Captain Pike's Ship Log II

My grandmother saw Haley's comet twice. The first time, she was about 13, just a kid, standing in a field, in the darkness, long ago. The second time was in 1986, and I took her outside of her house and pointed it out. I had just graduated college and my parents were away in Florida, so I visited my grandmother often during that time because she really shouldn't have been living by herself in her own home. I didn't want my mother and father to have to drive their camper home in the winter.

It was hard for me to imagine my grandmother as a young girl. All my life, she was a kindly, white-haired old woman who had thick eyeglasses that made her big blue eyes look even bigger. She had a way of looking at you that was more like looking "through" you, but it wasn't mean or anything, it was just a nice, looking through you. When I took her out to show her the comet, I assumed she didn't know anything about Haley's comet. I was really surprised when she told me she had seen it before, when she was a kid. Later, we got out lots of pictures from way back in the early 1900s. One showed my grandmother and her good friend Venus leaning against an old car. There were two boys with them, and they were all drinking beer. My grandmother had long blond hair, and she appeared very attractive. This really confused me. The idea of my grandmother looking like a hot young girl just didn't make any sense.

She told me about drinking Coca-Cola. Back then, the Coke had cocaine in it. Can you imagine? It's no wonder they did so well on the stock market. My grandmother told me: "Nice girls didn't drink Coke, but I did!" She laughed when she said it, rolling right back in her rocking chair, her head looking up, as if to better see the past. She showed me more photos of her with her friend Venus. Wouldn't Venus be a great name for a girl today?

My grandmother and I talked a lot about the past. She wasn't sure, but she thought that the Titanic went down right around the same time that she had seen Haley's comet. Somehow, thinking about these kinds of things, and the cocaine in the Coke, gave me a completely different conception of what life might have been like that I had ever had before. Just like today, the world had become sort of cocky: imagining they could make an ocean liner that couldn't sink. When the Titanic hit, or rather grazed against an iceberg, big pieces of ice fell upon her top deck. Supposedly, some of the first-class passengers had used this ice in their cocktails -- drinking a toast to an unsinkable ship!

My grandmother actually lived on another 10 years after this, dying at the ripe old age of 97. By then, she had been living in the rest home for the last couple of years. As far as I could tell, her stay in the rest home, or nursing home really, had been okay. I'd visited her several times, and it seemed like she was always visiting with somebody, or involved in something. Last time I saw her, she told me she was just tired. Tired out, and tired of all these new things -- trying to keep track of the new thing she learned on the news. She told me she didn't think a person ought to live this long, because things had changed so much that she herself, had become outdated.

Years after she died, my parents told me how grateful they were to me for having checked in on her so much during that time that they were down south for the winter. I let them thank me, but really, I was glad to get to know my grandmother again. To know that she wasn't always just an old white-haired lady.