The Goat, Judy Garland and Grand Rapids, MN.

When I was growing up, Grandma Shirley talked about Judy Garland all the time.  “Grandma, I already know this one,” I’d complain when she started the story, but she’d just continue anyway.

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“You know, Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz,” she’d explain.  And I did know; each time Grandma came over to babysit us while Mom and Dad had parent-teacher conferences or volleyball or whatever, Grandma would bring over her tote full of her favorite VHS cassettes.  Anything with Shirley Temple or Elvis, The Secret Garden, Miracle on 34th Street, most videos in black and white, and not a single one was my idea of something good to watch while Grandma was over to visit.  Usually we’d end up talking.

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“Judy Garland wasn’t her real name, you know,” she’d always say.  Then she’d tell the story of Frances Gumm and her family of flamboyant singers, dancers and actors who moved to Grand Rapids, MN and lived in the house down the street from Grandma and her family for several years.  Grandma was only a year older than Ms. Garland and the way she talked about her, I thought they must have been very good friends.   I always pictured the girl with the ruby slippers from Grandma’s video with my grandma as young girls, playing together in the woods and down along the river bank as I did with my young friends.

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Inevitably her story about Judy Garland would transition to a story about Grandma’s unique family pets kept in their home while they lived in Grand Rapids.  When I was a girl, the pets were two huge dogs.  I don’t know if she told me they were Great Danes or if this is just what I always pictured when she talked about the huge beasts that towered over their fence in the back yard and got loose one night, spurring an exciting chase and rescue as the dogs ran into downtown Grand Rapids and began popping in and out of shops and restaurants.

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As time passed and I became a teenager, Grandma kept telling her stories but soon it became clear that something was going on with her memory.  By the time I was a sophomore in college and Grandma was living full-time in a senior care center, her story about the Great Danes running down the streets of Grand Rapids had turned into a story about goats.  Goats.  And at that point we didn’t correct her or ask for clarification; we were just happy if she had remembered who we were that day.

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It’s hard to watch a family member lose their treasured memories to Alzheimer’s Disease.  I didn’t appreciate Grandma’s stories when she told them and never understood the importance of her colorful history until it was too late.  But Grandma Shirley’s history is my history; her story is mine, too.  And while I can’t go back in time and ask her to tell me those stories again so I can write them down and understand their true value, I can work with what I still have left of my Grandma and in that way honor her memory and her stories.

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In a box on a shelf at home, I have the journals my grandma kept in the years before her death.  I was only 22 when she passed away and still so caught up in my own unfolding story that I never gave hers a thought until it was too late.  When I read through her journals, I sense a woman who was scared of losing her history.  There are birthdays and anniversaries jotted on random scraps of paper stuffed into notebooks and family recipes jotted in the margins of pages upon pages of sheer data that would seem so unimportant to the uneducated observer; details of each and every phone call made and received, coffee made, coffee drunk, lunch eaten and walks taken.  “2:42 PM November 13, 2003: My grand-daughter Stephanie came to visit me today.  She lives in Minneapolis, I think, and goes to college there.  She has to go back to Minneapolis this afternoon.  She is my daughter Laurie’s daughter.”

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I don’t exactly know how to keep these memories alive, but this seems as good a method as any.

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Miss you, Grandma.

Shirley (left, age 21) and her sister Wanda in 1942.

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