of attitudes and assumptions, not family names. When advertisers tout their soups, pies, or cookies as "the kind grandmother used to make," they aren't talking about my Grandma. When we went to Grandma's for Sunday or holiday dinner -- as we often did, because she lived just a mile away and my father, brother Roger, and I often walked through the woods to get there while my mother drove the younger kids, John and Ellen, in the family station wagon -- Grandma presided, serving food that had been expertly prepared by Jessie. Jessie had pretty much raised my father and his two brothers; by the time we came along, she came in to cook, clean, do laundry, and generally keep the big house in order. At these family gatherings, we kids were drawn like hungry magnets to the spacious country kitchen, but it was Jessie we wanted to see, Jessie who'd sometimes let us help out or lick a spoon or eggbeater. On rare occasions her husband, Frank, would be sitting at the kitchen table. Frank was a sailor, so he was away a lot. He was the only man I knew with tattoos. Grandma was classic New England gentry. Emotionally she was reserved to the point of distant, and many times when my siblings, first cousins, and I got to playing too boisterously, she'd intervene with a "Hai hai hai!" to keep things from escalating out of control. This was rarely a real danger, but to her raised voices signaled danger and she considered it prudent to mute the volume before things blew up. When people ask whether I was close to her, or who was I closest to in my family, I hesitate before answering. "No one in my family was close to anyone," I say, each time in slightly different words, "not really, not in the way I've come to understand 'close' -- but I was closer to Grandma than to anyone else." From Grandma I drew the two great passions of my childhood, horses and the Middle East. By the time I was born, Grandma no longer had horses. My understanding is that the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression had adversely affected family fortunes enough that whatever horses she had at the time had to be sold. The small barn behind the garage on her property was used to store rarely used tools and equipment; it was musty, dusty, and neglected, and though it intrigued me, I didn't often play there. I don't recall how my horse craziness began, but I do know that Grandma, having raised three sons who had no equine interests whatsoever, encouraged it. She drove me to lessons. When at last I had a horse of my own, she was the one who filled in when I had rehearsals or other activities after school. She cleaned my mare's stall and took her out trail riding. Decades later, after I'd returned to horses, I realized that Grandma was at least seventy when she was doing all this. Today, at fifty-eight, I assume that I will be capable of riding horseback and mucking stalls when I'm seventy. Grandma was active in the International Institute, which assisted foreign students in the Boston-Cambridge area. Over the years she befriended several, who became regular guests at the Sunday dinner table. I remember Vivian from Kenya, Yung from South Korea, Jamshed from Iran . . . and especially how seriously they took the questions and comments of an American teenager who had hardly been out of New England. How Grandma became particularly interested in the Arab world I don't know, but she traveled to Egypt and Jordan more than once -- I still have the beautiful embroidered purple dress she brought me from Jordan in 1964, though several accessories have long since gone missing: a hattah, an agal, a couple of kuffiyahs, and two gossamer women's head coverings, one white, one pink, each with a row of jangly coins across the brow. Grandma was unabashedly anti-Semitic and regularly made disparaging remarks about Jews as well as Israel. Did her interest in the Arab world stem from her anti-Semitism, or was it the other way around? I don't know, but each exacerbated the other. Her anti-Semitism embarrassed me then and still does, a little, but I throw it into the balance with other things about her -- that young men of color were welcome at her dinner table, and that the first copy of Akwesasne Notes that I ever saw was on her hall table, underneath the great mirror that reflected the antique grandfather clock across the hall. From her I had my first inkling that the Indians had not been completely erased by Anglo history, and that she, Mayflower Descendant and Daughter of the American Revolution, believed that injustice had been done. My grandmother graduated from a private girls' high school -- the same one I attended more than fifty years later -- and then went to Massachusetts Agricultural College, one of the rare women to do so. For a while she worked on a dairy farm in Vermont. After she died, I moved into her house to look after it and her golden Lab, Max. I was at loose ends, seriously depressed, unable to get on with my life because I had no idea how to go about it and no one around me did either. I played endless games of solitaire, walked in the woods with Max, and read letters Grandma had written as a young woman. She was not, I gathered, excited about getting married, or about marrying George Sturgis, but she felt it was her family obligation. She wasn't especially suited to wife- and motherhood; she loved gardening, and dogs and horses, and being outdoors. She would have been happier if she'd been able to stay on that Vermont farm. Living in her house I finally managed to gather my forces and launch myself into adulthood. In May 1977, a month before my twenty-sixth birthday, I returned to Washington, D.C., immersed myself in the women's community, and after a while came out. I joked for years that Grandma had been somewhat disappointed when I displayed no interest in coming out as a debutante; what would she have thought when I came out as a lesbian? I doubt it would have surprised her. I even think she would have approved. Grandma believed that in each generation one person keeps the family legacy alive and passes it on to the next. She passed the torch to my father, and my father passed it to me. I don't see myself as transmitting a legacy, exactly, but I do see myself as the inheritor of certain family questions whose answers have to be worked out again and again. My paternal grandmother bequeathed me several of her passions -- gardening, however, was not one of them -- and I have carried them through decades that she never saw, feeling them tested, reshaped, and transformed with every passing year. For me as for her, Family begins with a capital "F." I was never interested in creating the small "f" kind, and because times had changed I wasn't duty-bound to try.
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