Life

One thing I've always been floored by when reading novels by Charles Dickens is his ability to have you laughing out loud at a passage one minute, and then you turn to the next page and you're crying whole heartedly. Well, that's the way my week has gone. I went up to Yosemite last Saturday and left Tuesday, and the days in between rank as among the most beautiful I've ever experienced. Yosemite in the snow is breathtaking and it recharged my spirit to be there in a way nothing else could. I couldn't stop smiling. I'll post some of my pictures and an account of the trip on another blog.

On the drive home Tuesday I turned to the next page. I called my mom to check in and say I wouldn't be home until after dark, and she told me that Gram had died. I cried from Selma to Bakersfield. The last few days have been a bit of a blur, with the family in mourning and me packing up to get back to Chicago, where I arrived yesterday. Now I'm sitting in the silence of snowy Chicago with the time to miss her properly. It doesn't matter how old someone is when they die, or how much you accept that that is the way of things: you still miss that person. My Gram was a huge influence on me. She was the English Professor in the family, specializing in Victorian lit. She was also a mildly successful author who published ten mystery novels and a non-fiction study of mystery fiction. She used the royalties from her books to travel the world more than once a year right up until the end. Before her stroke three weeks ago she was planning a trip to New York that she would have gone on last week, and a trip to London in March. She loved opera and classical music passionately her whole life, starting as a little girl of six riding the street car alone from Azuza to downtown L.A. in the '20s for her piano lessons. She grew up in the Great Depression and married during World War II. In the '30's, when most of her classmates--and girls especially-- in small town Azuza weren't contemplating college, she graduated at 16 and went off to UCLA. After having three children, she went back to get her masters and PhD in the late 1950s when she was near to 40 years old, and was then one of the very few female professors hired on to work in her department in the start of the 1960s, though she was never one to preach about "feminism;" she simply went out and did things, rather than talking about it. All her life she had copious numbers of friends, hosted charming cocktail parties, and regularly attended symphonies, operas, and theater. She always stayed meticulously within her budget and could squeeze the most possible out of a dollar (possibly part of that depression upbringing), but when it came to travel, dinner out with friends and family, music, or chocolate desserts her favorite thing to say was IOM (It's only money!). She has always been a vibrant role model for me, and someone whom I could go to to discuss our shared love of literature, music and art. She will be deeply missed.