-aside-

Of course, Los Angeles isn’t supposed to be humid. I can think of my one thunderstorm growing up. I was ten, riding my bike up the hill toward my house, and the clouds arrived, went black, it rained and thundered really hard for maybe five or ten minutes while I stood there with my bike, marveling at how drenched I was getting, and then it stopped, the clouds moved on, and the sky went orange before fading to that almost white summer sky, etc.

Meanwhile, it was really humid here yesterday, and humidity is fairly common now. It must be the additional million people who now populate the city (vs. 1975), the concomitant water consumption, global warming, fumes from the earth’s crust — theories abound.

-end aside-

Anyway, it did rain that day, and had we left the nursing home even an hour later than we did, we would have found ourselves stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. An 18-wheeler overturned on the Pomona Freeway because of a tornado. I’ve spent a lot of time in Memphis the last several years, and the clouds in the distance looked like tornado clouds, but again, I thought, No way there’s going to be a tornado. We don’t have tornadoes in the Southland…

-aside #2-

I was being a little disingenuous because I remember Mike Davis in his book, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, writes about tornadoes being a occasional occurrence. He wrote something about a big one in Long Beach in the early 1930s, I think…

(I keep getting e-mails from Amazon Associates noting that I haven’t made any money with its program; hence, these links, what the hell…)

-end aside #2-

At one point, while we were wrapping up my grandmother’s Meissen figurines and other breakables, it started pouring rain. Mom didn’t give me too much shit over it (one of her many qualities that make her so lovable), but she hates getting wet. So I suggested she get a coat out of Lucille’s closet. Lucille may have willed most of her things to that woman in Orange County, but according to Lucille’s executor, the woman was mostly concerned with getting my grandmother’s fur coats, which neither Mom nor my aunt wanted anyway. Mom chose a fleece jacket, and the executor, a healthy looking 75-year-old man with a full head of gray hair and clear blue eyes, freed an umbrella from this weird hook thing at the end of the clothing rod.

Here is a photo of some of the breakables that I took on my Motorola RAZR. My mom was adamant about getting these items because they were in her mother’s bedroom. And the executor, seeing that Mom and my aunt only wanted either photos or things that reminded them of their mother (stuff Lucille kept after my grandfather died, stuff she promised to will back to them, but probably forgot about as her mind started to go), signed off on it without consulting this other benefactor.

I don’t know why it’s taken me over two months to write this entry, but I think it has to do with my ambivalence with blogs in general, which (I hope) will be the topic of a future post.

Lucille’s last home was a place called The Village. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a Heritage floor plan:

The building itself looked like so many apartment complexes built in the 1980s with its sandstone-colored stucco facade and drive-through portico. The apartments also had that era’s feel, with off-white carpeting, white walls, built-in drawers with oak veneers, balconies with painted steel railing (in this case, forest green), vertical blinds, etc.

The common areas, meanwhile, were decorated in the complementary scheme of a private hospital. The common areas had pink walls, wide hallways with brass railings, forest green carpeting with a repeating bland floral pattern, and watercolors of horses and seagulls. You entered through the automatic doors into a huge multiple-sided lobby with overstuffed side chairs upholstered in polyester pink and green vertical stripes and pots of dusty silk flowers with dull pink blossoms and faded green leaves.

The front desk was white like the floor tiles, tall enough that employees had to stand to be easily seen, and went from the wall to the right of the first hallway, angling somewhere in the middle and ending perhaps a foot and a half from the middle hallway (Lucille lived down the right hallway, FWIW). At the midpoint, a nameplate coupled to an 8 1/2 X 11″ dry erase board read: “Manager of First Impressions.”

I can’t remember what was written on the dry erase board, but it was green like the balcony railings and the hallway carpet. A woman in her 40s or maybe early 50s (she looked older than me, but it could have been the perm and the ultramarine blue suit) stood behind the sign, joking with two elderly male residents.

“I feel like I know you!” said the Manager of First Impressions to one or maybe both of them. I was sitting too far away to tell, the people sitting to the left of my mom, my aunt Judy, and me were discussing potassium and self-defense, the TV was on FOX News, and it had started to rain.

Lucille was cremated, and her ashes were sent to somewhere in Orange County. “Why Orange County?” I asked my mom.

“I don’t know why Orange County,” my mom said. She repeated the last three words as I did.

“What does it matter?” I heard my dad say in the background.*

I said it didn’t matter, but it was curious. Why did Lucille stay alone in Hemet those last years? Why did she refuse to come back up to Los Angeles? Was she having an affair with my grandfather back in the 1940s, when she was hired to be my mom’s younger sister’s nurse?

It’s odd that the only photo I have of Lucille is this one. My mom is standing at the right with the cute white overcoat (this may have been around the one time I know of when Los Angeles had bona fide snow). She’s about eight-years-old. My aunt Barbara, a year older, looks like she could be Lucille’s daughter, but Lucille looked like a goy version of my Grandma Birdie — tall, thin, minimal chin. This photo was taken of Birdie at Santa Monica beach sometime in the 1930s.

On Thursday, I’m going with my mom and her younger sister Judy to Hemet to go through Lucille’s things for photos and anything else “that has a memory,” as my mom put it.

* * *

* This comment was unsurprising. Back in 1994, Dad failed to tell me my grandfather (his father) had been in the hospital for two weeks and was dying. If I may quote myself…

I missed Rosh Hashanah and my first week of film school classes to attend the Telluride Film Festival Student Program. The following weekend, distracted by my classes and the relentless heat, I made a U-turn into a mini-van and gashed up my head. I didn’t want to worry my grandmother, so I ignored the Post-It note on my desk written in black sharpie that shouted, “Call Grandma and Papa!” until my mother came over for the duffel she had lent me two weeks earlier.

Mom pointed at the note, which by now had a dozen other things scribbled around it, and said, “I’ve been meaning to call Sue myself.”

I dialed. Speaking with a brightness that goes in tandem with guilt, I said, “Hi, Grandma! How are you? How’s Papa?”

“He’s at Cedars,” Grandma stammered. “Didn’t Walter tell you?”

I looked at my mother as I said, “No, he didn’t.” Stupidly, I handed the phone to her. They spoke briefly, a conversation that had no relation whatsoever to the news.

“You didn’t know about Aaron?” Mom said cautiously as she hung up.

“Dad didn’t tell me.”

“He’s been there for almost two weeks,” Mom replied as if the length of Papa’s stay had placed the onus on me to be omniscient. “I’ll make sure that Greg and Jon know, in case they don’t.”

Two days later, my younger brother Jon called, voice cracking, asking if I knew Papa was dying. “No one told me he was even sick. How long have you known?”

I phoned my parents. “What were you guys thinking?” I yelled at Mom, who was unlucky enough to have answered. “After what happened with me?”

“I’m not going to call every goddamn person just because my dad’s dying!” Dad raged in the background, as if three phone calls to his three children would lead down a slippery slope to everybody.

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Lucille, memory token, Robyn Weisman, memory, death, conundrum

Grandma Sue just turned 98 on April 7th (although her birth certificate says she was born on May 2, 1910, and she says she was born during Passover that year, which only ran until May 1, 1910, so this is the subject of a whole ‘nother story), and she still plays bridge, listens to the Metropolitan Opera every Saturday morning during the season, reads The New Yorker weekly, and tries to walk 500 steps a day.

At her birthday party Saturday night (incidentally, my grandfather Aaron, her husband, would have turned 100 years old that night, along with Bette Davis), she attributed her longevity to walking and to not eating potato chips because they’re junk. The attendees went briefly silent, realizing that their lust for the fried potato would be the death of them, but anyway…

Grandma can certainly be repetitive (the usual: Have you been eating? Do you have any friends? Are you putting money into the bank?), but in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that she repeats certain anecdotes to me with regularity.

The most notable one (and the one she has repeated the most lately—although my mind may have just latched onto this one and forgotten some of the others) happened over 90 years ago.

Grandma was seven years old, attending a public school on the Lower East Side. One morning in early November 1917, Grandma’s teacher showed up to Grandma’s second-grade class in a state of euphoria.

“We finally have a homeland!” she told the students. Then she provided an overview of Balfour Declaration, which stated British support for a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

Grandma was terrified. “I didn’t want to be shipped off to the desert. I wanted to stay in New York! I thought they were going to ship all the Jews out there, and I didn’t want to go!”

Technorati Tags:
Balfour Declaration, memory, memory token, New York, Grandma Sue