I just finished making a batch of chocolate chip cookies with Lily. We don’t bake very often, but when we do she loves to add the ingredients and crack the eggs and try one chocolate chip or four, “Just to make sure they’re good.”
Chocolate chip cookies always remind me of Grandma Brown. Whenever we would make the trek up to San Jose to visit her, she would have a couple of batches ready for us, stored in the old yellow Tupperware container on top of the fridge. She was a cookie baking sort of grandma.
I had a deep, sweet relationship with my Grandma Brown. Or Grandma Dorothy, as we sometimes called her, as she called herself. For most of my childhood years, she lived less than a mile away. She moved when I was ten, but our relationship was already cemented in the hours spent together, the lounging hours, the hours at bedtime.
She will always be sixty-two in my memory, the age she was in my childhood. Sixty-two, still working in the credit department at Robinson’s with her stylish outfits and honey-colored hair and high heels. Petite and pretty, sipping a glass of Chardonnay on our back patio after a long day, listening to the Dodger game on the radio while my dad grilled Chris & Pitts hamburgers. The backyard would be streaked with late afternoon sun, the grass damp from the sprinklers, everything golden and sparkling. Vin Scully’s voice takes me right back there, and there is Grandma Dorothy, sipping her glass of wine, sneezing those tiny sneezes if she had more than half a glass.
On many Friday nights, my parents would go out to dinner–I remember them standing there in the foyer in their dressy clothes. And we would stay home with Grandma Dorothy. I remember her voice in the dark of the room I shared with my two sisters, guiding us back through the decades and across the prairie to her childhood on the farm in Montana. We would marvel at the stories of barn dances, of the piano they raised with a winch to the barn loft. You could feel the heat of the farm families packed into the barn, skirts swirling and twirling, boots stomping, cheeks flushed as the music filled the evening air. We would giggle as she told us about doing her chores barefoot in winter, leaping from one pile of manure to another to keep her feet from freezing as she fed the animals. We loved the tale of Uncle Bud tossing the rotten apples to the pigs, and the hilarity which ensued when the whole lot of swine became intoxicated. We could see the young Dorothy who fell in love with the dashing young Bill Brown, playing her favorite tune at The Palm, necktie draped over his trumpet.
I was her eldest–the eldest of her five granddaughters. And she was the eldest in her family, the first of three girls and a boy. She always called me her eldest.
And when I think of it, I could cry for missing her.
When Jack scrunches up his nose just so, I can see her. And I see more of her in my reflection every day. I grew up looking like my mom, but now I look more and more like a Brown, more and more like Grandma Dorothy.
Building A Cathedral Takes Time 