el dia de los muertos

November 2 having just passed (a holiday I feel is sorely lacking in our traditional US culture - we have need of remembrance; the need to acknowledge those who gave birth to us - and I mean that literally and figuratively. Our society is so individualistic, I think sometimes people start to believe that they are self-made! What a grand delusion!)
... Anyway, so I was thinking on the way home tonight about how grateful I am for all the people in my life, and it reminded me of something I wrote in high school about my mother's mother, Popi. I have the urge to put it in here, so I think I will:

Popi. Immediately I see her; the wrinkled, brown, smiling face. Her hair is short and curly, peppered grey-white. Her eyes are watery blue, yet unfaltering, and lined in wrinkles. When she smiles, I can see her long, crooked chipmunk teeth. But more often she is laughing; a warm, cackling sound, and she throws her head back as if to catch the joy between her lips. Her feet are planted firmly in Dr. Scholl's clogs, and thin, brown-speckled legs appear from under the brightly patterned Indian skirts of wrinkled cotton. These are fastened haphazardly with a safety-pin around her ample waist. Her cotton blouses of orange, yellow, pink, brown, are chosen for comfort, and hang out over her skirt, perhaps tamed by a woven belt or spare piece of brightly colored cloth. As she talks, gesturing, her rings and bracelets dance and sing, following the rise and fall of her voice.
Popi is my grandmother, but she doesn't seem like a "grandmother." She is my friend. She is ready to try anything - she likes the music I listen to, which my parents condemn as non-classical. I love to create, and she is always there to spur me on, suggesting new ways, different ideas, which I can either embroider or cut, making them uniquely mine. She is childlike, wondering as much as I do, dreaming, exploring. Perhaps it is through this that I find a link which does not exist with other adults. With Popi, adventures are always waiting to touch us with gentle green fingers.
Her car is a dark blue Volkswagon Bug. The inside is dirty cream-colored plastic which smells wonderfully familiar in the broiling sun. The glove compartment is always filled with hot, leathery dried prunes or apricots, which stick to the maps and other papers. In the morning, when Popi takes the car to the end of the driveway (which in reality is not all that long) for her morning paper, she calls to me, and lets me ride standing on the running board all the way, feeling the blue morning air on my cheeks. Sometimes she takes me to the Market Basket for groceries. As we drive along the Pacific Coast Highway, breathing the warm, salty sea-air, her skirt is impatiently pulled up to her thighs as we talk about our plans for the day. She always drives like this, unaware and uncaring that the state of her stretched and faded underwear is evident to passing drivers. If I ask, she will buy me gum, or an ice-cream cone at Swensen's, and we go to the park so I can practice on the monkey bars. We stay until my hands are red and blistered, and the sun has begun to drop behind the purple hills.
At night, stretched out in the big bed, I feel the gritty sand on my legs from yesterday at the beach, but I am warm and comfortable, surrounded by my friends, the cats. At first I am impatient, for Popi can never remember where she has put her glasses, or which pair is the one she wants. Finally, though, she reads to me; perhaps Harriet the Spy, or a favorite mystery. But soon her voice slows, the words stop, and I realize she is asleep, her glasses slipping to the end of her nose. I wake her, saying, "Popi, you're falling asleep!" "I'm doing no such thing", she replies gruffly, as if the very suggestion is offensive. Yet after a few more words, she snores. And soon we are both asleep in a land of cats, sand and crickets.