Other Grandma

“Other Grandma says she loves me, and I think she does. She at least likes me because when she reads to me, she always lets me look at a page in my book as long as I like.”

By Teresa Swartz Roberts

Blog Post 58. Copyright 2024

Did you grow up with an Other Grandma? I did. Grandma Perry lived far away from my home in Dunbar, West Virginia. She lived in Indiana in my earliest memories, ending her journey in Florida. She was good at crochet and embroidery, and I used to watch her hands while she worked. She was a storyteller who believed in the power of dreams and visions. She knew our family history and helped make me proud of my coal-mining, labor-organizing heritage. While I loved her, it took several years of visits and letters for me to experience the kind of emotionally intimate love that was easy with the Grandma who lived two blocks away.

I am my baby granddaughter’s Other Grandma.

Here’s what I imagine The Guppy will think as she gets to know me through online visits and annual in-person visits.

“Other Grandma lives far away in a box on Daddy’s laptop. It takes a very long time to get to Grandma’s house, and when you get there, you are not allowed to run, and you have to use your inside voice.

 “Sometimes I miss Other Grandma, but we won’t be going to see her until February. When it’s February, Other Grandma will ask me if I’m her Valentine, and then she’ll laugh and smile at Daddy, and he’ll smile back. And I just don’t get it. She says a lot of things that are supposed to be funny, and Daddy’s the only one who laughs. Sometimes she tells a joke or tells a story that she thinks Daddy ought to know, but he doesn’t, and she sometimes gets sad or mad about that.

“Other Grandma’s house smells funny. But Mumma does not like for you to say so. Mumma also doesn’t like for you to say that you don’t like the food that Other Grandma fixes for you. Mumma says Other Grandma isn’t part of your daily routine, so she doesn’t always know what you like and don’t like. Other Grandma thinks that she knows what you like because she knew what your daddy liked when he was little.

“Other Grandma doesn’t know about your favorite videos or how to find them on her devices. She doesn’t call them devices; she calls them the TV or the computer (not tablet, like I say), or thing-a-majig. That’s a funny word. Sometimes she calls her phone a telephone. That’s a funny word, too.

“Other Grandma doesn’t know about your toys and doesn’t really have any except for one box of them that she keeps in a closet at her house. She has a lot of baby toys, some games without all the pieces, and some kind of old-fashioned Legos that don’t snap together. The batteries are always dead in the fun toys. What she does know about is what your daddy was like as a little boy and a baby, and she talks about it all the time.

“I don’t know how Other Grandma got to be Other Grandma. It’s probably because she and Other Grandpa are so old. Other Grandma keeps saying that she didn’t expect 63 to look so much like 93. All you have to do is turn one number upside down, and they look exactly alike.

“I like going to Other Grandma’s house, as long as we don’t have to stay too long. I always get to go to the zoo. And Grandma’s house has a fun ramp that I can ride my Big Wheel on.

“Other Grandma says she has Parky-suns. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I think she has to stay out of the sun, and that’s why she doesn’t go to the zoo with us.

“Other Grandma says she loves me, and I think she does. She at least likes me because when she reads to me, she always lets me look at a page in my book as long as I like. She’s not allowed to read to me unless Daddy is there to help her hold me or I promise not to squirm. I like for her to hold me sometimes, so I don’t squirm much. She’s kind of squishy like a pillow.

“I say ‘I love you’ to Other Grandma when we say goodbye. It makes her happy.’”

I remember when I realized that I loved Grandma Perry. My cousin and I had found a dead bird, and she let us bring it into the house and identified its breed. It was a grackle, she said. Then, when we told her that we wanted to have a funeral for the bird, she gave us a spoon to dig the grave and a box on which she had written “Mr. Grackle” in big block letters.

I think that was the same visit that saw me heading home with a jewelry box I had admired. She had simply dumped out the costume jewelry and given me the box.

By the time I reached my pre-teen years, I wrote letters to Grandma Perry, and they were every bit as intimate as the talks I had with my nearby grandmother.

I hope that The Guppy can get to know me, and more importantly, that I can get to know her so that she can understand how deeply I love her. Meanwhile, Future Guppy is right: If she says “I love you” when we say goodbye, it will make me happy.