THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 25, 1994 TAG: 9409240157
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
I had the great good fortune as a boy of having two grandmothers. One was small, dark and active, of Scots-Irish Canadian descent. The other was large, white-haired and, as the consequence of a stroke, generally seated in a wheelchair; she was of German ancestry. My grandmothers really only had one thing in common:
Whenever I showed up, they were glad to see me.
Honoring these giving ladies and their peers, Virginia poet Nikki Giovanni has brought forth a glowing anthology of filial celebrations titled Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories about the Keepers of Our Traditions (Henry Holt, 168 pp., $15.95). It is a bright blazing fireplace of a book. But the informing fuel for these enduring flames is unabashed truth, not sentimentality.
``Grandmothers, it seems, are a lot like spinach or asparagus or brussels sprouts,'' writes Giovanni, ``something good for us that we appreciate more in reflection than in actuality. We were all young when we met these women; we were teenagers by the time we learned to resent their easy, almost casual way of telling us what to do and how to do it. On top of that we had to hear how they and our parents had done everything better.''
But they were always on our side.
The poet solicited contributions on the subject from her friends, including such famous veterans as Gwendolyn Brooks and relative beginners such as Dorothy A. Schueler, a member of the writer's workshop at the Warm Hearth Retirement Community near Blacksburg.
Here are memories of African-American grandmothers, Native American grandmothers, Jewish grandmothers, Asian grandmothers and grandmothers without any particular ethnic portfolio at all; hale, disabled and dying grandmothers; open, closed and caring grandmothers. One well-remembered matriarch of these pages was a licensed steamboat captain.
In such lovingly rendered specifics there is universality - I recognize both my grandmothers here, and you will undoubtedly encounter elements of yours, too.
``Grandmothers,'' writes Mildred Bollinger Andrews, ``are the ones children go to for love, for stories, for comfort when they've been scolded, for guidance, and, of course, for treats.''
Especially for treats. They feed us. When Deidre Hair recounts the kitchen enterprises of her grandmother, I'm borne back irresistibly to savory range rings of yore:
``Chuck roast with potatoes, onions, and carrots cooked in the same pan. Liver. Country-fried steak. Pork chops. Mashed potatoes. Green beans. Best of all, her fried chicken and white gravy every Sunday at noon.''
Among those asked to write for this book was Kathleen Angle, an English teacher at Cox High School in Virginia Beach. Angle's offering, ``A Grandmotherless Child,'' tells of her meeting with a long-departed grandmother through a book that the outwardly forbidding old woman once owned. Tipped into the pages of The Report of the Secretary of Agriculture 1890 were clues to the sensibilities of a bygone person named Janie Brown Bailey.
``The decaying pieces of newspaper articles called me,'' she writes. ``Tattered pieces of poetry, death notices, World War I stories, lists of war dead, words seventy-five to one hundred years old became tangled inside me and blended with the mental picture of a petite lady I never knew except in photographs. So many questions.''
Belatedly, they bond.
``I was trying to discover my grandmother,'' explains Angle from her Virginia Beach home, ``and why I have inside me feelings I can't put into words when I drive through rural South Carolina, where she lived. There's a sense of timelessness along those back roads. The homes and fields and tobacco barns don't change.
``There's continuity there.''
She finds Grand Mothers to be beautiful testimony.
``It's magical,'' Angle says. ``It has miracles in it. I hope anyone reading it will find the magic and the miracles and the unique affection of grandmothers.''
All of which points up their terribly temporal preciousness. Grandmothers are irreplaceable. If you still have one, give her a hug. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket illustration by GEORGE PRATT
by CNB