Pure joy

I liked Kate. She had good Yankee common sense, she had high cheek bones, and she wore pants – just like my grandmother, who was similarly name. She was Kay for Kathryn instead of Kate for Katharine. Kate Hepburn reminded me of my grandmother – or more accurately, my step-grandmother. She’d married Granddad Barlow seventeen months after my natural grandmother died.

Nanny (as we liked to call her) was my favorite person growing up. I loved her best, better than Mom, better than Dad, and better than Gary and Jeff. I always looked forward to Nanny and Granddad coming over for a visit. She fought rheumatoid arthritis for more than twenty years and never failed to have a smile on her face when we went to see her at home or in the hospital. She adored it when I played the piano. Mom told me once that when she came into the living room, Nanny’s face was glowing as I played a Mozart piece she’d given me for my birthday.

I remember the night she died. I was a sophomore in college. Mom had called me that afternoon, warning me that the end was near. So soon, too, after Granddad had died, just seven months earlier. So I called the nursing home, and after a while, a nurse came on the phone and said, I’m sorry Mr. Wood but your grandmother died five minutes ago. I was the first person to hear the terrible news.

Alone in my dorm room that Sunday night, I hung up the phone and attacked the bed in a sob of tears. That was February 1983. The only other time I cried in the 1980s was when Ronald Reagan was elected president.