“Grandma, do you know anyone who was in a tornado?” I asked. I had just seen The Wizard of Oz for the first time.
“No,” she said. Then sensing my disappointment, she added, “But I have a friend who saw a tornado once.”
“But was she in it?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” she said again. “I wish I knew someone who had been, so I could tell you about it!”
I slumped in the seat of her car, thinking about tornadoes.
“Look at all that traffic on the other side of the freeway,” she pointed out.
A true Californian at the age of probably 5 or 6, I pleaded, “Is there another way we can go home when it’s time?”
“Yes,” she said. “We’ll go a different way.”
And I felt better. I think she did too.
It was a little thing.
I don’t remember where we were going. I don’t even remember for sure that those two topics were discussed consecutively on the same car ride.
But I do remember how Grandma tried to make me happy in our conversations. She would often point out something of interest to me. She also often asked me what I thought about things and what I was doing in life.
As I grew older, I no longer needed to know about someone getting swirled through a tornado, but I did have a lot on my mind and in my life.
And Grandma knew how to highlight it all.
Every time I saw her, we would have at least one individual conversation. She would seek me out in the crowd of family members to ask me questions. (I’m finding out as an adult that she did this for everyone.)
She wanted to know if it was difficult to learn to play the flute in 6th grade after playing the piano my whole life. She wanted to see where I decided to place my nativity set in 8th grade.
She always wanted to know what I was reading. If she had read it, we loved to discuss the story. If she hadn’t, she wanted to know if it was worth reading.
It was a little thing.
She remembered little details. Of the dozens of family members she had, she somehow remembered that my cousin and I had a love for the color purple. And she made sure we both received purple folders at the family reunion.
Little things. But she remembered them.
When I married and then later became a mother, her gift of noticing and remembering extended to my husband and children. She knew their details, and she cared.
This is when life got hard; when the challenge of learning the flute was a distant memory. This was when children became mysteriously sick, when jobs were lost, when family was difficult.
And she prayed for me and my family. And she checked in.
Little things. But so big.
She remembered details, and she wrote about those details in her handwritten Christmas and birthday cards. She learned how to follow her grandchildren on Instagram so she could stay up to date with even more details.
She got down on her hands and knees to get to know my children when they were toddlers. We all rushed to her 80-something-year-old body and said, “No! You don’t have to get down on the ground!”
But she hopped down and up anyway, because her people mattered to her.
Little things. But challenging things she chose to do.
In my one-on-one conversations with Grandma, she was always amazed by the things I was doing. I was a brilliant mother, wife, daughter, writer, pianist… whatever we were talking about. But it was sincere. She chose to admire, and I walked a little taller after each conversation with her.
She chose to admire my children as well, and I always saw them with fresh eyes after seeing what she loved about them.
When our foreign exchange student, Caroline, lived with us, Grandma also took her aside to learn all about her. And when Grandma passed away 10 years later, Caroline mourned too — halfway around the world.
Little things. But lasting.
When my little brother Darren was small, she knew he liked Barney the Dinosaur. So she recorded hours of episodes on a VHS tape.
He watched it on a loop, much to the family’s annoyance.
But that’s how important he was to her. She saw he loved something, she figured out a way to give it to him, and she set aside time and energy to follow through on her creative plan.
Little things. But so big.
Whether it was feeling disappointed she couldn’t tell her granddaughter she knew someone who had been in a tornado, or whether it was hours of Barney on demand before on-demand was a thing, Grandma made sure her people were noticed.
She made sure each of her people felt important — her four children and spouses, 24 grandchildren and spouses, and 81 great grandchildren. She delighted in her family.
It was all mostly little things. But those little things turned out to be the most impactful things in the end.
beautiful article about grandma 🙂