Grandmamaid

Today is my grandmother's birthday. She's not alive anymore, but an April 27th can't go by without me thinking about her. Grandmamaid was an icon. She wouldn't have seen that in herself and many who knew her would likely come up with many other words to describe her. But icon is mine (and probably some of my siblings' and cousins' too).

Grandmamaid raised 5 kids. She worked at the Budget Rent-A-Car counter. She found true love at 70. She was a member of a young men's bowling league. She mostly wore tracksuits. And had a best friend named Myrtle. 

When she laughed her whole body shook.

She was massively superstitious - adhering to popular beliefs or, as we have discovered decades later, her very own concoctions. Holding money at midnight on New Year's Eve, bagging a cabbage for good luck, never ever putting shoes on a bed or hanging anything on a doorknob. 

When Annamae (she wasn't named Grandmamaid at birth surprisingly) was a teenager her mother would turn out the front lights at a socially-acceptable hour even if she wasn't home yet. She'd stay out on the town while her neighborhood assumed she was the good girl at home in bed.

I remember fondly overnights with Grandmamaid before she got remarried. Just me. And her. (Which is meaningful when I had five siblings and eleven cousins to contend with). We'd eat dinner in front of the t.v., flip through family photo albums, watch the late night shows, and make up stories about the neighbors. I can still hear conservative talk radio playing in the background as I fell asleep on the twin bed in her guest room.

She would drive her granddaughters to the beach in Jersey. Correction - she would drive us down the shore. (No respectable Philadelphian says "to the beach.") Before we would pull out of her condo parking lot in her light gray Oldsmobile, she would reach into the glove box and uncover a 1980s Chippendale's air freshener and toss it over the mirror. "Can't go down the shore without the boys."

Happy 93rd birthday, you icon, you.

I would usually take this space to tie the above story to my coaching work, but this time I'm just going to let it be and retire to the hammock with a cool glass of sangria on the start of this warm Amman weekend.

I'll just say this. Find Grandmamaid in you.