My grandma Ellen turned 99 yesterday. She was born in Wakeeny, Kansas, Trego County, July 2, 1913.
We celebrated with wine and cake. I lay in bed with her last night holding her birdlike, blue-veined, sun-spotted hand, the one that milked cows on her family farm during bone-chilling November mornings circa 1920. The one that held her mother close after her father made the morning coffee then ended his life with a shotgun to the head in their barn in 1932. The one that bore my grandpa Maurice's wedding band on her ring finger in May of 1934. The one that swaddled my infant mother in September of 1941, just three months before America and her husband went to war. The one that helped me catch my first Bluegill at Cachuma Lake in the summer of '70 at the tender, bloodthirsty age of 5. The hand that was there to hold mine through my parent's divorceand their remarriages, some for better, some for worse. The hand that stroked my hot, sunburned 6, then 7, then 12-year-old brow as she whispered the Lord's Prayer in my ear at bedtime in her house on the frog-symphony creek. Her God is the only one I've ever fully known.
She's tiny as a child now. Her mind works in a circular pattern, the neuron pathways in her brain iterating the same frustrating ritual over and over again. "I need to get dressed." "Grandma, it's 4:30 a.m." "I need to get dressed." "Grandma, it's 5 a.m." "I need to get dressed." "Yes, I'll dress you." "What time is it?" "5:30 a.m." "That can't be right." "Your microwave clock says so." "Oh."
Then, just when I'm mentally checking out, she surprises me by singing an old Gogi Grant folk song I've never heard her sing before, even though we've tended many a campfire in together in my 47 years. Even though her third and best and last husband, Ned "Rusty" Allred was a cowboy who worked the last cattle drive from Utah into California during the days of the open range.
Her tremulous voice rises to meet the tune:
The wayward wind is a restless wind
A restless wind that yearns to wander
And he was born the next of kin
The next of kin to the wayward wind
In a lonely shack of a railroad track
He spent his younger days
And I guess the sound of the outward-bound
Made him a slave to his wander'n ways
Oh I met him there in a border town
He vowed we'd never part
Though he tried his best to settle down
I'm now alone with a broken heart
And the wayward wind is a restless wind
A restless wind that yearns to wander
And he was born the next of kin
The next of kin to the wayward wind.
My grandma's singing voice is imbued with a mournful beauty. She sings me through the Kansan Dust Bowl, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, her father's suicide, the many roads she's ventured down throughout this land and sits me down at the troubled knee of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. She and I have traveled "a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, Lord I'm one hundred miles away from home." Together.
She is my touchstone. My angel. My Northern Star. The blood from Bohemia, Czechslovakia that sings in me. I don't fully know it now -- because you have always been there -- but I will miss you, I will miss you, I will miss you when you're gone.