Monday, April 14, 2003

People - you make me

People - you make me feel very lucky.  Thanks for the support around my grandmother’s death.  It means a lot that you’d take the time to give me a boost when we’ve barely even gotten to know each other.  But I guess some things translate universally.

Today some two-word phrases started coming to me, little contradictions that seem to bespeak my grandmother’s paradoxical nature.  I don’t pretend that they give a complete picture of this woman, but they give a bunch of interesting snapshots and maybe if you flip through them quickly you’ll get a short cartoon of a very powerful person.  Or maybe you’ll just get dizzy.  That can be good too.

Without further ado, my dear Zerline was, or had, or could be described as:

* enormously diminutive
* repressively artistic
* accoladed anonymity
* tightfisted generosity
* stern love
* frenetic focus
* pious apostacy
* peripherally central
* cosmopolitan parochialism
* independent goodwife
* dynamically ineffectual
* wizened orchid
* assertively gracious
* heartbreakingly funny
* stylishly declasse’
* archaically modern
* benevolently prejudiced
* tragically undramatic

Nana was a woman of her time, which was a good long time ago, but she never missed a step in the dance or lost a footpound of torque on the wrench of life until her mind stopped working - and even then she could crush your hand in her grip.  I learned too much from her to do her justice with this post.  But don’t get the wrong idea from the list above.  She was a contradiction in terms in everything she did, but she made it work and made it classy.  I’ll have to do some more thinking before I write anything else.  I’ll leave with this: if you find yourself ahead of schedule, tidy, courteous and driven to over-achieve, you’ve picked up a piece of her.  Try to make it last, there wasn’t much of her to begin with and they’re not making more.