What Would Grandma Do?

Nearly every day of Covid-infested 2020, I’ve felt my hope drowned by despair. And every time I went under I asked myself, “What would grandma do?” And she pulled my head back above water.

My maternal grandmother was a fiercely independent woman who carved a remarkable life for herself after being orphaned by the Spanish Flu in 1918. And I know if she were me right now, she would be happy to have a job. She would be happy to have a home. To have food to eat. To be healthy, and to have her loved ones be healthy.

Thinking of her has helped me to be grateful for what I still have even during the darkest days of this dreadful year. But sometimes, just thinking of her isn’t enough. And while I can’t turn to her directly for wisdom anymore, I can find comfort in her car: a tiny, old Toyota I still drive.

She bought that Tercel brand-new at Toyota Santa Cruz for $6,538.30 on Aug. 31, 1984. (I know all these details because she typed them onto a 3-by-5 card.) I remember thinking at the time that the car was too small and an ugly color, but she loved it. Every time we walked up to it in a parking lot she would gush, “Whose pretty little car is that?”

I had never heard my grandmother use that voice before. I only knew the one she used to complain about my father. Or to order me and my sister not to walk so far away from her. Or to ask why I wasn’t wearing the sweater she bought me.

I spent most of my life afraid of my grandmother and dreading our time together. But once I learned how much she lived through before I was even born, it helped me forgive her for being so difficult to be around.

She was put in a Masonic Home in Southern California with her brother after their father died of the Spanish Flu in 1918 when she was 4 years old. She came of age during the Great Depression, watching her older brother head out in a three-piece suit to carry his briefcase door-to-door in search of a job, and she tracked every penny she spent ever since.

She became a bookkeeper, then became a single mother at 29 during World War II. (She wasn’t widowed, mind you, just never married my grandfather, whom she met while both were ice skating with Sonja Henie. According to the contract she kept, my grandmother earned $30 a week for that job.)

My father said once that my grandmother only kept my mother to prove to her mother she could. But it doesn’t matter to me why she kept her, just that she did. And then she helped her daughter pay for college. And helped my parents buy a house. Then helped me pay for college.

It took me a long time to accept that spending her money was how she showed love. Because I always wanted a grandmother who hugged us and laughed when we played, not one who loved to remind us of every naughty thing we ever said or did.

The only time I remember sitting in her lap was when she let me drive a car for the first time. I don’t remember why she put me behind the steering wheel that day, but I remember us all laughing as I struggled to guide the car through the empty parking lot.

The next time she gave me the wheel was two decades later when she took me to England so I could drive on the left side for her. The day after we picked up the rental car I woke up with a cold that she blamed on my walking around with wet hair. “You better not be too sick to drive,” she announced as I stared out the window above my bed, wishing I could just sleep.

Later that same trip she gave me a rare compliment when I miraculously drove us back to our hotel through thick fog with no GPS, maps or even road signs to guide me. “You’re a wonder,” she said.

Another 20 years passed before I drove for her again, but this time she didn’t ask me to. She also didn’t ask me to write out all her checks so she didn’t pay her rent twice, or to have meals delivered to her room every day when she stopped going to the dining room to eat. No, she fought my help every day until I finally cracked at the diner where she demanded to know why we weren’t at the French bistro she loved (knocking over all the tiny tables with her walker) and I snapped at her before running into the bathroom to finish yelling in a stall.

Afterward as I buckled her seat belt she said, “Are you sure you don’t want to just push me out of the car?” I sighed. “No, grandma. I don’t.” And I didn’t. But I did ask my husband to start driving her around after that.

Several years ago she died just shy of her 98th birthday, but she is still with me every time I drive her car. I still hate its color. It has no air conditioning. The radio doesn’t work. I can’t move the driver’s seat anymore, I can’t open the passenger side window anymore, and the rear-view mirror disintegrated long ago.

But I love driving it. Because now in that car I can spend time with the grandmother I choose: all the best parts with none of the bad. Inside her car, I don’t think about the woman who spanked me for spilling cereal milk on her bedspread. I don’t think about the woman I drove to doctor’s appointments after cleaning diarrhea off her shoes.

Instead I think about the woman who drove me to countless museums, operas, ballets and Broadway shows. I think about the 56-year-old who moved to Paris for a year so she could learn French. And the 80-year-old who walked miles and miles of that city with me during a transportation strike. The 83-year-old who took me to New York. The 90-year-old who filled her tiny car with everything that would fit and drove herself to her new senior apartment complex in Petaluma.

And I think about that little girl who thrived through sheer force of will after her father died during a pandemic, and I hope that the more time I spend with that determined, independent woman now, the more likely it is that I’ll not only drive safely out of this pandemic, but hopefully well into my 90s.