Generations

I love thinking about my grandparents. They’re all gone now, too soon, of course, to answer every question I should’ve asked when they were alive if I’d been paying better attention. But I love their lives; I love remembering them. I am made up of them, in my substance. They echo across every aspect of my life.

I have patchwork memories of one of my grandfathers before his Alzheimers set in when I was very young. Before that, he was an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. He was from Pittsburgh and, according to everyone who loved him, very quiet. My other grandfather was a writer with a wicked sense of humor. He was the only person over the age of 10 who could truly pull off a bucket hat, and he had a collection of them, which he rotated, some days wearing his “hundred-dollar hat,” other days his “million-dollar hat.” When I was six or seven I asked him if I could have his million-dollar hat, and he said, “You can have the five-dollar one.” I still have it, somewhere.

There are so many family stories about my paternal grandparents—million-dollar hat Grandpa, and Grandma, who was a nurse, and whose eyes lit up for you whenever you shared good news with her. She’d grab your hands and just beam. They were glamorous and funny and full of stories, exactly the guests you’d want at a dinner party. The house they lived in during my childhood was one of the most magical places of my life. After two hours in the car (which seemed like forever as a kid), my sister and I would leap out and try to beat each other through the garden and over the paving stones and up the brick steps to the glass door, full of giddy joy waiting for Grandma to walk into the kitchen smiling at us. She always looked at us that way, every year that our lives overlapped.

She passed away at the beginning of the pandemic, which meant that we couldn’t gather together for her till a year and a half later. I knew I wouldn’t be able to say anything at her memorial, so I wrote a poem for her instead. Part of it said, “Your spidery cursive handwriting / the old kitchen table where we all ate together / walking Duke of Gloucester Street with you at Christmas, / laughing our way down waterslides in the summer, / that time we were caught in a sunset riptide at Ocracoke and you swam us to shore, / Louis Armstrong crooning on the stereo of the house in Kingsmill, / all the stories of happy past times that I’ve always wished I could’ve seen, / and 54 years of you and Grandpa showing the rest of us what love meant.” Those words didn’t feel like enough—they didn’t feel like the magnitude of thank you’s she deserved.

And then Nana. She was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known, quietly self-deprecating, and she was easy to be with, easy to listen to. Setting Holland Road in non-coastal Maine was a tribute to her childhood in Augusta, and she was proud of being a “Mainer.” She liked very hot coffee, swimming, and art history. In 2016, the year before she died, we sat down with her and went through old photo albums—growing up in Augusta within view of the state capitol; lobster bakes on the coast; a picnic with friends and with Grandpa when they were dating; and later that same trip, film footage of the two of them on their honeymoon in Bermuda. Her memory for the present wasn’t as strong by then, but she remembered the past in perfect, illuminating detail.

Of course she paid attention, though. She was a watercolor artist, and after she died, her collection was so big that there was enough for each of her six children and multiple grandchildren to have several paintings each. Most are New England settings—the rocky “Down East” coast, rhododendrons blooming outside an old white house, the pond on the Christmas tree farm where my parents lived in Connecticut. Her work makes me think of Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for living a life”: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

And Nana did, through light and color, through her patient creation of beautiful things that will now carry down through generations.

My mom—the youngest of Nana and Grandpa’s six—had the idea to use one of her paintings as the background art for Holland Road’s cover. I don’t know how I didn’t think of it sooner. It immediately felt right, seeing the setting of my own book through her eyes. Her work is now forever entwined with my own, and with my sister’s, who designed the cover. It’s a collaboration that crosses generations, that bridges death.

All of my grandparents are in this story, one way or another, and some of that is in ways that only I and the others who loved them will recognize. Some of it is unconscious—because how do you measure love?

When I think of the people I love, this quote comes to mind: “And still the box is not full,” from John Steinbeck’s dedication to East of Eden.

But that’s one of my favorite things about writing: I get to spend the rest of my life filling the box, to say thank you.