My five-generation photo

The earliest memories I have of my great-grandmother were made during the weeks she spent in our house just after my baby sister, Megan Marie, was born. In my mind she arrived like Mary Poppins with an umbrella and a sense of order that was like a foreign language to us. Winnie, who only had one daughter (my mother’s mother) must have had similar feelings about us. Megan Marie was the seventh baby in eight and half years and the delivery had not been an easy one.

With our mother on bedrest and our father departing for work before the sun ever rose, that September, it was Winnie, one of eleven children herself, who fed us breakfast and assuaged worries I and my brother had about the start of a new school year. She knew how to help when help was needed.

Even though she only lived about 14 hours away, we didn’t see much of her growing up. Every year she sent each of her great-grandchildren a birthday card with a crisp dollar bill and one year I spent a few days with her in her apartment in Oakland. She took me to the circus and laughed harder at the clowns than any of the children. She also took me to the zoo and paid the few extra dollars it cost to ride a giant tortoise. At night I slept in her bed with her and I remembered how strange and paper-like her bare feet and the overwhelming aroma of her cold cream.

As a teenager, I loved hearing her stories about the movie theater she helped operate with her parents and listening to her play the piano. I also bragged to everyone I knew when she went back to school in her eighties to learn how to use a word processor so she could write a book about her family. That book, self-published, when she was ninety-one, is one of my most treasured possessions.

We had the opportunity to visit her this summer when we drove across the country and as I’ve said before the moments shared between my children and their great-great grandmother are as much as I’ve ever wanted out of life. I wish I could have been there on January 14th as she celebrated her 104th birthday and I hope that the group home she lives in now indulged her with the breakfast she’s been eating as long as I can remember: Mountain Dew and M&Ms.