Leta's Birthday

First, today is my great-grandmother Leta's birthday. She would have been 117 years old. I think it rather fitting that after some search (and confusion), I found my initial notes from the conversation with my grandfather Ed (her son-in-law) that inspired this project. This conversation occurred after her death in 1985. The notes are dated February 14, 1991. Interestingly, I first became curious about Leta’s marriages and romantic life on Valentine’s Day.

In any case, I wrote down several things he told me and other things I remembered. This is a sampling of my childhood memories.

The duplex apartment, where she lived on the second floor from my earliest memory until1972, had a living room/dining room that was one long room – from the front of the house to the back. The dining room table was typical for the period—Formica and chrome with matching chairs covered in plastic (or vinyl) cushions. She did not have a kitchen table. White was the color of the décor: walls, draperies, furniture and kitchen. (It was not a child-friendly house, and I have a vague sense that the living room furniture was covered in plastic, even though it wasn’t. While we never saw the downstairs neighbors, they were relatives—a niece, I guessed. In the back yard, which we could access via “escape” stairs, were a fruit tree and grape vines.

One time, I remember we picked grapes, which my mother made into jelly. We tasted them, but they were sour and had seeds.

Grandma Leta was trim, poised, her hair flawless (and white), and she always wore a dress with apron. (Her daughter Vivian wore the same combination.)

While we never ate there, I do remember Grandma keeping candy in her apron pocket—hard candy, such as peppermints, sometimes butterscotch buttons (my personal favorites), anise squares (which I hated), root beer barrels, strawberry bon bons, cinnamon buttons, but most of the time these Pepto-Bismol pink thick wafer things (like extra thick Necco wafers) that were supposed to be minty.

She had false teeth. So did her daughter Vivian. As children, when my siblings and I stayed with our grandparents Vivian and Ed, we did get to see our grandmother’s false teeth. She soaked them in a glass on the bathroom counter. They only had one full bathroom in their three-bedroom house. However, I never saw my great-grandmother’s false teeth—well, outside of her mouth.

Grandma Leta always had a pet bird or two—parakeets. Some could talk, or we (my siblings and I) thought they could. We spent a lot of time talking to the bird, begging for her to let it fly around, arranging and rearranging the jingling balls and ramps and mirrors which were its toys. The animal was the only toy we were allowed to play with at her house. None of them liked to play with us, however.

When not playing, we would sit politely. She would talk to us. She liked having us there. She just didn’t it when we were rambunctious.