grandmother

These Here Are Crazy Times 2

farhana — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Every so often, I’ll be on the phone with my ninety-one-year-old grandma and she’ll reveal a tidbit I’ve never heard before. The most recent revelation—admittedly several years ago now—was about her only serious boyfriend before meeting my grandpa. He hadn’t been interested in religion, and my gram just couldn’t envision a future with such a man, much as she loved him.

My grandpa, a theology professor who fit the spiritual bill, has been gone for a decade, but while I’m always working to pry memories from Gram’s Alzheimer’s infected brain, I’ve got a nice little book full of grandpa’s handwritten notes about every major event of his life. The once-blank journal contains 365 questions about childhood, marriage, children, and aging; always an educator, he filled it out like a homework assignment and gave it to me before he died.

Most people aren’t lucky enough to have such compendiums of information about our loved ones after they’re gone. Even fewer would know what to do with it. Sarah May’s zine, These Here Are Crazy Times 2, about her late grandmother, Martha Luzier Birdsall, is filled with stories about working in a coal mine, getting married in the Methodist church, and losing a brother in WWII, many of which bear resemblance to my own family history. Several years before her death, Sarah May’s grandma gave each of her grandchildren a folder full of poetry and family history, but it wasn’t until years after she’d been gone that Sarah May started poring over her grandma’s personal stories about losing everything but a yard full of turkeys and a big vegetable garden during the Great Depression and dating an enlisted guy who showed her his incomplete divorce paperwork as an afterthought.

Some people have a knack for storytelling, and it’s clear that Sarah May inherited hers from her grandmother. Pick up this small booklet for stories about how things have changed—and how, when it comes to some things like dismissive doctors and broken hearts, they haven’t changed at all.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 18th 2011

My things, my grand-mother’s things

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Sarah Pinder

Bits of String Press

One of the wonderful things about living in this digital age is that you don’t have to be famous to be a real artist or a writer. You can create your vision, and then get it out into the world through the Internet if you're so inclined. And once online, you don't ever have to throw anything you create away. It can all be stored... forever.

Enter Sarah Pinder: a Toronto essayist who, for a decade now, has been a maker of zines, self-published works. And for about two bucks (Canadian currency), you can own and enjoy her brief yet insightful pondering My things, my grand-mother’s things.

What I like about Pinder’s prose is that it’s highly relatable. True, I can relate as a woman with a Depression-era grandparent who hoarded trinkets away, and as one who helped to clear those objects out of attics and basements after that seemingly ancient relative had passed on. And I can relate to her take on twenty-something nostalgia: the place when we’re not quite ready to be grown up and throw away our childhood things.

But most, if not all, people can relate to her rather haunting description of how the spaces we inhabit shape and trap our memories, not because of their own qualities, but because they become “repositories” for the things we collect along the way: “My grandmother lived in a house that was a constant archive of identity... Everything in this house was a touchstone, a trigger to summon memory... And regardless of how broken or worn things were, my grandparents’ Depression aesthetic meant that nothing was thrown out...”

This reviewer had two sets of Depression-surviving grandparents and observed two distinct reactions to the crisis. One set decided that: well, if they overcame that, they could overcome anything. They lived out their days without saving much of anything. The other parent's father became a hoarder. This man, who as a boy had shot and skinned squirrels for supper so as not to starve, secretly tucked away mountains of seemingly meaningless household items: camera film, new pens, etc. He was never content to have just one of anything after the Depression ended, and cleaning out his closets yielded hundreds, if not thousands, of things-treasures to him-that told tales of a man obsessed with getting to the bottom of how things work, and a man who lived in fear of owning absolutely nothing.

Pinder’s essay serves as a wonderful launch pad for this kind of reminiscing if you’re game. Her words seem genuine and her doodles–somewhat resembling the sketches of Shel Silverstein–might remind you of any number of seemingly frivolous objects your ancestors once collected and then subsequently left behind. “(I)t seemed callous to get rid of objects from a space that held such meaning for me, regardless of the fact that the objects I had were not the touchstones I’d hoped to use to recreate my grandmother’s life before illness,” Pinder reveals.

For more information or to purchase any of Pinder’s zines, visit her online hub Bits of String Press. My things, my grand-mother’s things was given as a lecture in October, 2009 at the Ontario College of Art and Design during a symposium called “Collectorama,” which focused on people’s obsessions with the act of collecting.

Written by: Rachel Moehl, August 31st 2010

Grandmothers Counsel the World: Women Elders Offer Their Vision for Our Planet

admin — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:49:00 +0000

By Carol Schaefer

Trumpeter Books

The year is 2007. We can still see the impressive footsteps of Betty Friedman, Margaret Sanger, and Gloria Steinem in the sands of time, yet women, as a whole, seem more concerned with which pop icon has fallen from grace, or how their Coach bag stands up against the other soccer moms' Gucci one. I don't carry a handbag, and I don't watch much TV, yet this book was a sobering and gentle call to action. "Grounding" is the best descriptive word that I can place on this book.

At the beginning of the book, I was informed that “When the grandmothers from the four directions speak, a new time is coming.” The fulfillment began in 1986 with a sacred fire outside the United Nations Building, ignited by a chief of the Iroquois Nation. From that fire, a torch was carried through 62 countries in 86 days by runners. The fire now resides in New Mexico, continuously burning. It traveled once more in 2004 to spark the meeting of thirteen grandmothers, called the “keepers of their tribe’s teachings from original times.”

Each of the grandmother's give a personal account of their lives. These wise women saw some hard times, but it was throughout these times that they received great revelations. Their biographies resonate with warmth and compassion; their photos define true beauty. Their simple lives and passion for healing their people and the Earth are a loving call to action for every woman. Their "Guidance for Our Times" (Part Two of the book) includes chapters on "Prophecies," "Women's Wisdom," "Sacred Relations," "Our Mother Earth," "Oppression," "Nature's Pharmacy" and "Prayer." "Prayer is the greatest thing I have as I walk upon this earth," Grandmother Agnes says. "I am nothing without The Creator."

Author Carol Schaefer, a well-known journalist, has done well with this compilation. Not terribly poetic, but straight to the facts. The contents more than make up for that, however.

Can Grandmothers Counsel the World actually change the world? The concepts within the book could, but probably not anytime soon. If you take the time to read this book, I guarantee that it will press you to see the world through the eyes of indigenous wisdom, and perhaps ground you like it did me.

Written by: Gina Hobbs, April 26th 2007