In tribute to Grandma Woolum's birthday -- she was born November 9, 1901 -- Christy gave us this assignment:
Grandma Woolum's birthday is drawing near. Write about good memories with our grandmother.
Christy's post is here. Carol's is here.
Heavy sigh.
Before I can write about good memories with Grandma Woolum, I have to clean some house within myself.
Grandma was in her early 80s, living alone, when I accepted two consecutive one year full time teaching appointments at Whitworth College. I moved to Spokane in August of 1982 and returned to Eugene at the end of May or the beginning of June in 1984.
I was a sharply divided person in August of 1982. On the one hand, I had just completed a wildly successful year of graduate school and Whitworth's English department called upon me to put my studies on hold and come to teach for a year to replace Prof. Dean Ebner who had resigned late in the school year to take an administrative position at Bethel College in St. Paul.
Quite honestly, in the spring of 1982, my academic life and my work as a novice English instructor could hardly have been going better.
My personal life, on the other hand, was at a low point. My first marriage's dissolution accelerated in the spring of 1982 and, by August, our divorce was final. Away from my studies and my teaching, I was unmoored, uncertain, fragmented, disillusioned, and lost. I was about to navigate the landscape of being single again and I didn't have a compass, nor did I have a clue how to manage my life -- aside from knowing how to cook for myself and carry out my professional responsibilities.
Quite honestly, during the period of time from August, 1982 through June of 1984, my personal life could hardly have been more confusing. It was terribly painful. I'm very grateful for the friends I had during that time in Spokane. Sometimes they had to stand back and watch me derail the train of my life and other times they offered me solid companionship and some quiet in the midst of my personal chaos.
My lonely grandmother lived in north Spokane, about 5.5 miles from both places I lived, first near campus and next on Stevens on the hill leading up to the Sacred Heart Medical Center.
I was so caught up in the excitement of my professional life and the chaos of my personal life that I rarely called Grandma and visited her even less.
I deeply regret my neglect. As I grew older, and especially after Grandma died in 1991, I began to come to grips with how lonely Grandma's life was and I tried to learn from my immaturity, from my transgressions.
I kept a promise to myself that I would never repeat this neglect when Mom and Dad got old. What I learned from not spending time with Grandma Woolum fueled my decision to be in Kellogg, with Dad, for the last three to four weeks of his life; it also fueled my decision, once I was no longer working, to come to Kellogg and spend as much time with Mom as possible and to do all I could, in unity with Christy and Carol, to make sure Mom spent as few waking hours as possible alone in the nursing home.
I hear people say all the time, "I have no regrets." Well, I do have regrets and I try to learn from my regrets. I try not to wallow in the pain regret triggers in me; I try not to repeat the things I've done that I regret and correct those actions in other situations.
I regret not spending more time with Grandma Woolum, but, out of that regret, I think I grew into being a better son for my parents than I had been a grandson for Grandma Woolum.
If you bore with me through my deep cleaning of the house of my inward life, I thank you.
Now I can write about good memories.
I lived with Grandma Woolum for about eight weeks or so in the summer of 1976.
I had just graduated from Whitworth and I saw that Fort Wright College, located in Spokane, was giving courses designed for people doing work in ministry. I think I was the only Protestant in both the courses I took, that summer and the next, and it was my first experience spending extended time with nuns in the Roman Catholic Church. I was about to work for the upcoming school year as a Chaplain's Assistant at Whitworth College and thought it would be fun and enriching to be a part of this summer institute at Fort Wright.
And, indeed, it was.
It was also a great time to get to know Grandma Woolum better and to help her out with trips to the grocery store, medical appointments, drives out to Fairchild, and other things. I got to know her better through our conversations, mostly about spiritual things, politics, and the Spokane Indians.
Every night that the Spokane Indians played, Grandma listened to their games on the radio. Often she fell asleep before the games had ended, but this didn't stop her from having favorite players -- but, I must admit the 1976 Spokane Indians of Lenn Sakata and Kurt Bevacqua and Moose Haas did not fire her up like Indian teams of previous years featuring such players as Willie Davis, Davey Lopes, Bart Shirley, and Bill Singer. She was, however, tickled that former Spokane Indian, Frank Howard, managed this team.
Grandma's family originated in Tennessee and Kentucky and she was a lifelong Democrat. She loved watching the 1976 Democratic campaign and was ecstatic about the rise of her fellow southerner Jimmy Carter. I was living with Grandma during the 1976 Democratic Convention and we sat in enraptured silence and listened to the great orator and Representative from Texas, Barbara Jordan give a monumental speech. We also listened to Jimmy Carter give his acceptance speech and I loved how happy it made Grandma that he would run for president. She was really happy in the fall when he won.
Grandma listened to different preachers on the radio and she subscribed to literature from the Unity church. She talked with me often about how she understood our world. She was troubled by division, by people of God dividing themselves into different denominations and with the way their differences led to conflict and distrust. She loved the idea that one day in heaven these divisions would dissolve, that in the afterlife we flawed and divisive humans would see the errors of our schismatic ways on earth, and in eternity we would be at one, in harmony, with our Creator. When Grandma talked about these things, she almost sang her words instead of just speaking them and I wondered if, without even knowing it, she was imitating the oratory of preachers she'd heard when she was a youth.
Grandma shared her spiritual understanding of life with me most often at her kitchen table, usually after we'd eaten dinner together. I don't remember what all Grandma fixed for us for dinner, but my most delicious memories of Grandma Woolum of are her fried chicken dinners. I'm not totally sure how Grandma fried chicken, but she did something that made hers the best I've ever eaten. Maybe she fried it in shortening. Maybe it was the amount of time the chicken fried in the pan. Maybe she had a secret way of seasoning the chicken. I just don't know. From her chicken drippings, she made rich, velvet gravy poured over perfectly mashed potatoes. As heavenly as Grandma's chicken, gravy, and potatoes were, though, for me, the best part of the chicken dinner was Grandma's green beans, especially the ones that came right out of her garden. Again, I wasn't savvy enough around food and the kitchen back in those days to know what Grandma did to make her beans so memorably delicious. All I know is that when our family visited Grandma or, during that summer, when Grandma fixed fried chicken, I was in that place Grandma used to tell me about where all divisions dissolved and harmony and pure joy reigned.
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