Happy Birthday,Dear Nana . . . .

Today is May 23rd, 2006. My grandmother. Isobel Florence Foster Shurr, was born 100 years ago today.

She died 5 and a half years ago, and I still feel it like it was yesterday. It's funny how some people you never think twice about, and some you miss like you'd miss your arm if it was cut off.

Or your heart, if it was cut out.

Well, that was my Nana. I wrote this for her funeral, and i think it bears repeating.


Nana

I think the thing I always forget about Nana is that she has grey eyes. Whenever I see her again I’m always startled by the color and depth and texture of her eyes. In any other medium, in any other subject the color of that grey would look odd and out-of-place. Like crushed grey velvet her eyes have a softness, ad warmth, and fluidity that makes you want to cup her face in your hands so her eyes don’t pour out of her head; she looks that fragile, and gentle. I could stare into those wonderful, warm, accepting, forgiving eyes forever.

The thing I always remember about Nana is her grace, and her strength. Widowed at a young age with three small children, she found a teaching job and put herself back through school to get her Master’s degree eventually. Where did she find the time, I wonder to myself, but the answer comes softly and quickly back; “You make the time for the important things.”

Failure was never on her list of options, but she wasn’t what you’d call “iron-willed” or “indomitable” or any of those other adjectives of strength or forcefulness. Nana has a grace to her strength that belies itself. She had to sell her family business to be able to teach because “it didn’t look right” for a teacher to run a liquor store. If that’s what she had to do to survive, that’s what she did. The iron in her deeds is always overlaid with supple, pliant willow reeds that give her a kind of sad, loving beauty. She’s not the relative I think of as harsh or strict; or the one that always gave unconditional love.

She’s so much more than the sum of her parts or actions. When I think of Grandma Florencey, I think of her old rooming house on Garfield and the borders she rented to. When I think of Grandma Albright, I think of ice cream cones and boats on the lake and fishing with hooks made of paper clips under the rental boats. When I think of Aunt Hattie, I smell mothballs and see the white tile in her bathroom and taste the windmill cookies with almonds in them that she always had. My grandma Glynn was the strict one, with the cold, hard iron in her words but the wonderful gifts she brought from Marshall Fields. Grandma & Grandpa Gertsmeier had that big old beautiful barn and the vegetable patch and the pig pen and the rows of corn that would go on forever and ever into the Iowa sky until you’d get dizzy just thinking about it.

Nana was the one who would welcome you almost any time, any day, no matter how far you’d driven or what time it was. Nana always had chores to do around that big old house of hers, and paid you too much after you’d finished. Nana wouldn’t hesitate to make you a big breakfast of fried eggs and oatmeal and toast and orange juice with the pulp still in it, even though she’d just barely eat a piece of toast herself. Nana would have Thanksgiving (and, earlier, Christmas dinner) at her house and serve up more food than anyone had a right to try eating at one sitting, then nibble at a small plate of food herself. She made the most magnificent rolls, but was lucky to get one herself

Nana? She’s . . . . I guess “respect” and “unconditional love” are just the only words that fit her even halfway, but there’s so much more to it than just that.

I have no idea what I’ll do without her, but I’m sure my life will be much more pitiful and small without her.

September 2000


Son of a gun; I was right.

~~John~~