On the phone with Grandmother

I spoke with my grandmother, yesterday. I call her about once a week on my drive into work. She has never been much of a phone person. I don’t remember speaking to her often as a child from the phone accept on birthdays and holidays. However, her voice has always comforted me. I enjoy these calls. They make me feel connected and I like to hear her voice in the mornings. She tells me about what her cats are doing and how the birds are right outside her window. These conversations makes me smile. Yes, this is what you should do at the age of 82.

Grandmother has also always been there to help me. I remember calling her from my dorm room at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, asking for help on a sociology paper twenty years ago. She told me about living in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s. She remembers seeing a bus shoved over because the riders were not white. I made an A on the paper.

Just a few short years later, without a diploma in hand, I would get married at too young of an age to a man much older and not wiser by any means. She was there. When I had a baby a year later, she came to my house and realized that my refrigerator was not working, she bought me a new one. I still have it in my house 16 years later. When my baby needed glasses, when I graduated college finally, when I got divorced and fought for my daughter, she was there -sending a check, attending graduation, listening to my anguish. And when I got remarried, she would celebrate with me the delight of finally finding my way.

Grandmother and I have started to work through her mother’s life work on these weekly phone calls. Catharine Robertson Sheils or Grandmother Cat, as we have always called her, was a writer, a project manager, a genealogist, a healer and so many other things. My grandmother and her brother have often said that I am a lot like Grandmother Cat. I imagine that this process will prove how much we are alike or different. Till then, I savor the time I have talking to my Grandmother.