Granny

Granny would never have a facelift. She's alive and well today at the age of 107, surviving two years longer than needed to be young at heart.  Mama nagged her repeatedly on her 75th birthday to get a facelift. After all, Mama reasoned, she lived in Delray Beach, Florida and as a recent widow needed all the help she could get to find a new husband.

"Stuff and nonsense, Jane," she told my mother, "I'm not going to ruin my face with any surgeon's plastic knife. Those blowsy 70-year old blondes with their facelifts look like a cross between a drag queen and a burn victim. Not for me!" And seeing the question form on my mother's lips, she added, "And don't you be thinking I'm going to get a boob job, either."

She never did marry again, but she did have the risque golden years -- living in sin (as she called it delightedly) with an 80-year old widower named Morrie Fishbein. Now, Granny was raised in the south of Georgia. Her parents, staunch George Crackers, would be spinning in their graves to know their daughter was living in sin with an old Jewish man from New Jersey. But Granny loved it. She told me, sotto voce, that Morrie Fishbein was the best lover she ever had. "And don't you forget it, child. The sex always gets better and better. Even at my age."

Those wrinkles on her 107-year old face ... the lines of time, the record of a life well lived. I can see now why she refused the plastic surgery. Why would she want to erase the history of her life? When I look into Granny's wrinkled face, I see the young woman who defied her parents at the age of 17, moving to Atlanta with her high school sweetheart and marrying him. I see her running away to New York with a jazz saxophonist five years later, only to return when he turned out to be a bum. I see her pulling her no-good husband up and out of the doldrums during the Depression -- and keeping their home in Atlanta together. I see her on the home front during World War II, working in the textile factory while her husband went off to fight -- and mourning him briefly after he was killed. In those wrinkles I see her new post-war husband, a man fifteen years younger. I see in those wrinkles the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s and my grandmother's outspoken liberal tendencies. I see in them the grief when her second husband died in the early 1980s -- wrinkles of grief that said no woman should have to bury two husbands. I see in the wrinkles the golden years of South Florida and, in them, her outspoken politics, her common sense, and her love of youth and energy.

It's nice to have a roadmap into the life of a human being you love, a roadmap into their life's history and their soul.