Random Shit that Makes Me Think of Both Summer and My Grandmother

Yes, a pretty random topic. So sue me. It’s hot, it’s summer, and it’s been ten years and two weeks since Josie passed. And these are the things I remember on a day where I don’t have to think about how quickly I would need to get out the past due Sam’s Club orders if the product finally clears Quality Assurance (work related, obviously).


Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice made in blender. Most of us just plop it into a pitcher and stir relentlessly. Josie figured a blender would (obviously) work more quickly. Saved by Technology. What was interesting was what you wound up with was a great deal of ‘Whipped Orange Froth’ before you actually got to Actual Orange Juice. Similar to when you pour a beer with too much head. Not that it was a bad thing, unless what you wanted was Actual Orange Juice. You’d need to wait about twenty minutes before you got to drink that.


Incidentally, her’s was the only household I knew of (although I’d today wager many grandmothers of her era did too) that had actual porcelain cooked egg bowls. These little, short cups that your boiled egg could stand in within the shell. So if you soft cooked the egg, you just chiseled the top of the shell off, scooped open the solid white, and you had this little dunking cup of yolk for your toast.


Old School Coffee Percolator. Until the last couple of years she lived on her, Josie insisted on making coffee with an old school percolator. So, inevitably, the sounds of waking up in the morning was one of two options: 1) Josie coming home from church (a hardcore catholic, she went every morning) and starting the coffee. 2) While Prof. was still mentally capable, if he woke up while Josie was at church, he’d turn on the radio news, make his English muffin with marmalade, and then he’d start the coffee percolator. Probably no one nowadays knows how loud a percolator is, since most of us are used to the near-silent editions that were cloned and adapted from the ‘60s invention of the Mr. Coffee. There’s a tremendous amount of hissing and bubbling. It sounds like what you’d imagine H.R. Giger’s Aliens might sound like when making a mating call. The CBS radio always had this news music that ran at the top of the hour in the morning that always makes me think of Prof. but that’s for another time (we’ll talk about match books and White Owl cigars if we do).


Bony Kisses. Josie was nothing if not an overtly affectionate old lady. She would smooch her grand kids any chance she could get. But she was notorious for a certain type of very air-tight, jaw-first type of kiss, where you could almost feel the teeth behind her lips against yours even more than the lips themselves.


Plastic Bathing Caps. She wore them whenever she went for a swim, and those that know our family, knows that Josie took us for a swim. Every. Single. Day. Well, maybe not Sundays. So the familiar smell of “Made in Hong Kong” floral printed rubber is indelibly connected to both summertime and my grandmother. Josie pretty much taught me to swim from the age of two. Granted, I had ‘professional’ instructors from the lifeguards at Josie’s town pool. But the fundamentals were from Josie, who taught us how to practice rotary breathing--a fancy term for putting your face in the water and taking it out for air--how to dive, how to kick. But, of course, when you’re two years old, you can’t comprehend any of that, so instead she just took you into the pool, carried you and dunked you up and down and chanted ‘Washing machine! Washing machine!’ as she splashed you about. Somewhere in my parents basement, there may still survive some 8mm film of me, at 6 years old, wearing Josie’s rubber bathing cap, performing my ‘Chinese Diver Routine’. It consisted of me marching up to the edge of the pool, clasping my hands in front of me like the plastic figure on the ‘Mousetrap’ game, and flopping sort-of-head-first into the pool.


Sunfish and Perch Off a Dock. Josie was surprisingly unafraid of going off on gross, boy-oriented excursions, not the least of which involve my cousin’s John’s memories of Josie taking him ‘Toading’ (catching frogs) in the back fields behind their house. When he said he wanted to find some frogs, she didn’t flinch, just grabbed a bucket and some crummy shoes, and away they went. I was by no means quite so ‘boyish’ (as a bit more artsy lad, I was far more given to books and drawing pictures), but everyone went fishing. Mind you, at 5 years old, I my rod consisted of a run of twine nailed to a dowel rod, with a plumbing washer tied on to use for a sinker. But she drove us up to State Street behind the Graves House which Prof. and Josie used to rent from, took us to the dock that landed on their old back yard, and you fished until the carton of worms were used up, or the mosquitoes attacked in battalions rather than platoons. It was always catch and release, since we never caught anything more than fresh water perch (which still populate the St. Lawrence in the millions) and the odd Sunfish. Maybe a small mouth rock bass. One time my brother tried to catch a carp which managed to swim all the way up to the shallow river shores by the dock, but it nearly took him off the boards, and broke his reel. Josie, of course was generally in charge of a lot of the guttier aspects of the operation. At five, I couldn’t hook a worm for shit, much less get a fish off a hook, but none of this ever stopped the old lady. She’d lived on the river for over 40 years by that point. None of this irked her.


Finding Prayer Books or Rosary Beads in every desk drawer, junk drawer, night table or mail nook in the house. Josie wasn’t so old school that she had a problem converting to the non-latin mass, but she was old school enough to still call the Third Person in the Trinity the Holy Ghost (even though, as youngsters the term ‘ghost’ wigged us out, no matter if you put the term Holy in front of it or not). She was also, fortunately, not preachy enough to speak the Decalogue aloud if she was busy at her rosary. She did however insist on the Bedtime Prayer, with its dubiously ‘uplifting’ passage: “If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take”. ‘Cos that helps kids fall asleep really well. Josie’s faith was simple, the clear result of a thoroughly Sicilian upbringing, and little more. As an atheist, the one item of real value that our catholic background can carry with me is, at least, Josie’s pervasive sense of the Mystery. If there is one thing the catholics can score points on, it’s the enduring belief that the unknowable in the Universe deserves legitimate awe. And rather than try to over-define their sense of God, the more poetic treatment of life and reality as, fundamentally a Mystery, is a mind-set that, even as a non-believer, carries a certain amount of usefulness.