My Grandmother at 100

(This blog entry is a revised version of my notes to my Music Video Of the Week from August 24, 2012.)

My maternal grandmother, who would have turned one hundred years old this past Friday, August 24, 2012.  And I thought she would make it to a hundred.  She was a tough lady. She grew up in a coal mining town outside Scranton, Pennsylvania, and she and her Italian parents lived a rough life at at time when coal mining was much more dangerous than it is now.  Her family was poor in the 1920s.  While my grandmother couldn't remember any President before Roosevelt (she had no recollection of President Coolidge and his penchant for wearing Indian war bonnets), she knew what life was like before Roosevelt, and it was not pretty.

As a coal miner, her father took a big risk working in the mines; there was always the risk of an accident, particularly some kind of explosion.  When one of the mine shafts collapsed, or came close to it, I don't remember which, my great-grandmother got my great-grandfather to quit his job and moved the family, which included several children, to Orange, New Jersey, where my great-grandfather later found work.  My grandmother left northeastern Pennsylvania in 1926, and she never returned.  

My grandmother was a dynamo. She made it through nine decades on earth, surviving the Depression, overcoming her own minimal literacy, bearing five children - the first of which died in infancy, an uncle I never knew - and living in Orange, New Jersey even after the the town became a dead zone until she was 83, seeing everything from Curtiss biplanes the advent of radio to 9/11 being covered on cable television.  For some odd reason, she never looked young - she looked a decade older than her 52 years at the time in pictures of my parents' wedding - yet she always felt young. She was 44 when Elvis Presley debuted, yet she bought his records and became a lifelong fan even as other Americans of her generation tried to ban him. At 70, she could outlast my 43-year-old mother picking strawberries at a pick-your-own fruit farm, and she could help Mom cook Easter dinner at 84.  She could walk to the store, both in Orange and nearby Caldwell, where she moved, until she was 89.  And, she played with dolls well into her eighties as well.

My grandmother couldn't stop her body from aging faster than her mind and spirit, though, and she died at the age of ninety. I was expecting her to live to be a hundred.  Noting as far back as the mid-1990s that her one hundredth birthday would fall on a Friday, I was prepared to rent a banquet hall for either the Saturday or Sunday after and making a whole weekend out of her centenary one way or another, with all of my maternal relatives.  Alas, it was not to be.  But by making it to ninety, my maternal grandmother outlasted all of my other grandparents. Only my paternal step-grandmother, my paternal grandfather's second wife (he'd been a widower), lived longer, to 95.

But I still remember my maternal grandmother, so in a sense, she did live to be a hundred.  Happy birthday, Grandma.