Grandma

It occurred to me that once you start a blog you have to find things to blog about. This was not something that occurred to me yesterday when I started this but actually over the weeks since I decided to give this a try and I proceeded to make a short list of what I would include besides apron adventures. Grandma is the next logical topic, don't you think? It was her apron at one time, after all.

I am the eldest grandchild of many. My memories of Grandma are amazingly wonderful and no doubt different from those of my siblings and cousins because I have been around much much longer than some of them (but only a little longer than others). I also know that you can be in the same room with people, seeing and hearing the same things and take completely different things from that experience. Ask Joan, who always had a vastly different version of things than Dolores did!

My Grandma was one of my favorite people ever, and our relationship was close. However, it is not true that I was her favorite! But if you want to think that it is fine with me.

The first thing that comes to mind when I attempt to describe Angela Gianquinto Macaluso is motion. She was always doing something. Cooking, getting ready to cook, making little tiny clothes for my Barbie doll, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, fixing a broken anything, sweeping, sewing from patterns she made herself from brown paper bags, walking to church. Always, always moving and always there for Grandpa and the rest of us.

I dont remember a stereotypical warm fuzzy hugging Grandma, more like a whirwind of activity that showed love in a million ways. Her cooking was incredible, her long tables stretching from the kitchen through the middle room alllll the way to the front windows for holidays. Or sometimes just Sundays. I remember her hair escaping from those hairpins constantly, something that often happened to Aunt Carole on a regular basis. Wisps of soft white hair.
As a child I know she had a special way of making us all feel special. A touch of a cheek or a card with a lottery ticket inside. Her nicknames for us (Thad Boy, Porky, Pee Pants). With her great grandchildren, those lucky enough to know her she was Nona! who loved them unconditionally.

As I got older she and I talked a lot. I mean really talked about important things that surprise people when I tell them about. She talked to me about sex and told me off color jokes, we laughed about husbands. She encouraged me to reach higher in life to finish college. We talked about college when she went back to school in her 70s. I read her assignments and marveled at her ability to tell a story or write a poem.

She was more than a grandma, she was talented woman who was too busy for too long to share a lot of her talents; I suppose like many women of her generation. But, what she did very well was instill a dedication of what family is in all of us. I can see her putting just a little bit of pasta water in the sauce to stretch it so we all got enough.

Now, that is Grandma love.