Looking happy

I like these two pictures together. The one of my grandmother isn’t dated but she looks very young to me, maybe the same age as my mother is in the next picture. Isn’t her dress amazing? I wish I could ask her about it – did she make it? Was it for a special occasion? What color was it? And in the photo it looks shiny, so I wonder what kind of fabric it’s made from.

I described this next picture to my mother and she remembered it immediately. She is not quite 15, and I love the way she seems to be so pleased with herself here. She said she was getting ready to start her sophomore year in high school, which startled me. I realized I’d never put it together that my mother was either one of the younger ones in her class or the older ones because her birthday is in September. As it turns out, she was one of the younger ones.

A quick retrospective

I’ve been scanning old photos from my family – I do mean old. Some are of great-great grandparents and whatever was written on the backs of them has faded with age.

I didn’t realize that I had high school senior pictures of my mother and my grandmother. I have one of me too, although mine wasn’t in black and white. But Picasa makes it very easy to alter photographs and so I’ve converted mine to black and white just for fun. Looking at my grandmother's picture, I see a very strong resemblance with my sister Amy. I'd never really noticed that before.

Mana (my grandmother)

My mother

And me

My grandmother and college

So here’s another family story. This picture is of my grandmother (Mana) and isn’t dated although she looks quite young. She wrote on the back of it that she thought her dress was pretty and she hoped whomever the recipient was would also think so. I suspect Mana made the dress herself – she was quite a good sewist.

I don’t know all the details of this story, so here's what I do know. Mana’s parents didn’t have a lot of money but they did send her to college for either a semester or a year, I don’t remember. Then they told her it was her sister’s turn to go and so Mana never got to finish college. She ended up marrying my grandfather and having four children: my mother, my uncle and twin girls, my aunts.

You need a bit of information about me for the rest of the story to make sense. I’d joined the Army right out of high school and didn’t start college until I was 29. I dropped out a couple of years later as my entire personal life imploded and wasn’t able to go back until my late thirties.

By the time I was able to go back to school very part time, my grandmother was dying from colon cancer. I flew out to see her in early February that year for a final visit. She was still entirely herself, her brain and personality hadn’t been impacted by the disease and the only time there was any impairment was when she had to take her pain meds.

I sat with her that Saturday, and she had me tell her what I was doing with myself. She’d drift off from time to time and at one point woke up enough to say “I’ll be with you momentarily.” That simultaneously made me smile and feel really sad.

Anyway, the point of the story is this. After I’d told her my plans to finish school even if it took me five years, she patted my hand and as fiercely as she ever said anything, she told me “You finish college. Get that degree.”

I flew home the next day and she died the following weekend. And I did finish college, I did get that degree. I had a chance to walk around KU the day I graduated (because you’d better believe I walked down the hill) and I told Mana that I did it, I’d finished and it was partly because of what she'd said.