My grandmother Pauline and I never quite connected in the way that I imagine some grandmothers and grandchildren do. I loved words—especially big words—from an early age, and words weren’t Pauline’s stock in trade. As my parents drove away one night when I was three years old, leaving me with Pauline for the weekend, I was inconsolable.
“Why are you crying?” Pauline asked gently, holding me in her arms as the car disappeared down the driveway.
“I’m insecure,” I wailed.
I’d probably heard my
father, a psychologist, use the term, but Pauline was flummoxed. What do you say to a three-year-old who flings those kinds of words around? She’d had to leave school after eighth grade; sometimes she just didn’t know what to make of me.
What Pauline loved best of all was feeding people. She seemed to be cooking all the time. At Christmastime, she filled brown paper grocery bags with her sugar cookies and gave them to the w
hole neighborhood. She made noodles and hung them over the backs of all her chairs. Sour beef, a German dish, was one of her specialties, and it appeared on the table at nearly every family gathering. In the summer she made warm potato salad with vinegar and bacon, and lemon meringue pie, and crab soup. No one went hungry at Pauline’s house.
In fact, even people who never came in the house went away satisfied. Years after Pauline died, I learned from my mother that Pauline often fed hoboes on her porch steps during the Great Depression. She was the head of the household on weekdays, when my grandfather was away servicing vending machines on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and men would wander up into her Pikesville neighborhood from the railroad tracks, hungry, homeless, and looking for odd jobs to do. Pauline would put them to work with a rake or a shovel, and then put together a plate of food for them, which they ate outdoors.
The kindness, the open-heartedness, and the fearlessness of this act has often made me wish I’d spent more time getting to know Pauline. Big words aren’t everything. Actions speak louder. And people are people, and deserve to be treated that way.
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