When somebody touches your life as long a grandmother does there is little you can do to pay back or pay tribute to that person. Is this an attempt to do so? If it is, it will fall short as all such attempts must because the measure of eighty years of life cannot be placed on one small page.
No, I can only thank her for the efforts and influence she has had in my life. I can thank her for the example she has been to me, my thirty plus years. So I thank her for one of the many great things she has done for me in my life. I thank her for being my storyteller.
I try to remember the first memories I have of my grandmother and I have to say they are pretty vague. I remember climbing into her Nova and marveling at its size, this boat on wheels, and how it rocked to the sway of asphalt waves. And I recall a few times being in the kitchen after she had cooked me eggs before the arthritis set in on her hands that still has yet to fully limit this high functioning chef. These very fleeting fuzzy memories are more snapshots than true memories as they exist more as faded photos that have sat out in the sun than a digital pic on the LCD screen.
The first true memory that I have, and my mind will never let go of, is sitting in my uncle’s basement and listening to Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”. The basement became my dungeon as she read. The rough wool couch I sat on was like tattered rags on a prison floor. The low lamp light fades as my grandmother’s airy wispy telling continues, the wind of her voice seeming to snuff out the light. The humidity of the basement reflects the rank cell’s stagnation. Every word she read to me brought me more into the macabre world that my whole family has read before I heard this first tale of horror. This was far from the comfort of the Hardy Boys books I was used to reading.
And as the heat of the climax was read and the story finished, my grandmother looked up and smiled her comforting smile returning me to the basement. The prison door that seemed locked to me as she read was now opened and I was free to walk through it. Except as I walked through the door, I did not exit out into the free world but into my own asylum. Chained and bound having now experienced and tasted the wonders of a true master, not wanting to enjoy anything less than literary crème. There was no doubting the power of Poe’s written works, but my grandmother, she became the master of my desire and near insane obsession for great writing since that day.
We talk of the books we read now, though not as regularly as we used. I have read more of Poe, plus Shakespeare, Stoker, Card, King, Doyle and others that are too many to list. But it was that day, the day I tripped and nearly fell into the abyss, the day I felt the rush of the blade as it swooped closer to me, that changed me. It was that day that I was gladly locked into my own prison by my “Grammy”, the key in her keeping, so that I could enjoy that new world with each turn of the page.
