Originally published on February 27, 2012.
I spent the first half of this past February 14 watching my grandmother take her last labored breaths before going off to the great beyond. Some might think that's a fairly spot-on description of the worst Valentine's Day imaginable, but I think that may have been the single most appropriate thing for me to do on a holiday devoted to that thing called "love."
The following picture captures the essence of my grandmother better than all the words I could ever haphazardly hurl. She laughed, frequently and without restraint. From the depths of her soul, she let fly with a hearty guffaw whenever the spirit moved her, and the spirit moved her about once every five minutes or so.
It's not that she had any more to laugh about than the rest of us. To the contrary: life handed her lemons more often than not, and she turned around and just squeezed those lemons right into her scotch and water. Her first husband went off to World War II shortly after he knocked her up with a little rug-rat who would later become my dad, but was, at the time, chiefly concerned with soiling himself. Then, after saving the world from Fascism, my grandfather came home and promptly and inconveniently died. Years later, she remarried, only to have husband number two perish after a long and protracted illness. If she were to have become a bitter and hateful old crone as a result, I don't think anyone could have blamed her. But take a look of that face! That is the face of someone who has forgiven life for everything it did to her. Take that, cruel fates! Ha!
Now let it never be said that I do not also have the Best Mom Ever, because I most certainly do, and I write that with the secure knowledge that there is almost no chance my mother will ever read my blog. But Mom had some serious medical problems that were beyond her control, so my gram frequently took on the role of emergency back-up Mom. She taught me how to play scrabble, gin rummy and poker and how to mix the perfect scotch and water. Some of my fondest early memories are sitting at a card table in a smoke filled room, watching my grandmother sip the highball I mixed up for her, trying to figure out if she really made that flush on the draw.
Gram also gave me the single best present I ever got in my life. This was an unabridged dictionary, which I received almost thirty years ago, for my 15th birthday. It helped make me into the person I am today, which is to say an obnoxiously pedantic jackass. I don't know how many hours I spent poring through that big blue lexicon, blissfully enraptured with the magic of the English language. Decades later, I used some of the words from that dictionary to create the very first post on my blog, entitled "How to Use Really Big Words to Sound Smart."
Were it not for my grandmother, that post might never have existed, and I might never have become a writer. She could have gotten me a sweater instead, and where would I be then? A little warmer, granted, thanks to the calefacient sartorial accoutrement, but I'd never be able to say that.
You might notice that the book is a little beaten and battered, but this is largely not my fault. A little over 20 years ago, I was in college and lived in a house full of hippies. Other hippies who did not live there were constantly wandering in off the street to strum guitars, subvert the dominant paradigm, emit odors, and do whatever else it is that hippies do. One of them knocked the dictionary off the table, presumably while playing hacky-sack in my kitchen. I was not home at the time, but apparently the tie-dyed freak showed little remorse for having damaged my dictionary. But I had told my good friend Nicky Pook about how it was my most prized possession and, according to reports, she mercilessly laid into the oblivious hippie. You have to imagine it in her charming English accent.
"That dictionary belongs to Andy! It was a present from his grandmother and it's very special to him and now you've gone and damaged it you horrid, horrid little knee-biting, patchouli-stinking git wanker bastard!"
Or something like that. And on the very off chance that the hippie in question ever reads this: It's okay Spencer. You have long since been forgiven, dude. The dictionary is beaten, but not broken, and I still use it to this day, looking up words, both big and small. The dictionary does a great job explaining most of the words, especially the big ones, but it can only hint at some of them. Like this one:
Love (luv) n. [ME love, luve, AS lufu, lufe, love]
1. a strong affection for or attachment or devotion to a person or persons.
The small words are the best ones.