My Visit with Grandma Taylor, or How I Became Part of the Family

By Jon Maney:

Not long before Grandma Taylor was killed by a car while crossing the road in July of 1970, I stayed with her. I can’t remember how many days exactly--just a week or two at most. I had just turned fourteen and my mother thought I could help her around the house. Grandma Taylor had spent part of the year with us and was unhappy to be away from her own home. Everyone seemed worried about her and wondered how long she could stay there alone.

Living with us, Grandma Taylor had been subdued. I had hoped that when my brother Dan and I fought, which was often, she would do something to break it up. Instead, she was silent. It wasn’t her home, she told my mother; she wasn’t comfortable making or enforcing rules there. I remember watching television with her when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, and being puzzled when she had nothing much to say. Here was a woman who had grown up with horses and buggies, who had lived through two world wars, who’d gone from using kerosene to electric lights, who’d seen silent, black and white films evolve to Technicolor talkies, who’d raised six kids through the Depression, and who now watched a fuzzy figure in a space suit bounce down and declare that this was a giant leap for mankind. I looked at her and her face was impassive.

Later, back in her own home, she was different. She was in command, cleaning up, giving stuff away, taking charge of herself. I remember that clearly, and the fact that as her guest now I was the quiet one.

For those of us who were there, her house in Waterloo evokes strong memories. We recall its smell, an odor that for me could be summed up in one word: old. The place reeked of age, of times past, meals past, of all the human history that she and Grandpa Taylor had brought into that house along with the relics from their married lives and their kids and the long-dead relatives that made the place such a wonderful, vast museum. I can remember the heft of the front door, the feel of the cool doorknob, the sensation of entering the always frigid hallway with its steep Victorian staircase, tall ceiling, and light fixture with that weird, multicolored glass star that served as its globe. From the hall you entered the dining room with its big, golden oak sideboard, round oak table and set of T-back chairs, and a lumpy, overstuffed sofa with hairy upholstery that felt and looked like a bum’s stubble. To the right was a roll-top desk and a mouse-colored 50s tv with a tiny screen. Next to that was the telephone and an old tabletop radio tuned to WSFW and Paul Harvey every day at noon.

Then to the kitchen: down an oak ramp into what was almost as strange as a cave with a monster inside--a big, brooding cook stove with a deep blue, steel stove pipe that rose up and arched like a dinosaur’s neck with a knife stuck through it. Just a damper to control the draft, but it looked violent to me.

Past the kitchen, a gray, murky laundry room with floor to ceiling wainscoting and a wringer washer, and that infamous grate on the floor that some of us boys had used, from time to time, to pee in.

This is just the beginning. There is so much more I could describe in every room in that house, all the way up to the cobwebby cupola. But it would take too long. So I’ll mention just the things that figured powerfully for me in that visit with Grandma Taylor in the time just before she died, before the house was broken up and all this became a memory.

I’ll also mention what I was like at fourteen. I was wary of adults. I didn’t trust most of them. But Grandma Taylor was different. She was from a different time, and, from my perspective, she seemed to be from a different planet.

She probably thought the same about me, too.

There was a long, dull silence after my mother left and drove back to Geneva. When the front door closed it had sounded like the lid on a tomb. Grandma Taylor sat in a chair and began sorting through papers on the dining room table. She was wearing an old-fashioned pair of gold, rimless glasses and her long, silver hair was pinned tightly at the back of her head. Outside it was sunny. I could hear the shouts and cries of kids playing somewhere in the warm July afternoon. I looked away from the wavy window glass and said, “You sure have a lot of antiques, Grandma.”

She looked at me. Grandma Taylor could smile, but this time she didn‘t. “No,“ she said. “I don’t think so.”

“You do,“ I insisted. “All this stuff, like this table.”

Her glasses seemed to magnify her watery eyes. “This was a wedding present. From 1915. It’s not an antique.”

Give me a break, I thought. That was ancient.

All afternoon I tried to find something to talk about. I looked through dusty old Life magazines and watched her arrange boxes of photographs and papers. She said she was going through things and didn’t want to leave a mess behind. She was writing names on the backs of some of the pictures. She was also writing the names of my aunts and uncles on the stuff she wanted them to have. After I finished with the magazines I started on the funnies page of the newspaper. At one point when she looked up I told her I liked the comic strip Pogo, but then she read it out loud and it fell flat.

I tried to explain the humor, how Pogo was often an allegory for the political scene in Washington. That flopped, too. Then I told her I liked the quality of the drawing. She seemed unconvinced.

“Would you like some Fritos,” she asked finally. She pronounced it “fri-toes,” instead of “free-tos.” She returned from the kitchen with a small bag, opened it, and offered me just three or four of the corn curls. I could have eaten two of the bags. Then she put it back.

Later we had supper. The food was really good. Fresh vegetables, and plenty of them. After I helped her wash the dishes and dry them with the towels that hung on the oak commode she kept in the kitchen, we went to the dining room. The evening was crawling along and I felt increasingly hopeless. My attempts at conversation stalled because we seemed to have nothing in common. Even though she had stayed with us earlier that year, most of the time she had talked to my mother. And even though I’d seen her at family reunions and the times she and Grandpa Taylor had visited our house, we were still, more or less, strangers.

What changed everything was the photographs. As we sat down on the couch in the dining room, I asked her to show them to me.

She did. Box after box.

We started in the 19th century, with the daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, cartes de visites, tintypes, and cabinet photographs. She introduced me to each person: Nancy Borthwick, Leonard Baker, and then their son, Byron, who became her father. There were Carsons, Motts, and Youngs. She showed me the pictures of Byron’s wife, Kate, who was her mother. About nearly everyone, Grandma Taylor had a story. I loved listening to her. It was as if the dam had broken, and in her voice lived all these generations of people who were her family. I was sitting close to her and we balanced the boxes on our knees. The sun went down and still we were only at 1904, the date of the blue, cyanotype photograph of her sister.

The photo was arresting. It showed a young girl of about my age standing outdoors, wearing a long, dark skirt and a white shirtwaist. Her face had a haunted expression. Her eyes were deep set and stared searchingly into the camera. Perhaps it was this, combined with the rich, watery tones, that made me stare back at her just as deeply.

“Oh, that is Ruth,” she said. Then she told me the story that Aunt CB has written and will perhaps one day appear in this blog if it hasn‘t already. If you haven’t read it, then I won’t spoil it, as it will draw you close to what Grandma Taylor and her brother Adin were like in their kindness to their dying sister. By the time Grandma Taylor got to the end of Ruth’s life, with Ruth in her arms and hearing the bells, both Grandma and I were in tears.

What a reservoir of feeling Grandma had for these people. You wouldn’t know it from the outside. She was not a “touchy-feely” person, the kind who said “I love you“ or gave you a hug. But listening to her it became clear that she’d come from a loving family. She told me about her father--how he, a poor farmer, believing in her brains and ability, helped send her to Cortland Normal, the teachers’ college, so that she would have a career. And she told stories about Adin and her little sister Lil, about life on the farm with its hard work and many opportunities for fun as well.

It was a relief to see Grandma Taylor as a sister, daughter, and mother, not just as a stooped, elderly lady who said quaint things like “land sakes,“ and “dontcha know.”

Next she showed me her college graduation picture. Wearing a white dress, she held the diploma, a slim, attractive woman with thick, upswept hair and pince-nez glasses perched on her nose. And then the ones from her wedding, and suddenly 1915 didn’t seem quite so long ago as I saw her as she was then, young and looking ahead at her life.

As we went through a box that held Taylor family pictures, I reached for one that had a cover. Opening it, I saw a sheet of thin, almost translucent paper with creepy cobweb designs on it. I peeled it back and was shocked to see a young girl laid out on a board that had been placed over the seats of two chairs. Her eyes were sunken and closed.

I wanted to shut the cover but could not look away. Grandma said it was Mildred, who died of scarlet fever. No one outside the family would come near her for fear of the disease, so it was up to her mother, father, my grandfather (who was only fifteen then), and her other brothers and sisters to prepare her for burial. They dug her grave in the orchard close to Woodlawn, the family farm.

It must have been grim work.

That night I went to bed in the little room off to the side of the dining room. There was a lumpy bed there, and it took a long time for me to sleep. The beams of passing cars on West Main Street showed through the window and lit up the thistle designs on the old wallpaper. They were big thistles, and I seemed to see things between them in the dark. I closed my eyes and saw Ruth, after whom my mother was named, and who, according to a psychic Grandma had spoken to once at a fair many years before, watched over her. And I saw the cobwebbed paper that lay over poor Mildred like a shroud.

There was a noise in the kitchen. Frightened, I got up in the dark and felt my way along the walls, down the ramp, until I found the light switch and there stood Grandma. She was wearing a cotton night gown, with her hair down in a long coil, her mouth all sunken in because her teeth were out.

I nearly screamed.

I told her I wanted a glass of water. “Not that one,” she warned, as I reached for the tumbler with her teeth in it.

Then she smiled, sort of.

After that, I guess we both seemed to adjust. I helped her with the laundry, squeezed the water from the clothes with the crank wringer, and hung them outside. We worked together in the garden, pulling weeds and picking lettuce and, as I recall, hoeing up some radishes. Then Aunt Barb visited and we went grocery shopping. I was finally helping her. Most of the time Grandma was quiet, especially when we were working, and I got used to the long silences that would’ve bothered me before. Time slowed. I could go through the rooms in the house and find things that I had questions about (Arnon’s wings insignia, the victrola, the pressed oak clock repaired with a tin hand Arnon had made, Grandpa’s calendar behind the door to my bedroom that featured a lady in a see-through negligee, kerosene lamps, clarinets, and so on. Grandma answered all my questions either briefly or with a story about someone in the family.

Once, while standing on the worn spot in front of the kitchen sink doing the dishes, I heard something I never thought Grandma would say. She had dropped a can on the floor and said quietly, but decisively, “Shit.” Now I know that doesn’t sound like much, but she had always struck me as being such an old lady, and a proper one at that, so I was surprised. And then there was the time she walked from one end of the kitchen to the other, all the while maintaining a remarkably long and tuneful fart.

I began to feel a change in me. As I mentioned before, at fourteen I was not an especially trusting kid. I thought most adults were mean. I had grown up with screaming and yelling, so the calm that Grandma managed to radiate was at first discomforting. I didn’t know what it meant. Staying with her, I learned to relax, and I found myself drawn to her and her serenity. Her friends would call and she would sit at the phone listening to their problems. She was a sympathetic listener, and when she said something, it mattered.

Looking back, I honestly don’t know if Grandma cared much for me. I probably was a burden to her during the time I stayed there, but if I was, she never made me feel that way. She was a very good cook and I ate simple meals that I loved because so much of the food was fresh and from her garden. We watched no television, but sat together at night reading books or magazines. Sometimes we went out to the side porch where she would say hello to her neighbors as they walked by. Grandma never said anything particularly affectionate to me, but I felt accepted and cared for by her, and that was plenty.

She was happy to be in her home, yet I believe she knew she wouldn’t be there for long. I can’t say whether she’d had a premonition that she would die on July 24th, in just a few weeks, but it wouldn’t surprise me. She was that kind of person. While I was there she spent a lot of time arranging things so that my aunts and uncles would find her house in order. I think that says something about her state of mind.

I also know, because of our talks, that Grandma was by nature a teacher. Of course she had trained as one, and she had, unfortunately, been wooed from the classroom, but the kind of teaching she did was constant, nevertheless. I remember her telling me how to count in German, and when we worked in the garden, she would not only show me how to use the tools, but why this or that method was best. She loved history. She never seemed annoyed by my questions about how life used to be. She answered every time with patience and interest. She was deeply connected to her family and was happy to find an occasion to remember them. Her face would light up as we went through the boxes of photographs, and I can only hope that my pleasure in seeing them and learning about these long ago relations gave her some satisfaction.

In the course of a life, certain people try to teach you how to be a human being. I would like to think that Grandma Taylor taught me something about the inaudible language of the heart, the way she made me feel welcome and cared for without having to say so.

This, happily, is the spirit of the Taylor/Baker Cousins Blogspot. It is kept alive by those of us who contribute stories and photographs to these pages. Though we live far away from one another and don’t meet as often as we should, we keep the spirit of this family alive by coming together here, to rediscover who we are.