Our battle of feminine wills started almost fifteen years ago with a ring. Specifically my grandmother’s wedding ring. A ring that represented over 50 years of marriage. When she died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, my grandfather made a special trip to see me, so that he could make sure that I had it in case he passed away just as unexpectedly. He didn’t want anyone else to inherit it.
To understand his reason, you should also know that I lived with them like a daughter, not just a grand-daughter for a good portion of my childhood. The summer before she passed away, I wrote my grandmother a letter and told her that I felt like she was more like my mother than my own biological mom. We are that close. I say that in the present tense because there have been moments when I have had dreams of her that are so real, that I felt as if she had made a special trip to visit me from the “great unknown.”
My relationship with my grandfather was a little more complicated. I believe now in hind-sight that he sincerely loved me, but there were times when I feared that his anger and judgements indicated otherwise. He was more F. Scott Fitzgerald than Hemingway. He was what you would call, a metro-sexual, a man who perfected himself and lived for “his public”. For example, when he did not have socks that matched his pants, he had wife #2, my late grandmother’s cousin by marriage, drive to town and pick up a new pair…or he refused to go outside. He had his nails manicured almost weekly, and kept his shoes stacked in a specially designed closet. Together, they made a pair. She catered to his whims, and eccentricities, and he gave her love and security.
Where as my grandmother, four years his senior, spent most of her married life, treating him like a child, not caving into his moods, or slightly unrealistic expectations…wife #2, was artfully, not as vocal. I recognized it, because I too, had used this defense technique, to maintain their love. But with grandma gone, there was no one else, to say “no.”
Let’s put it this way, if grandpa got a bugger of an idea, he NOW refused to let it go. His first bugger was that he wanted grandma’s wedding ring back, so that he could make an impressive diamond bouquet for his new bride. I tried to refuse, but he insisted….and fearing that he would cut me out of his life like he did with the rest of the family, I relented.
Thanksgiving two years later. I visited him and wife # 2 in a condo they rented in Arizona. They were trying out the life of a “snow bird.” Fashionably well off seniors would live in Scottsdale during the winter to avoid the harsher climates of their home states. I was going to school in Tucson and looked forward to spending at least one holiday with him. Since he had moved he had suddenly become more harsh and remote. I didn’t understand the distance. Was he just getting older and more cranky, or did he really not like me?
My grandpa, now almost eighty, did hate to drive. It brought up deep seeded issues. He had a life sized dummy complete with clothes and a baseball cap made. He put it in the back seat of his Cadillac, so that no car-jackers would be tempted to accost him. I sat side by side with the dummy as if he were my stronger, older brother.
He wouldn’t say so, but I think one of the major reasons why he moved back to a small town in the middle of a rural state was it meant that he did not have to drive on any of California’s major highways. But still, even after the move, the dummy stayed in the back seat, looking like the grandson he never had. I hated that dummy. They drove him around and dotted on him, giving him the approval, I couldn’t seem to earn. Nothing I did seemed right anymore.
At the end of my holiday visit, the idea of driving from Scottsdale to Phoenix must have terrified him. (the cities are less than fifteen miles away away…literally they’re really just one city). His plan to avoid the airport, was to have me flown from Scottsdale to the Phoenix airport. He seemed to be under the impression that I could hop out of a prop plane and hop on to my waiting 737. Imagine what a flight of no more than ten miles would have looked like. Taking off, and landing in like two minutes. Forget fastening your seat belt, you’re already there.
When I tried to gently get him to drop the idea, his anger and determination only intensified. We drove all around Scottsdale all afternoon looking for the local commuter airport. When he finally found the local heliport, he seemed stunned that they didn’t have regular flights from Scottsdale to the Phoenix airport. Wife #2 and I ended up finding a convenient shuttle service that drove me there on my own.
All in all, I think I blamed wife # 2 for a lot of strain I felt in my relationship with my grandfather, even though most likely, the strain we felt toward one another had nothing to do with her. I don’t think it was, in retrospect, all her fault. I think she was probably, just like my grandfather, guilty of “bad taste” with the ring incident. I think they were two older, elderly people who needed each other, neither of whom knew how to deal with their children.
How do you continue to blame someone when she has left you half of her assets, even though you parted on less than ideal terms after he died a year later in 1995. Didn’t she want everything for herself? Wasn’t she willing to do anything to get what she wanted? Didn’t she stab me in the back, when I wasn’t looking? I built her “evil intentions” up to mythic proportions. I even started a screenplay based on an elderly Anna Nicole Smith archetype who wanted to manipulate and kill, the angelic only daughter, of a Texas millionaire. But I never finished it. In the end, through some hysterical reversals of dogma and karma…I have ended up being the one who looks like the stuffed dummy.
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