My grandma turned ninety-five.
I keep coming back to the number. I know what it means mathematically. I have more trouble taking in what it means as a life.
Ninety-five years of waking up as the same person, however much that person changes. Of having things to do, people to love, something on your mind before falling asleep. Years that were ordinary while she was living them and now belong to a past I can only ask her about.
She was already my grandma when I met her, which was convenient for me but leaves out quite a lot. There was an entire life before that. Childhood. Coming to this country. A young man who would eventually become my grandpa. A family taking shape long before I arrived and assumed my position near the center of things.
The women in my family seem to live forever. This is an affectionate observation, not a genetic study. I have simply been lucky enough to know several remarkable women well into their nineties, and there is something almost defiant about their continued presence.
The men have had long, full lives too. My grandpa did.
I wrote about him in “Somebody Has to Be Here”, and about the conversations we used to have that never quite ended. I wish he could have been beside her for this birthday.
That wish did not make the celebration sad. It belonged there alongside everything else. Ninety-five contains people who are no longer here, including people she loved for a very long time.
And, she is still here.
So, we went to Kentucky.
Eleven People, Two Cars
Six adults and five children traveled in two cars. Two of those six adults could not drive: my sister and me.
My sister has appeared here before in “The Thank You That Keeps Moving”, under very different circumstances. For this trip, she and I shared the distinction of contributing precisely zero miles to the driving rotation.
Six adults. Five children. Two cars. Four possible drivers. Six and a half hours to Danville.
Dad apparently thought we would stop once or twice.
This was adorable.
Young children do not recognize interstate efficiency as a moral good. Somebody needs the bathroom. Somebody is hungry. Somebody needs changing. Somebody has dropped an object six inches beyond their reach and is now experiencing the collapse of everything they believed about the world.
These needs do not conveniently occur at the same exit.
Then there is me. Getting out of a car involves a wheelchair and a transfer, followed by questions about parking, surfaces, entrances, and whether the accessible bathroom is accessible in the useful sense of the word. Getting back in means doing enough of it again to make “a quick stop” sound ambitious.
It also takes energy. I cannot make the process smaller just because the map says we should already be farther along.
But, this was our family traveling together. We had children to feed, bodies to accommodate, and a birthday to reach. We would get there.
The question was how many times we would stop before Kentucky accepted us.
The Airbnb Has Opinions
The Airbnb was comfortable enough.
That is my charitable opening statement.
Christa and I could not sleep in the same room because there was not enough usable space. She ended up in the basement with Wyatt and Rowan. I stayed upstairs in a room with two twin beds, since traveling up and down stairs was obviously not going to be part of my weekend.
Our sleeping arrangements were determined less by romance than by architecture.
On the bright side, Charlotte stayed with me. I got a sleepover with my daughter, which was genuinely fun.
In “By Inches and Seconds”, I wrote about her quietly moving an easel so my chair could get through. I love that memory. I also love having this one: the two of us sharing a room, with no particular significance required beyond enjoying being together.
Across the hall was the only bathroom in the entire house whose doorway my wheelchair could fit through.
Excellent. My bladder had exactly one approved destination.
Most of the house also had thick carpet. For a manual wheelchair user, thick carpet is resistance training with furniture on it. Every ordinary trip across a room requires more pushing than it reasonably should.
My triceps did not book a vacation to Kentucky. They came to work.
The carpet was red and blue, for reasons that were not explained to me.
Red. And blue.
Sure.
There was also a grandfather clock in the foyer. It had a little door that kept opening by itself, several times a day.
My sister and I began joking that the house was haunted.
Half joking.
The half matters. We did not conduct an investigation. But, when an old grandfather clock in an unfamiliar house repeatedly opens its own tiny door, I think skepticism has a right to sit down for a minute.
Maybe the ghost chose the carpet.
No evidence. Just asking questions.
Then there were the flies and gnats. Constantly.
People tried explaining this as a Kentucky thing. No. I have visited family in Kentucky enough times to know the state is not an enormous open-air fly enclosure. Something was happening in this house.
Because of my vision, I could not really see the insects. I could hear them. I could also hear everyone else trying to kill them.
Smack. Cabinet.
Smack. Wall.
Smack. Counter.
I was receiving a complete auditory record of a war we did not appear to be winning. The flies remained largely invisible to me, but I had excellent coverage of the furniture taking casualties.
You would think the owners might have supplied a flyswatter. One. Perhaps two, if they wanted to position the property as luxury accommodation.
Apparently not.
Perhaps the ghost took them.
Ninety-Five, Again
All of this makes an excellent set of complaints about a house we briefly occupied.
Then we went to the party, and my grandma was turning ninety-five, and the house became a much smaller subject.
There was family everywhere. The gathering felt like a wedding reception, with roughly a thousand relatives in the room.
That is not a literal estimate.
Probably.
The wood floors were wonderful after the Airbnb Carpet Fitness Program. My chair could move without requiring a personal commitment from every muscle in my arms.
Acoustically, the room was a different proposition. There were not enough soft surfaces to absorb the sound. Conversations bounced around and overlapped until the whole thing became a wedding-reception cacophony.
This does not excuse the carpets in the Airbnb. My triceps remain opposed.
I have written in “The Texture of Sound” about how my hearing has changed. “Better” is too simple a word for it, and “louder” is not quite right either. Everything feels more accentuated now. I notice more of the sound around me and feel more of it. What might once have stayed in the background is harder to leave there.
The noise was not painful, but it was not pleasant either. Trying to follow a conversation inside all of it was extremely difficult. Add my speech loss, and communicating became harder still: trying to take in what someone was saying while getting my own words out into the same room.
I wanted to be there. I was glad to be there. Some of being there was difficult.
Those facts fit together perfectly well.
The room was full because people had come to celebrate her. My children were there with their great-grandmother. Other relatives had their own relationships with her, their own memories, their own reasons for making the trip. All of that affection had become a very loud gathering in Kentucky.
I could appreciate what the noise meant while occasionally wishing there were less of it.
The Next Day
The next day, Grandma came over to the Airbnb.
We talked for more than an hour.
That was probably the best part of the trip.
We have always been very close. Still, there was something about having that time after the party, after the effort of getting there, that made the conversation feel especially good. I had spent so much of the weekend managing movement and noise. Now I could listen to her.
We talked about her history. About coming to this country. About family and her life.
And, of course, about Grandpa.
She remembers him as a young man. That is such a simple fact, and I find it astonishing. I knew him from my place in his life. She knew him from hers, decades earlier, before he was the person I would call Grandpa.
There are people I remember largely through other people’s stories whom she knew herself. There are versions of our family that existed before I did, when the relationships I grew up taking for granted were still new or had not happened yet.
She can tell me about them because she was there.
I do not need to turn the conversation into a revelation to explain why it mattered. We were talking. She had stories to tell, and I wanted to hear them. There was time to stay with a subject.
After moving eleven people across several states, that was what I most wanted: a little while with my grandma, listening to her talk about the life that came before me.
I miss being able to talk with Grandpa. Writing about our conversations lets me revisit them, but I cannot ask him another question and hear what he says.
Here was Grandma. I could ask. She could answer. We could keep talking.
Ninety-five.
The number felt different sitting with her than it did thinking about the birthday beforehand. It belonged to someone I knew and loved, someone whose life I could still learn more about. She was telling me about it herself.
I hope I keep remembering that hour alongside the party. The crowd mattered. The celebration mattered. I am glad we gathered everyone we could.
I am also very glad I got to hear her without a thousand relatives contributing.
This is the strange privilege I have had with the women in my family. They keep going long enough that I can almost start treating it as normal.
It is not normal in any dependable sense. Ninety-five is still ninety-five. Bodies change. People disappear. A long life has losses inside it, and I would not want my affection for these women’s persistence to make any of that sound easy.
Still, there is something wonderfully stubborn about it.
The men did well too. Respectable performances all around. But, the women apparently looked at ninety and decided they had errands.
I love them for continuing to be themselves in lives that have become so long.
Not everyone gets to have a grandmother at my age. Not everyone gets to bring their own children to her ninety-fifth birthday. I know this, but sometimes I have to stop long enough to let myself understand it.
There were multiple generations in that room, overlapping in a way that will not always be possible. My children got to be there with her. I got to be there as both their father and her grandson.
For this birthday, all of those relationships still fit into the present tense.
Home
Eventually, we packed up and reversed the process.
Five children. Six adults. Two cars. Still two adults contributing nothing to the driving rotation.
I assume Dad’s original one-or-two-stop theory had undergone some revision.
Then, finally, home.
My house. My setup. My bathroom. Floors I already understood how to cross. I did not have to keep discovering whether some ordinary part of the building was going to become a problem.
And, above almost everything else, my bed.
Human beings have made art, discovered mathematics, and composed symphonies. I respect these achievements. But, getting into your own bed after several nights away with five children, thick carpet, insects, split sleeping arrangements, and a clock of uncertain spiritual status deserves serious consideration alongside them.
Civilization peaked with mattresses we already know.
I was very happy to be home.
I was even happier that we had gone.
The house was temporary. Its inconveniences are already becoming the parts we can laugh about. I expect the clock will improve considerably in the retelling.
Grandma’s birthday mattered while we were there, and it matters now.
We went because she turned ninety-five. Because she is still here. Because I wanted my children in that room, and I wanted to be in it myself. At a birthday like that, showing up feels like a way of acknowledging something I cannot quite fit into a greeting card.
Somebody is still here.
My grandma.
So, we got into two cars, stopped approximately nine thousand more times than my father anticipated, pushed through hostile carpeting, slept wherever architecture permitted, fought an airborne occupation force, and kept a cautious eye on the grandfather clock.
We filled a room in Kentucky to celebrate her.
Then, the next day, I got more than an hour with her. We talked about how she got here, about our family, about the man we both loved and still miss.
She told me stories. I listened.
That was worth the trip.
I got to be there
The room was filled with her love
We got to be there
