My grandmother died this week. She was my last grandparent and my last, real link to a life that I am now quite unlikely to live.
My grandmother spent much of her adult life overseas accompanying my grandfather, a disciple of Borlaug in the Green Revolution. While working for USAID and the State Department they lived and worked in exotic locations around the world. Afghanistan, Bolivia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ecuador, Liberia. The list of places they visited is even more impressive.
To me of course they were grandma and grandpa. They were the grandparents we didn't see as often, at least compared to my paternal grandmother, who was a fixture at holidays. Grandma and grandpa lived on a lake near Nevis, Minnesota. I have vague memories of fishing and learning to shoot with them. In the mid 80's they moved to Palm Coast, Florida and built a home beside a salt-water canal.
We visited them there and, for a number of years while I was in high school and college, they would return to Minnesota to visit. At some point during those high school years I started to develop an appreciation of how different my grandparents were from everyone else. Maybe it was when my grandparents solidly defeated me and a good chunk of my Knowledge Bowl team at Trivial Pursuit. Maybe it was just the slowly dawning realization that the stories they would tell were just a lot more interesting than those of others. Conversations about the Biafran civil war and similar events came out at cocktail hour.
In any event, I also started to pay attention to their home. It didn't look like other people's homes. It was covered in masks and paintings that you didn't see in Wadena, Minnesota. More importantly, the items had stories connected to them. There was the Orisha Oko - a literal god of farming. A devil mask. Bright paintings commissioned from an African artist who worked on doors at the U.N. building. Cowrie shells, dark wood, exaggerated features. They sat on the shelves and hung on the walls of their home. Each had a story.
On their porch sat a bar that my grandfather had built. Embedded on the top of that bar were coins gathered during his work. They were a geography lesson but also a history lesson as well. The bar was covered with coins from places that no longer existed. Tanganyika. British East Africa. I would sit at that bar staring at pieces of history from a world that had vanished before I was born.
I never joined the foreign service. I came close. Very close. Six weeks before my marriage an offer letter came from the State Department for a consular affairs position. A month before we found out we were having our first child I got notice that I had passed the written exam again. I never took the oral round a second time. Grandpa wanted me to I think. He paid for me to travel to Chicago the first time I took the test. He was thrilled I passed it. I think he knew that I wanted to go.
Grandpa died three years ago. We went down for the funeral. I think it was that visit that I casually remarked on the oven hood over the range in the kitchen. "Oh that. Yes, we replaced the old hood with that. It is copper (or maybe bronze, I have forgotten). It was made from the roof tiles of the old palace in Kabul. I got the dimensions from Sears & Roebuck and went down to the Kabul market and had it made out of the old roof tiles."
If I hadn't asked I am not sure any of us would have known.
I don't know how many stories went with grandma this week. Probably a lot. Most of which I will come nowhere near experiencing myself.
In a few months we are to divide up the contents of the house and sell it off. Grandma made lists I guess. I haven't seen mine. I believe there are some books on African art on it. Grandma had mentioned them to me. They were supposed to have gone to my mother but she had no interest in African art. In fact, most of the art she doesn't want so it will be split among my uncles. I do not know if it is all spoken for. The paintings may remain unclaimed. The fate of the bar is unknown (at least to me). Similarly, the Orisha Okos may be unclaimed - though I assume they will be split between my uncles.
I have found myself wanting it. All of it. For reasons that I have struggled to explain to myself much less articulate. I want the art, the masks, the coins, the oven hood. Not because they are valuable though some of it certainly is. Not even so much because it reminds me of my grandparents though it does. More because it is doorway to a very different world then what I live in here in suburbia.
Maybe I wouldn't covet these trinkets so much if my own life had taken a different path. If I had taken that consular posting. Maybe my walls would be covered with something. Perhaps not masks and paintings from South America and Africa. Maybe something else entirely. But I didn't. Instead, my walls are bare or have pictures from my few vacations and posters of great art work. My dreams of replacing those things with different, more unique things; replacing them with stories of a life lived outside of the average experience is fading. I am not an old man but yet I feel that die is cast.
In a few months, my grandparents' things will be redistributed. A handful of things, apparently mainly the jewelry, will reside with my parents. Much of it will go into my uncles' homes and I will likely not see it again. Perhaps some of it will even come here.
When it goes, that window to a greater world that was my grandparents' home will close. I want desperately to keep that window open long enough to point it out to my children. To say "see, there is more out there than this. You can see it. You can live that life if you want to." I despair of my ability to tell them this story.
There is probably no single piece in my grandparents' house that will tell the story that I am struggling to articulate. No mask or painting that will make my children suddenly look at the world they know and wonder what else is out there. Still, I feel like if I could just hold onto the contents of that house that I could tell that story to them. That I could see their imagination kindle.
If I could just do this I could walk away from all of their things without regrets. I have my memories of my grandparents. They set my imagination alight in that home. I may not have physically escaped my Midwestern orbit but I mentally did. As it is though, I want it all. I want all of those precious things to stay where they are on the shelves and the walls. I want my stories back the way they were. I need those stories. My children need them.
