Well, this is strange. I just got this e-mail from my grandma, addressed to the NSGA with a single CC to me. I don't know if she sent a copy to my dad or if she meant to CC me at all but I think I should maybe keep it to myself because it might depress him. It's certainly made me sad. The letter:National Senior Games Association
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Dear Friends,
I couldn't find anything about how much the dues were in your notice to me that my membership fee was due, so I just sent you $10. I think that is what the State dues are.
Anyway, please consider the ten dollars I paid as a contribution, as I have decided to resign from the National organization. The only State Meets I ever entered were in Tulsa, and they have made so complicated for me to participate in now that I no longer go to them. I only live about forty or forty-five miles from the Meet site, but I have to pick up my packet in a suburb of Tulsa, of which I know nothing, by 2:00 p.m. and just float around until the meet starts at 6:00 PM. We used to be able to pick them up at the Meet site. Maybe that was if one were entering only one event
Time was when I would not have been daunted by that, but now I am almost 88, and my situation is totally different. I scarcely have time to swim any more, as I am so occupied with my efforts to stay in my own home now that I am a widow.
Best wishes for your worthy organization. I am sorry I delayed so long in responding and for all the inconvenience I caused.
Cordially yours,
[lampshade's gramma]
She's getting old. Grandpa died about five years ago, and I was glad to hear that one of my uncles moved back to the same town as the big house she's taking care of on her own. I was scared to hug her too hard when she was visiting a few months ago. And this is a woman with a shelf full of swimming trophies from only fifteen years ago. The subject line of that e-mail was "Resignation."
I think I will tell you a little about my grandma, okay? Her name is Verna and she was born in a log cabin in 1914 before the big farmhouse was built in the Southeast corner of Washington State. Our family lost the farm property about ten years ago, if I remember correctly. Married away. I wish I knew more details about how she met my grandfather but I hate to ask questions that would probably yeild painful answers. I know that when my grandpa was an infant, his baby carriage rolled under the wheels of a buggy and he was unharmed, "watching with wide brown eyes the gathered crowd." Amazing what you find, looking through old newspaper articles in boxes.
Anyway, the two met and he went promptly to war. Grandma became a translator and while her sweetheart was standing fuzzy-headed with his cup of coffee on the bank at Pearl Harbor, she was translating at the first United Nations meeting in San Francisco. She saved her notebooks, but her handwriting is impossible for me to read. I hope whoever gets the newspaper clippings and the notebooks and the polaroids of dead people in my Grandma's closet takes care of everything.
Grandpa hopped around islands for a while and then came home. He apparently never talked much about his war days, and I heard the Pearl Harbor story for the first and last time when we visited the USS Arizona memorial in Hawaii in 1992. I think I'm getting the date right, there. They were married in San Francisco and went directly to Bartlesville, Oklahoma to start a healthy American family, as was the fashion at the time.
I don't know how to end this diary entry. Today I gave Duder a bath and showed him his reflection in the mirror. I said "Who is that handsome turtle" and Duder nosed the mirror before shrinking back into his shell.
