It doesn't matter where I am walking or what I am walking upon. It can be gravel, dirt, grass, pavement, asphalt or glass. It doesn't matter what shoes I am wearing. They can be knee-high boots, tennis shoes, high heels. Nearly every time at some point on a walk, along the way I realize I have a pebble in one or both of my shoes. And I walk a lot, when free some days wandering up to ten miles. Everywhere I've ever lived I've walked all over the area, exploring. I just don't know how the pebble happens. My second husband, Chris, used to despair of it. "How can you get a rock in your shoe when you're wearing boots? How can you get a rock in your shoe when we're walking down the street in Manhattan? I never get a rock in my shoe!" He'd say one of these statements regularly as regularly we would walk somewhere and nine times out of ten there would suddenly be a pebble in my shoe. This morning I was walking to campus and lo and behold, half way there I felt a pebble in my shoe. It's one of those strange mysteries in life. I see it at this point as a metaphor or a sign or a symbol of my life, though I haven't exactly pinpointed of what it is symbolic or metaphoric. I find contemplation of the possibilities pleasant. Perhaps it is a reminder of something that I've forgotten and can't quite pull to consciousness. Perhaps it is a symbol of struggle, as I have experienced a lot of that. Perhaps it is to remind me to stay down to earth, grounded so to speak. Perhaps it is a symbol of constance, that no matter what happens in my life I have this thing I can depend upon.
This morning it reminded me of how, in contrast, I never remember my grandmother ever stopping to shake out a shoe. I don't think I therefore inherited this odd characteristic from her. Though I hope and pray that I inherited other of her characteristics as she was the most wonderful woman in my life. She was the daughter of the chemical engineer, the scientist I have written about earlier. Her proper name was Natalie Freeman and she was born in Noank, Connecticut in 1901 of a very old, distinguished family. Her family tree is a scroll that when one end is held up high in the air, it rolls down to the floor, eighty-four unbroken generations, going first back to Plymouth, then to Merry Old England, then to France with the first Plantagenet, back back until the Icelandic Eddas confirm her ancestral names in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. But she was more than a line of DNA. She was lovely from the beginning, poised, sophisticated, witty, urbane, the essence of the Old Money flapper.
Her father, Nat Freeman, had married the daughter of a senator from Michigan. Her name was Bessie Walker. After their children had been born, Nat moved them all to Boulder, Colorado where he had interests in the chemistry of mining. One of my grandmother's sisters contracted what was called then "consumption" and the family doctor said it was wise to move her to a temperate climate. There was argument between Nat and Bessie if this were really a good idea. Bessie won it and moved them all to San Diego, California to take up residence in a wonderful old hotel called the Ulysses S. Grant. I called the hotel a few years ago and they assured me that it had been recently remodeled to reflect the glamour of that abundant period. My great-grandfather Nat spent most of his time back in Colorado and then extensively in London, particularly when the little girl died anyhow. Bessie and the children didn't mind, enjoying life in the hotel, where the children all grew up to adulthood. They reached majority smack dab in the middle of the 1920's and took to a life of high rolling with the best of them. All of her stories were of antics and none of them had the slightest degree of strife. Things like how she and one of her sisters would sneak into their brother's room and carefully turn all his dresser drawers upside down, holding the clothes as they slid the drawers back in so that when he came back and opened a drawer, everything would fall out. It was a life of laughter, dancing and delightful easy free-spirited fun. All the flappers had nicknames and my grandmother's was Peppie and her sisters were Dot, Dye, Speed and Baby, to name a few. They played music, my grandmother several stringed instruments like her mother They dated inappropriately, drank martinis like they were going out of style, went to dinner parties where the invitations were carefully planned for the perfect balance of personalities, boys and girls and occupations, including always one good-tempered alcoholic priest. Banter was the conversational norm with serious subjects like politics and investment a tolerated second.
Then the Crash of 1929 happened and my great-grandfather came to San Diego to break the very bad news. Most of the capital was gone, only a little left that he would change into real estate in the form of part ownership in factories in Belgium that a couple of decades later would be confiscated by the Fascists. For me, a perfect portrait of what their perspectives were like was that day he arrived to tell them their lives were changed forever and the reaction his daughter Baby had over the news. Baby decided then and there to help the financial wound by going down to the restaurant where she had received room service her entire life and ask for a job. In those days there was still very clear class consciousness so that the maitre d' was astonished to hear her request but with great embarrassment and awkwardness, knowing what was happening, granted it. Unfortunately, she was fired the same day and as the story goes, the reason given was, "She couldn't even cut pie." From her photograph at that time that I cherish, she doesn't look at all like she could cut pie and doesn't seem to need the knowledge. She's still called Baby though she's past her nineties.
My grandmother married a sailor on a lark, an event that was quietly remedied. Then she married another one, a sailor who then became a merchant marine and that one held. He was my grandfather Paddy O'Reilly. At Thanksgiving when she was ninety-seven years old, I happened to be sitting by her as the table was cleared. Everyone else had left the room. She turned to me and asked, "Do you remember your grandfather?" Of course! I said. "Well," she said quietly, "I married him but he was just a pretty face." The pretty face knew he probably wasn't going to be able to keep her, especially going off for weeks to months at a time at sea. So each time he came back he brought her furniture from the Far East until her whole house was attired. She left me her dining room set, which I adore, particularly because most of my memories are sitting at that table with her. She took up delivering the mail from one town to another in her Cadillac. My mother remembered how she loved to speed down the road, the back seat of the Cadillac filled with bags of cash being mailed for pay to service men, with at least one child in the front seat with her, flying along a particular road next to a parallel rushing train with her goal to pass it and cross the tracks before being crushed. Great fun.
One time Paddy arrived home from China, bringing with him two silk upholstered chairs, which were unloaded in crates on the pavement in front of their house. They sat there a little while as she decided how to place them in the house. My mother and one of her brothers, Ollie, were playing in the garden next to the house. My mother was six and Ollie was nine. They had a jar and were catching spiders. Ollie saw a small spider, cupped his hand around it and was dropping it into the jar when it stung him. He got it into the jar and closed the lid before he went into convulsions. My mother ran to the house and the ambulance arrived within a few minutes. But by the time it got there he was already dead. They raced him to the hospital where his chest was cracked open. The spider's venom had made his heart beat so hard and fast that it had ripped into shreds. Luckily, they had the spider who had done this. The local experts were baffled saying that this particular spider only lived in China. It must have caught a ride to California in one of the upholstered chairs my grandfather had brought to Peppie. Imagine. When she was ninety-eight, I asked her what the most difficult thing was that had happened to her in her life. I said she had lost her fortune, her parents, her spouse, one of her children. She had lived through two world wars. Without hesitation she said it was losing her child. No question. She said they're right when they say that's the worst that can happen.
But she didn't hold it against Chinese furniture. She adored everything Chinese, in fact, and spent much of her time in Chinatown when the family moved to San Francisco. She had a favorite bakery on Grant Street where we would go, she and my mother and me, taking a seat at the back table to dine on almond cookies and cups of tea. She made her own dresses and typically of the same pattern, just over the knee skirt with a dropped waist and a straight bodice, with or without the little jacket depending upon how much material she had. And the material was usually Chinese silk. When she got very old, after my grandfather had died, she could no longer zip her dress up all the way by herself. So she would walk around her home with a half-zipped dress, the lace at the top of her lovely slip showing. Her stockings were of the sheerest with garters, her shoes pumps with six-inch heels. By her 80's when she walked her ankles would tremble. This terrified my second husband, Chris, who invariably held his hands out oddly as if at any moment he would have to catch her falling. But she said if she wore flats she felt like she was falling backwards and finally a doctor she happened to go to confirmed it. He said her hamstrings had atrophied, that the "natural" position of her foot had actually become perfect for the six-inch heel.
She always dyed her hair black and rolled up the long parts of it in circles at the back of her neck and pinned them criss-cross with hairpins. The front she'd iron on an ironing board in the classic Marcel look of the 1920's. She only made me promise one thing to her in all the years I knew her, that I would always dye my hair. She said when a woman's hair went grey or white, when sitting in company, her part of the conversation would be ignored. It was not that people intended to ignore an older woman or be mean; she thought it was simply something automatic, generated from the primal lobe, that once a woman was past child-rearing age, she no longer had reason to exist and therefore became invisible. She said apparently this was given away by the color of her hair or lack of. So I promised her and I intend to always keep that promise, not because I think anyone would ignore what I have to say but because it links me back to her, something we share.
When I was a teenager I was a hippie, clad in patched bell-bottoms, covered in peace signs. She took me to a finishing school in the city and enrolled me but I refused to go. Then she hired the head of the school to come to our house and I was required to learn to hold a cup of tea on a saucer without spilling it, to walk as if gliding on air, this sort of thing. I hated it. I wish I hadn't. I did retain, however, the good practice of the nicely penned thank you note. That has done me well many times in my life. I wish I shared other things like that with her as I still wander around in ill-fitting jeans and pebbles in my practical shoes. She was so beautiful, so poised, so old-worldly in the most relaxed way you never see anymore. It was natural for her to dress for dinner and she was just comfortable like that, surrounded by perfume bottles and objets d'art. When she was turning ninety-five and I was thinking of a birthday present, I realized that no doubt since my grandfather had died so many years before, no one including me had ever given her a lady's present. We always gave her Chinese ornamental things. So I bought her an ivory silk Christian Dior slip at Sacks and had them wrap it beautifully in a huge box with plenty of white tissue. We had a gathering of family for her birthday and she was loaded down with gifts. But when she opened mine, she lifted the layers of tissue with delicate fingers slowly and then caught her breath when she saw the slip. Her eyes were teary when she thanked me. I was so glad I had had a brief moment of consciousness in thinking of doing that.
When she was ninety-six she performed her violin at some gala. Later, mixing with the crowd, she left her violin sitting by her chair. Someone stole it. Two weeks later I visited her. I was still furious over it. She asked what the matter was. I replied that I was still furious that some low-life had stolen a ninety-six year-old woman's violin that she had had her whole life and had been given to her by her mother who also played. She said oh, that she had just forgotten about the theft. How could you forget about it! I exclaimed. Then I saw her slight smile, the one where she knew she knew something I did not. I suddenly realized that she must have a philosophy. She really didn't seem like the type of woman who would have a philosophy but there it was. I asked her. She said she did. She said it was that if something bad happened and there was something that you could do about it, no matter how difficult that action was, no matter if it took courage or great effort, you had to do it. And she had lived through WWII, remembering the French Underground. She was referring to that kind of level of difficulty, even if it came to something like that. But, she said, if something bad happens and there is nothing you can do about it, let it go. Just like that. I knew the moment she explained it to me that it was a great, sensible, wise philosophy but it took me years to be able to adopt the practice, inside and out, myself. I have adopted it now. Many of the stories I tell you in this blog I would not be able to put into perspective if she had not given me this wisdom. It does work. It creates a happy life in spite of toils and tragedies, pain, confusion and fear. It reminds me of the Existentialists' position, which is apropos considering the years she lived.
When she was ninety-eight my aunts thought she should see a doctor for a check-up. They took her to one of their doctors since she had none of her own. The doctor asked her when the last time was that she had had a check-up. She said never. He asked then when the last time was that she had seen a doctor for a medical problem. Never, she said. She had never been sick once in her life. He said but don't you have children? I had five, she said, all at home, no complications had occurred in their births. He examined her, tested her. When it was done, he came out to talk to her and my aunts. He said that her heart was strong, her lungs were clear, she could see and hear and had no sign of senility. He said she will probably live to be 120 years old. My aunts report that she looked at him with surprise and said she hadn't even realized until that moment that she would soon be one hundred years old. She looked perturbed and said that it wasn't ladylike to be one hundred years old. A few days later she took her usual beauty sleep nap in the afternoon. She didn't wake up, just drifted off from life painlessly on her own accord.
She loved the sea. She loved to swim. During the war, she made my grandfather build her a house on the top of a hill so she could see the San Francisco bay. But even that wasn't enough. She then asked him and my Uncle Art to dig her a huge swimming pool. She borrowed a pick-up truck and drove it to a tile manufacturer and asked them if they had any broken tile they didn't want. They pointed to the back of the warehouse and said she could have as much as she wanted. She shoveled a big pile into the truck, bought four ball peen hammers, drove home and dumped the tile in the backyard by the now cemented-in hole for the pool. She gave each of her children a hammer and told them to divide the tiles into piles of colors and break it all up into tiny bits. Of course they had a ball doing that, my mother told me. Then Peppie went to the butchers who gave her a lot of butcher paper. She drew line-drawings of fish on the paper and cut them out and used them to trace the shapes of fish on the sides of the pool. Then she mosaic'ed it all and had a statue of a leaping fish placed at the front of the pool as a fountain. She was a direct descendant of a woman from French history named Melusyn de Lusignan, who was purported in legend to be a fountain nymph, a siren, not a human woman. All I know is that she and my mother and my aunts swam only underwater, as I do, and could glide without making a ripple. A few years ago when the cardiologist told me that the left side of my heart was enlarged, he said something that I found amusing. He said, "You are as healthy as a fish out of water." I said what? He said, "When you're underwater you're as healthy as a fish since when you're swimming underwater your heartbeat drops by half and relieves your heart. But when you're on dry ground, you're as healthy as a fish out of water. So I'm giving you medicine for those times." He had no idea how I was taking that information or how amused my mother would also be by it when I told her, especially as my particular blood pressure condition is inherited, from my mother's line. It's called Essential Neuro-Genetic Hypertension and it's controlled by my taking every twenty-four hours a synthesized venom from an Amazonian snake called the Jararaca. It drops my blood pressure to normal. My mother took this medication, too, as does my aunt. When I swim I think of my grandmother Peppie and her sisters and her long family line and the mysterious Melusyn as I feel the warmth of the water and tickle of the current and think sometimes about the little pebbles in my shoes. Perhaps the pebbles mean that I shouldn't wear shoes at all, just keep swimming underwater musing about sailors, grand hotels and Chinese silk.
