Dodging stalactites of old-lady underwear was deeply awkward. It was a nightly tribulation, navigating the cave of our cramped stateroom on the Delta Queen, the unmentionables hanging from a makeshift laundry line.

My grandmother had invited me on a steamboat trip down the Mississippi river, but if I’d known about the graying bra waving its deflated cups with the dingy little balls of fabric clinging to the straps, I might have made my excuses.

Perhaps my adolescent mind did not want to confront the eventuality of grandma-panties that lurks in every woman’s future. Certainly I was incapable of appreciating the wisdom and thrift of bringing three, and only three, pairs of underwear, washing two of them in the sink every third night, and hanging the wet underthings wherever space could be found, to drip dry.

Old age always looks impossible to youth. Generalizations are never accurate (see what I did there?), but self-absorption and missing the significance of everyday miracles, these are the hallmarks of the young.

I was young, sixteen years old and - though I loved and admired my grandmother - not fully aware how lucky I was.

And I was abysmally normal, at least as far as emotional development, including disdain for the cares of adulthood. (I was a voracious reader of everything from the moment the mysterious letters on the page stopped looking like bird-tracks and resolved themselves into words—even, for lack of anything better, the textbooks from my dad’s graduate studies in psychology, describing the phases of emotional development. Every time I read a description of what a normal person my age would be and think and feel, I rejected it out of hand. Even now, I hate to admit I might have been simply normal.).

Which is my explanation for how I could be so oblivious to the revelation that was my grandmother.

My grandmother traveled to South America, to watch the eclipse of the sun. She brought back a photo of a dandelion forcing its way through the concrete, a determined glory of color and courage.

We, her grandchildren, privately mocked the photo.

She took me and my cousins on a wagon-train trip, a reenactment of travelling over a portion of the Oregon trail. On the train to Montana, we smoked found cigarette butts in the bathroom. On the trail, my older cousins wore jaded and bored like a second skin. I fell in love with the purported cowboy leading songs around the campfire each night.

When a cowbell called us to dinner, we rushed to the gathering area. Our grandmother stopped and squatted on the dry, dry earth, joints creaking audibly, to examine the striations on a rock we’d kicked aside.

Helen of Troy was described by Homer as “white-armed, long-robed, and richly tressed.” She is imagined by most as tall, graceful, elegant. Beauty to start a war with.

For as long as I knew her, my grandmother (of the same name as the Homeric heroine) was sun-wizened, diminutive, with sensibly short, iron-gray hair.

Before I went to graduate school to study dusty stories in dead languages, I didn’t realize my grandmother was distinguishable from Helen of Troy in another, seemingly-insignificant way; she had two “l”s in her name. Was she born with that spelling, or, at some point after reaching adulthood did the woman who raised two boys without the benefit of a husband (my grandfather had succumbed to or perhaps never fought a battle against alcoholism), the woman who would become our family matriarch, did she quietly insert an extra letter in her name?

Take that, history.

I don’t remember, now, whether it was woodworking class in high school or engineering class in college, but the story I heard is that my grandmother lobbied tirelessly (and successfully) to lift the ban on girls in the class.

I don’t know if she really wanted to take the class, or if it was just the principle of the thing.

I am almost as old, now, as my underwear-saving grandmother was on the steamboat trip.

My husband and I are staying in a small fishing village on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Every morning I start the coffee, then begin the process of opening the sliding doors to the balcony, to let in the sea breeze. There are six heavy glass panels in an unoiled track, each of which must be moved, laboriously, to one side, and then folded over and attached to the wall. Opening the first panel lets in the beautiful cacophony of the surf. Logically, the sound should not change after that, but the reality is that as each panel is moved aside the volume increases, until the sound is a physical presence as tangible as the salt-laden mist. Embraced by that sound, sipping strong coffee, feeling the faint movement behind me as my husband stumbles into the day, I think of friends who visited this same village recently. They went on guided hikes to hidden waterfalls, kayaking tours, and man-meets-sea-monster-and-triumphs fishing trips. They did and saw and experienced so much more than I will do or see during my short time here.

I find I am content to welcome the morning with coffee and the slight exertion necessary to move the sliding panels aside, serenaded by the miniscule gecko whose outrageously loud chirping greets the dawn.

One day while walking on the beach we found an empty turtle’s nest, a depression in the sand with leathery bits of empty shell scattered around the perimeter and tracks where the newborn turtles made their unerring way to the sea.

Like most people, I see babies as a symbol of hope. Baby humans, baby turtles, baby anything. Even the baby spiders in Charlotte’s Web. The empty turtle shells on the beach are a sign that new life is here, another generation has begun, a fresh start for our world.

It would have been perfectly understandable to want to take a photo of the hatchlings making their way to the sea, if I had been lucky enough to see them.

Not as understandable, to many people: I had to fight the urge to take a photo of an empty egg shell.

¿Cómo te llamas?

The literal translation of the Spanish phrase is: What do you call yourself?

Not: what have others decided you should be called; what do you call yourself?

Here’s what I call myself, what I hope I am or am evolving to be: an amalgam of brave dandelions and empty turtle egg shells and underwear-thrift and unframed masterpieces painted on stones, a shy warrior for girls doing and being what they want to do and be, a small woman standing tall and declaring I decide how my name will be spelled, and quiet mornings listening to a tiny lizard expounding with a mighty voice.

Social sharing image by Natalia Luchanko @gvinevra38

#brillig #readabook #birthdays #evolving