Sandra Stephens's Open Salon Blog

Breast Cancer and the Defender of the Joy of Life

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:10:00 -0400

Today is the very last day of the pink tide of celebration that is breast cancer awareness month. It’s also Halloween. I feel like there is some sort of connection to these facts and the email - one of celebration + horror in equal measures - that I received from my best friend Sue.

“Today is my last radiation treatment,” she wrote, and I felt something loosen a little in my heart, something that seems to be connected to my knees. I actually sat down in relief. The treatment over, now maybe she could get on with the business of living.

But the next line brought me back to the ugly reality of what breast cancer really means. “Feeling pretty weak but glad it’s over. By the way - I got fired.”

I’m 48, and I remember when, if you knew what the Susan Komen Foundation was, chances are you were a runner.

The cause came to national consciousness on the heels of nationwide 5K races, an event that spread its pink tentacles to encompass events of all types, distances and conveyances: runners, walkers, bikers, shoppers, diners, credit card users, appliance purchasers, and even Five Hour energy drinkers are all walking, running, eating, drinking and shopping for the cure for breast cancer.

My first memory of what breast cancer is goes all the way back to age eight. When I was young, my parents had a group of friends that were, if not a constant presence, were a continuous one. When you’re a kid, adults are sort of like movie stars - each one is famous with you and your siblings for something.

There were the Duncans, both thin and anxious looking, and the Blaes, both tall and lanky and dark-haired and laughing. The Lodes’ drank beer from the can and liked cards. The Schlesingers and the Muckensturms both had dogs, and moms with a Mary Tyler Moore hair style.

The Haas’ were famous in our house for their size - neither was more than an inch or two away from five foot.   They were like Rea Perlman and Danny DeVito before Rea and Danny were themselves. For some reason, their shared tininess made them seem like a couple right out of a fairy tale. If they’d lived in a shoe, that would only have seemed as it should be.

I remember the first time I heard the word mastectomy - when Mrs. Haas needed one because of something called breast cancer.   I read a lot as a kid but that was the first time I’d heard that particular word - mastectomy. I couldn’t tell by the sound of it what kind of a thing a mastectomy was - it certainly sounded ominous, but then again, so did tonsillectomy, and my sister had gone through hers fine.

But I understood the word cancer well enough. It was the kind of word no one liked to say. The kind of word that leaves the mouth only reluctantly, with a hiss of horror, a tail of sadness. A word no one wants any truck with, a word that is like a bad smell in polite company. It’s a black crow of a word, the sight ot if sending a shiver of superstition through even rational types.   A word that has my eyes-averted respect - as if I could somehow bribe it to keep it away.

Mrs. Hass - Marlene to my mom - always wore her hair in a towering tan-colored Marge Simpson-worthy bun. Her feet! They’re so tiny! my mom would exclaim after spending an evening with the Haases at one of their Friday night card parties, or bowling leagues.

Together they had three small sons - the tallest of them, Bobby, earnestly crushed on by my sister. After Marlene died I thought about them off and on for years, that house of four lost men. I always pictured them bumping into each other in that house, like planets that had become unmoored from a gravitational pull.

When Mrs. Haas came over after the surgery, I was scared to see her, but she looked normal as always, and I felt a kind of cautious relief at the height of her hair, but the relief evaporated like steam when, after she left, mom cried quietly, sitting there alone in the living room so long it started to get dark.

When she died a few years later I wasn’t surprised - but plenty scared - at how familiar the news of her death already seemed. It was then that the word cancer took on a sort of hissing mythology for me. And when I hear the word pronounced by others, I sense, from the averted eyes and quick intakes of breath, that it's a mythology we share.

Breast cancer faded from my awareness until my first job after college, where one of my co-workers, Kevan, had a party on the five year anniversary of his wife Amy’s cancer free diagnosis.

He brought red velvet cupcakes to the office and we congratulated her, and I thought that because she was beautiful and looked so seemingly healthy even after a mastectomy, and because it had been five years (and that was supposed to be good wasn’t it?) and because I knew absolutely nothing about breast cancer, I allowed myself to think that breast cancer maybe wasn’t all that bad, after all. Mrs. Haas had been old, after all. Hadn’t she?

I called mom and asked her, how old was Mrs. Haas when....? and her answer - 36 - was two years younger than Amy was.

Less than a year later and the cancer reappeared, aggressively - her lymph nodes, her spine. In a Love Story like move, Kevan took Amy, still feeling healthy, to Paris. They returned and talked of studying French and returning to Paris later that fall and all of us at that last dinner party beamed at their enthusiasm and allowed ourselves to think that maybe it wasn’t as serious as they’d said. It was the 80s and there wasn’t much awareness about breast cancer - never mind what the different stages of breast cancer were, and how stage one was different from stage four, where Amy now stood, spotlit.

Maybe it’s not as bad as all that, I remember thinking as Kevan dimmed the lights so we could watch the slide show of the kajillions of pictures they took in Paris. It rained the whole time and Amy looked glamorous and Parisian in the pictures, in her shiny black raincoat and classic red lipstick, her brunette bob so sleek you actually forgot it was an illusion - she was, under it, as bald and patchy as a baby turkey vulture.

Over the next hour or so, as the slides clicked by in my light-dimmed living room, that thought - that maybe it was a mistake, it wasn’t all that bad, how could it be if they were planning to go back to Paris in the fall? - well, it would be fair to say that drained away like water.

We watched the slide show and the living room full of dinner party guests became slowly, chokingly silent, the silence the kind that makes you more aware of what’s not being said, not that anyone was really able to speak.

Everything that could not be said, and needed to be said, and would be said was right there in the pictures. The pictures featured Amy at all the classic French locations - at the Louvre, in a cafe - doing all the classic French things, e.g. buying a baguette, testing perfume, sipping red wine, applying lipstick in the reflection of a mirror at a pub, old men smoking pipes in the background. The slide show was like one long goodbye, a visual song Kevan composed as he snapped away, a song for himself, a song to the audience, a song about her.

As the images clicked by the sound of sniffing became audible. We didn’t look at each other’s eyes to verify the shine of tears - no one had to. We didn't look at Amy for fear of upsetting her, but we didn't need to. She was in every picture, you see - every one of what seemed like eight hundred of them. Almost always in the rain coat (it rained every day, they told us in thrilled tones); always smiling, always in the sleek bob of donated hair, always with the classic red lip I’ve never been able to pull off. Always 38.

By the time the lights went back up, most of us had been able to wipe our eyes and noses and manage watery smiles. Those were the last halcyon days of her good health, it turned out. The cancer rolled her up like a rug and she died less than six months later, at home, and when Kevan told me how he told her at the last that he loved her, and how her last words to him were, “I know" I hugged him hard and we cried right there in the office, the cubicles all around.

I got the news that Sue had cancer not from Sue herself, but from a friend who assumed I knew. I’m sorry you found out like that, from someone else, she said to me, and the warm concern for my feelings at such a time is one of those things that, like Mrs. Haas’ Marge Simpson hair, Sue is famous for.

My heart froze up when I heard the sibilant hiss of cancer in the same sentence as Sue’s name. It felt like someone could hit it with the mallet of bad news and effortlessly shatter it into a million pieces.

It thawed somewhat whenever I talked to Sue, herself. She was her same smart, funny, warm, competent self, getting her treatment arranged while commuting between New Mexico and California weekly. She talked about the horrors of her treatment in the same efficient, knowledgeable way she talked about any of the many things she is so good at doing/handling/knowing - Italian cooking, computer technology, human nature - so much so that I found myself responding with the same confidence in her recovery that I had in her homemade gnocchi or marketing plans.

It was a confidence that was severely tested the day of the surgery, when Sue’s mom came out of the recovery room looking immeasurably frailer and older than when she went in and we all held her in a circle as she cried.

But as Sue recovered from the injury of surgery added to the insult to her body that is cancer, her calm was reassuring, even (especially) in the bald staring face of the facts - a stage 3a tumor, a double radical mastectomy, dense dose chemo, endless weeks of radiation.

She had a boob party before the surgery, and before chemo she shaved her head before the cancer could, and held my hand against the downy duckness of it and we laughed together because laughing together is one of those things we’re famous for, and I thought how fear is like an icicle, a thing that keeps refreezing, even as it melts.

I had a house party for her in the wine country, and as her employees arrived in droves and flocked around her in the sunshine, I knew how they felt - before she was my friend Sue was my colleague and mentor. Everyone I know claims her as a mentor - she is one of those people that exudes such a sense of command, and listen-ability, and thoughtfulness, that people instinctively seek her out for her advice and help -- even when she's wounded and bandaged. It's the nature of Sue that when we gathered around her and gave comfort, we were also deriving comfort from her.

There are many companies that treat their cancer-stricken employees with legendary dignity and kindness (see: Thinking PInk: Heroes and Zeroes of Silicon Valley). With some great examples in her own sector, and with the popularity and leadership she enjoyed among her staff, I assumed that Sue would be in good company as she recovered.

I was mistaken about that - and how. Sue’s company treated her what could most kindly be described as a novel sensitivity -if the novel was Lord of the Flies.

Go home, you’re bad for business, her boss told her, when, after having her breasts scooped out like melons and her body pumped full of poison, Sue, ever the conscientious executive, returned to work after her surgery and first chemotherapy treatment.

I was appalled but not surprised. He's a guy so completely unaware of what he doesn’t know he could almost be forgiven for mistaking his Trumpian lack of self-doubt as genius. Combine an emperor with no clothes and the Red Queen of Wonderland - the one who was always ordering beheadings to keep her subjects in line - and you’ll get the idea.

Can they do that? I asked Sue, fuming on her behalf. You’re in the middle of cancer treatment and your hair hasn’t even started growing back and they are seriously *firing* you? Saying it aloud like that made it seem less rather than more real. Surreal.

So Sue closes out Breast Cancer Awareness Month not with a celebration for surviving the surgery and the chemo and the radiation, but with no income, costly, short term, COBRA health insurance (for which she is grateful), and a lawsuit to try to salvage some sort of livelihood for a very uncertain future.

Which just goes to show that just because you survive that murderer lurking in the garden called cancer, it doesn’t mean you’ll be exempt from slipping on a banana peel.

She saw her boss in the elevator the other day. He didn’t speak to her, but his wife violated the First Rule of Elevators and hugged Sue, giving a “just try to stop me” glare to her husband the genius as she did so.

I have more awareness of breast cancer now - more than I ever wanted. The march of years has added to my personal list rather alarmingly. A former colleague, the wives of two friends, a grade school chum recently rediscovered on Facebook. Each is at a different stage of treatment recovery; only one has died, and my mind holds this up like an illusory protective shield against the survival rate statistics.

If someone I know has already lost the battle, then Sue is safe, or so the reasoning of my heart goes. I am a market researcher by training - an analyzer of sophisticated statistics, but since the news of Sue’s diagnosis, I am more prone to these instances of magical thinking.

I don’t really let myself think about the numbers, Sue told me, and I can see the logic in that. She just got done fighting for her life, and now she must gear up mentally, physically and emotionally for the fight *of* her life - the fight for her livelihood.

Joy of life - that’s what the name Susan means, or is derived from. It used to bother me that my own name doesn’t have a delicate, feminine ring to it, or an appropriately feminine meaning like ‘joy of life’ or 'beloved' or 'cherished of God'. Sandra, it turns out, is an aggressor of a name, derived as it is from Alexander, which means ‘defender of mankind’.

Now I am glad to have evaded some feminine, wispy fated name; a name like a suit of armor suits me just now. Don’t know if I’m up for the task of all mankind, but I hope to offer Sue, the joy of so many lives, whatever protection - magical or otherwise - that the powers of my name has bestowed on me.

my late lazy daisy valentine

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 03:02:50 -0500

If a daisy grew every time I thought of you with a smile, all the houses in the world (or at least, in Norway) would have roofs thick with daisies. There would be daisies crowding together in the sidewalk cracks and curling up out of the sewer grates and over the curb, watching us walk by.

There would be daisies mixing among the roses and the Redwoods, their smiling nodding white heads carpeting lawns and gleaming dimly from the shadowy floor of the forests.

When there are too many to fit on the ground they will take to the air, pollinating the robins and the starlings. They will eventually find their way into every bouquet ever presented to someone's love, and they will even someday dot the sky at night, giving the stars a run for their money.

Sophia and the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer

Wed, 8 Feb 2012 19:02:55 -0500

Last Saturday you took a sort of entrance examination for sixth grade. There were 70-some odd kids applying for about 15 spots. As part of your day of tests and participation, the kids were asked to come up with an invention, and explain how it would work.

"So what did you invent?" I asked.

"A transporter," you responded. "So I wouldn't have to get up early for school. I could just be transported in two minutes before the homeroom bell rings."

"I don't like getting up early," you said matter-of-factly, a sentiment I sympathize with - I an not a notably early riser, myself.

"A transporter would be pretty handy," I conceded.

"Only, it's not really a transporter. It's a Mystifier."

I liked the sound of that, even better after you explained the etymology: "Because people would dissolve into a mist, then they are transported, and reappear like mist."

I liked Mistifyer even better, but you weren't done yet.

"It's the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer, and each dot represents a place you can program it to go."

A concern had been voiced that your invention - more specifically, it's reason - might be interpreted by the powers that be in charge of admissions to reflect a lack of motivation, but we needn't have worried - you don't imagine things so much as engineer them, and whether it's a picture you've drawn or a story you've told, there's always a reason for everything you've put in the frame.

I've always liked that about your imagination - never reliant on someone else's input or prompts. The stories you tell yourself unfold like a Dr. Seuss staircase, the kind that meanders up into the sky, seemingly all directions at once, with a twisting and turning, cheerfully accomodating kind of logic that that is both fantastic and eminently sensical.

The conversation that followed reminded me how little we get right when we think we know the why of what children think, and say - mostly because we forget to suspend our disbelief, something that still comes as naturally to you, at age 9, as thinking itself.

"There won't be any more airplanes so we won't need any more gas to fly them, and the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer can be made from old airplane parts," you explained.

"The airline pilots will do all the testing," you added, "So they'll still have jobs but even more fun ones."

The thought of beta testing a transporter reminds me of a science fiction story I read - I think by Ray Bradbury - in which the narrator is the father of two, with a young son who is brilliant - the kind of math and science whiz kid that aces applications like the one you just completed. The family is in the waiting area much like an airport, but it's for a new machine - a time travel machine. Not a Polka-Dotted Mistifyer, but close.

In the story, the father explains to his ever-curious son the history of how the time travel machine was built. He withholds some of the gruesome details of failed early versions of the machine - some really gross stuff happens to the testers, such as arriving at the destination inside-out, or drooling and unable to speak - until the inventor figures out that the transportees have to be unconscious.

Fast forward to the glorious future and people are time traveling by the thousands, with nothing more required than taking a light hit of laughing gas in Seattle in order to wake up a few seconds later in Nigeria, or the moon.

As is so often the case, telling a kid some of the truth while withholding important details didn't work out so well. The son holds his breath during the administration of the gas so he can see what it's like to time travel, and when the family wakes up at the destination, the kid has gone white-haired, and is quite mad, with a face gone ancient as a lizard's, screaming "Longer than you think, dad! It's longer than you think!" before clawing his own eyes out.

I decide not to mention the dangers of being a test pilot for the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer, at least, not until we have a working prototype.

"Will it be expensive?" I ask.

"Well, not for my family," you say in a practical voice.

"But yes, it will have to be, because if you're going to London, instead of twelve hours, it's just two seconds."

You paused. "But all the poor homeless people can go free, because after all, you only have to push a button. It's not extra work to send more people."

Can the whole family go together, or just one at a time? I ask.

Everything that fits into the Mistifyer can go, you say. You pause again, considering.

"You could lay all the luggage on the floor, and everyone can sit on top of it, since it's about the size of an elevator."

I remember in the movie The Fly (the Vincent Price version is better than the Jeff Goldblum version); the time travel machine that the scientist creates mixes up the DNA of the scientist with a fly that somehow found its way into the capsule. The scientist emerges with a fly head; weeks later, the bereaved wife hears a tiny voice in the garden; bending close to a spider web, she sees a tiny fly with her husband's head - now very aged, screaming "Help meeeeeeee!" as the spider moves in for the kill.

Your time travel machine doesn't evoke these fears, however -- maybe because of the brand name you have chosen. Polka-Dotted inventions just sound safer, and the worst thing I can conjure is an elevator door opening to reveal people genetically jumbled up with one another and their belongings - a woman with a purse for a head, a boy with a portable dog kennel for a body, a man with a newspaper face, a stuffed animal with a little girl's pigtails.

My teacher said that of all the inventions, mine is the one he'd buy first, you say shyly, and I have to agree - the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer is one of those 'everyone must have' things, for sure.

"Sign me up," I say, and your answer is, again, a reminder of how little I understand about how much you understand.

"Sure!" you say. "But only after it's tested."

The Be-All, End-All Force of the Universe

Thu, 1 Dec 2011 14:12:11 -0500

Monday the h turned 46 and because most people like a little fuss, even people like the h who don’t really like a fuss, we made a moderate fuss, declaring it birthday weekend, with gifts and cards and attention and cake doled out in serial fashion across Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

We drove to Tahoe, possibly the h’s favorite place, just me and the h and the little one and our newest pack member, everyone’s favorite, the one, the only, the chocolate Jake, who was also celebrating a birthday – six months and fifty pounds of well-meaning puppy enthusiasm. We love him a lot, our Jakey-roo. Sometimes you just get so lucky you can’t believe it.

We all love Jake, but Jake loves the h with a pure, unblinking and depthless devotion that makes the word love seem puny and inadequate. The h was an early disciplinarian, swift and stern and undeterred by mournful puppy yipping (very unlike me, I might add) and this has bred in Jake an unwavering confidence in Dear Leader (as his eyes have so clearly named the h) as the Be-All End-All Force of the Universe.

The rest of us are tolerated, even cheerfully liked for our ability and willingness to provide food, water, entertainment, walks, interesting experiences, and a place to rest his velvety chin, but no one gets the same level of hopeful-soulful puppy regard that Jake bestows on the h.

The arrival of Jake has enlivened the ghost of my lost little man, whose small, loyal form still seems to shadow me at times, especially when I sit alone to write, or read. Sometimes I cry, but less and less – Jake’s frantic clowning to get my mind off whatever is making me sad is too touching not to reward with anything but total success. Before you know it I am telling him, Sure, I’ll throw the ball (or duck, or raccoon, or unicorn).

I bought all of the h’s gifts at Cabella’s which is a huge outdoor sportsman’s retail paradise in Reno. They have everything, from tents and camo to guns and ammo. Probably they have camo ammo, which is no more unlikely than pink rifles, which I saw with my own eyes. It would have been hard to miss actually – the gun counter was the busiest counter in the store, with customers standing shoulder to shoulder along all 100+ feet of it.

They were selling guns by the dozens and I wondered if I asked each couple - because they were almost all couples, the he of the duo outfitting his she – why are you buying this gun, and under what conditions would you shoot it? - would they all say something similar?

The h and I will sometimes shoot trap in a place we know on the north side of the lake. To get there, you park your car, climb the barrier gate and hike in, the tarmac giving way beneath your feet to a wide trail rutted by regular snow run-off.

Off trail is brambly and dense; bear tracks were visible, as huge and distinct and startling as the palm print of God there in the snowpack that was melting into big dirty white jigsaw pieces on the Alpine floor.

You walk in a half mile and there is something like a driveway cut, and you walk in there, and the space opens up around you like a theatre, only instead of chairs side by side it is boulders of all sizes. There is a rectangle clearing like a deserted parking lot that sits in the more-or-less center of the boulders, forming a sort of stage for the shooter, who aims at targets propped up the hill.

The boulder field stretches uphill for a few hundred feet up beyond the shooting theater. It is littered with rocks and the remains of exploded targets – coffee cans lacey with rust, cloudy 2 liter plastic soda bottles, the occasional brown shards of beer bottles.

There is an odd patch of grass here and a gnarled bush there, but mostly it is rocks that rear and pile everywhere, rocks of all sizes, their backs white and mottled and bleached from the snow and the sun. The boulders and rocks seem to sit sentry but there is no sense of security in that, just an odd sensation of being watched in the quiet that is somehow thick.

The backs of the rocks poking whitely out of the thin soil remind me of a line in a poem I read once. They are like the once-buried skulls of children breaking through, or the cairns of the dead, fallen with time… or perhaps some other force has done that.

In my head I have fallen into the habit of calling it the Gallery. It is a spooky word, as watchfully suggestive as the silent, charged air of the place itself. My mind turns to it at odd moments, toying with the image of a girl standing at the center of those boulders, seemingly menaced.

This is what I think of as my pre-writing phase. I’ll keep mentally revisiting that image until I figure out the story that led to it, and of course, what comes after – always the best/worst part.

In addition to the Tahoe trip we had a weekend in Florida, where the h’s mom got married. The day itself was clear and cool and crisp and the bride looked radiant in strapless cream colored satin standing in the grassy backyard sloping down toward the lake, surrounded by her mom, eight children and their spouses, more than twenty grandchildren (and two great grandchildren).

The bride and groom held hands and included all of us in their vows. The graying groom got misty when he wished to be 40 again for the pleasure of more time with this, his last and best love, and then the bride said in reply “I so admire your amazing heart”, a line that flashed with all the brightness of the sun on the lake behind her as we gathered for pictures, the light of late afternoon slanting all around us.

In the midst of this scene I remembered our own wedding, the h and I and the girls and the h’s mom standing knee deep in freshly fallen snow which fell thickly from a sky whose gray color blended indistinguishably from the air, our vows leaving our lips in balloons of cold vapor.

“Love as the roof of the universe” I had written that night, and these words occurred to me again there in the chilly Florida sunshine, love as a roof, a place to shelter, a thing you know with the liquid-eyed certainty of a loyal dog to be the Be-All, End-All, Force of the Universe.

My Father's House

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:10:08 -0400

As adults, we often assume that the celebrations with the prettiest décor, the fancier food, the higher priced liquor and the nicer people will be the celebrations that are remembered best, most frequently and most fondly.

But kids have a calculus all their own, and what seems strained or miserable to a grown up can be remembered as great fun for a child who remains safely ignorant of the tension and unhappiness that crisscross the room like those infrared laser alarm systems, the ones that are invisible until you put on the infrared goggles and see the thousands of glowing virtual tripwires trapping you in a glowing spider web so that there is no way to move without triggering the alarm.

Growing up, Christmas Day was spent at home surrounded by my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, all of my mother’s side. Our house was small, with everyone mostly crowded into the dining room, living room and kitchen – surely no more than 200 square feet total. The house bulged with noise and heat, and the movement of children frothing amongst the adults like river water around rocks.

It should have been by far the best day of the year, and in many ways it was, what with dad’s raised voice directed at someone else, mom too busy to comment on the stringiness of my hair, the aunts’ generous compliments making me feel that pretty could be safe, and did not always have to cost what I couldn’t afford.

Christmas Eve was reserved for my dad’s side of the family. We went to Grandma’s house, which crouched, small and dark, at the end of a Dickensian lane that featured some sort of power station, a small square brick building that made your fillings ache if you got too close to it.

Even full of family, the house was always cold, the air that seeped off the screened in porch snaking its way into the boxy living room. Winters were colder and snowier then, and frost would frequently accumulate in a thick scrim just inside the front door, where we would print our names and draw snowflakes.

Though I know many things now that I did not know then, things slowly revealed after the death of each aunt and uncle and, finally, Grandma, my mind stubbornly presents me with the evidence of memory: we thought Christmas Eve was a blast. We ate sloppy Joes, a sensationally messy sandwich that printed our faces and hands with orange grease.

It was noisy, but in a different way than with my mom’s family, whose conversation resembled large colorful soap bubbles that drifted around the room banging into one another, sometimes denting, sometimes exploding with an iridescent pop.

At Grandma’s house, the adults spoke in sharp pointy voices that flew across the room to hit their targets with a thud. Comments muttered under the breath rolled randomly around the hillocky linoleumed kitchen. The moldy, hoppy smell of beer hung wetly in the air. When we sidled up behind mom or dad’s chair to ask if we could have a Christmas cookie they nodded and waved us off, their eyes never leaving Uncle LeRoys red face or grandma’s grim, thin lipped face.

Can we have two? Three? We’d ask, pushing it, and they’d say our names once, warningly. We’d grab the basket and run upstairs, delighted to be away from the adults. The cookies were always sugar, always frosted, and always included, mixed in with the snowmen and stockings, an Easter rabbit or chicken. Grandma’s forgetful, dad would say, to which my mom would snort. I didn’t care – the snowman had red hot buttons, the rabbit had red hot eyes. I thought Grandma was the cat’s pajamas.

We ate our cookies and played with the train set under the tree, and Grandma never told us not to touch anything. We sat on the porch and rocked wildly back and forth on the ancient glider and Grandma never told us to keep it down in there. We piled in the center of the big oval shaped green throw rug n the living room and then hauled it around, pretending it was a lifeboat being tossed about by ocean waves, the last person on the rug the sole survivor.

We heard the adults voices raised downstairs but never thought to listen in – we were too busy playing with Grandma’s dominos game, or examining her collection of ceramic salt and pepper shakers that all came in pairs: the little Blue Boy and his Blue Girl sister, the Mr. and Mrs. Snowmen, the toasters that somehow seemed like man and wife, the blue salt and yellow pepper umbrella, the spotted salt dog and the pepper hydrant. “Don’t’ break them” was Grandma’s only comment, and we were reverent in our handling of the shakers.

I loved the lights on Grandma’s tree – big fat ones in blurry primary colors, some of them with the paint chipped off so you could see the white light shining through. They seemed so much more generous than the lights on mom’s tree, thin and white and orderly and pointed.

The tinsel was better too, long strands draped carelessly on the branches seemed much more festive than the carefully scalloped garland that wove its symmetrical way around my mom’s tree.

Most of all we loved that grandma’s tree was real, even if it dropped needles, even when it dried out and crackled warningly. Mom had a fake tree, a good value made even more realistic with its bendable branches and occasional fake brown needles.

Everything about Grandma’s house was enclosed, the rooms small and low-ceilinged, the cellar-like kitchen, even, somehow, the tiny dank bathroom that had a curtain instead of a door. The only books in the house were located behind the toilet. Grandma was illiterate, and didn’t like for anyone to read in her presence – if you did, she’d turn off the light.

The bathroom had a bare bulb with a string, so you could read in there, for awhile anyway, as long as you made bathroom noises to cover the sound of pages turning.

The single bedroom door was always shut. We were drawn to that door simply because it was closed; we were too young to be curious how a family of five was raised with just that single bedroom, a room we knew without being told belonged to grandma. We never asked my father where he slept, and he never showed us, never wanting to help us picture his young self in this place.

It’s just as well, I know now – there were no warm stories to tell about sleeping on the floor next to the furnace, nothing cozy about reading in a miasma of sewer smells. He kept silent, and we ate cookies dotted with red hots and remained blissfully ignorant of what it was like to grow up in that house, with that mother.

A house where only the master bedroom was heated, where no books could be read, where lights could not be burned for schoolwork, where a dime was school lunch money, where a boy once went partially deaf from an ear infection due to neglect, where the children were tossed out at age sixteen to sink or swim, with the hope of sinking palpable in the grim mouth and stone eyes that watched to see what would happen as if it made no difference.

We knew nothing of the woman with hair the color of iron and the cold dark house she ruled, the boy hidden in his basement. We knew only the freedom of wandering the rooms, eating as we pleased, playing unchecked, a respite from a strict father, a freedom to do as we wished that we thought was love, and wouldn’t know differently for many years to come.