Looking Back

January is named of course, for the Roman god Janus, who had two faces , always gazing in two directions. So maybe January is a good time to look back and look ahead.


Looking Back


My grandmother died the Sunday after Christmas. She was 93 and led a full and generous life. I was asked to share a eulogy, which follows:

Today is a hard day, but today is a good day.


Today is a hard day, but today is a good day.

I thank you for coming today as we share some memories of Sylvia McGeorge, or as I knew her, Grandmother.

Some of the happiest summers of my childhood were spent in her house. I think what made those summers so happy is that they were so distinct and separate from the rest of my life. Her house was a place where the normal childhood rules didn’t apply.

Visiting grandmother was like visiting a different place, a better place.

For example, bedtimes evaporated as soon as my parents left the driveway. My brother and I could stay up as late as we wished, with no consequences to our actions.

Medicine was very different. Whenever I acquired a sore throat, grandmother’s remedy of choice was brought a combination of brandy and honey, a far cry from my teetotaling home. “Well, what do you think is in cough syrup?” she would say when pressed. (Of course, the result was an increase in sore throats whenever I spent some time with her.)

Next to her home, a magnolia tree grew that was as high as any sequoia. Kid limbs scrambled over tree limbs as we raced each other to the sky.


One of her “jobs” was to prepare for Wednesday night meals at First Baptist Church. In a move that OSHA would no doubt denounce, she let me open the huge cans of tomatoes with a table mounted can opener. I still remember as a six year old, lifting it as high as I could and then slamming it down on top of the cans and then turning it slowly around.


Visiting grandmother was like visiting a different place, a better place.


She had a couple of rocking chairs with a swing on the front porch of the house. For the only times in my life, I would spend summer evenings just rocking and swinging.

She was the first person I knew who owned a large freezer, which she kept well stocked with Popsicles. We could go get one whenever we wanted, and didn’t even have to ask. She also had an old fashioned coke machine with coke bottles. It was too big for me to slide the bottles down and then pull them through the top, to get them out. But she never tired of helping me to retrieve an icy cold beverage, not matter how close it was to bed time.

Grandmother also loved music. 45 Records were in abundance. Lawrence Welk and big band music of days gone by always accompanied me as I walked from room to room at grandmother’s house. There was no Time-Life record offer she could resist.



Mornings followed a predictable pattern. Captain Kangaroo was on in the morning, followed by the PBS duo of Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Then we transitioned to adult fare as Bob Barker always showed us that the Price is Right. But then there was a large gap in the day. Grandmother would always say, "Now its time for my stories”by which she meant The Guiding Light and As the World Turns (Or, as one of my cousins called it, "As the stomach turns"). During the soaps, we would go out and play, knowing that grandmother wouldn’t come looking for us until late afternoon. By then, more interesting things would be on as we resumed control of the TV at 3:00 when Gilligan’s Island came on.

Grandmother loved dominoes. I was too young to follow the complicated math involved in adding up to five, but from my earliest age, I was mesmerized by her ability to shuffle them on the special domino table she owned. No dealer in Vegas could match her manual dexterity. Their rhythmic clicking together is a sound I still recall to this day. She could turn and talk to me while she shuffled them without even looking at the table. When she felt like showing off, she would point and send me on an errand while she continued to shuffle the dominoes with her other hand.
Visiting grandmother was like going to a different place, a better place.

It was a place without room for corporal punishment. Although she did threaten to “blister our bottoms” (whatever that meant) I don’t ever recall being spanked by her. Her punishment of choice was to make us hug and kiss when we couldn’t get along with one another.

Perhaps best of all, grandmother’s home was a place where you got to see your own father get scolded from time to time by his mother. What kid wouldn’t want to see that?!

Visiting grandmother was like going to a different place, a better place.

Although she lived on East Avenue, some wag added an “F” to the the street sign so it read "Feast Avenue." But that was still appropriate, as Grandmother's house was a place where food was abundant. By the time I came along, she had been a caterer for decades.

She was an artist, and cake was her most savory medium. As she prepared her wedding cakes, she would have to level them (for proper stacking I suppose). After they came out of the oven, she would take a bread knife, turn it sideways, and shave off the top, ever so gently. Cake slices, a big around and as thin as plates. I would gather in the kitchen as she would stack these perfectly formed, slivers of heaven. With eyes the size of saucers I awaited them and then I did eat them. And lo, they were good. Very good.

She had a long table with multiple folding chairs. I recall receptions that seemed to seat hundreds (but probably more like 40 or 50). The aroma of food, the clinking of glass, and the hurried elegance of the wait staff as they did her bidding are etched into my earliest consciousness.

She fashioned tiny roses made out of white icing that she pressed into molds and stuck on wedding cakes. She would make sheets of these on wax paper, hundreds of them, and put them in the freezer until she needed them. I could fit about five of these into each of my hot little hands and pop them into my mouth to consume them in a few bites. The ensuing sugar rush would be sufficient to get me through even the slowest of summer days.

Visiting grandmother was like visiting another place, a better place.

Today is a hard day, but today is a good day.

The Bible shares about a very special grandmother. Timothy had a grandmother who was so remarkable that Paul mentioned her in one of his letters.

"When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also."

Paul succinctly identified the defining characteristic of good grandmothers: their influence on the generations to come. And like Lois, my grandmother passed on a legacy of faith to her children and her grandchildren.

Visiting grandmother was like visiting another place, a better place.

She didn’t have an easy life. She raised my father and aunt as a single mom during decades when that still carried with it the odor of scandal. But she picked through the difficult times and discussed them only when pressed.

My fondest memory of her is also one of the oldest. Grandmother purchased for me a sticker book, full of outdoor scenes. All the stickers were in the back and I had to search them out, lick the gluey side, and then stick them to their appropriate place in the book. I worked on it with all the focus a six year old could muster. On this particular day, grandmother was vacuuming the room while I busied myself.

One of the stickers was a bee. After carefully tearing it out from the back of the book, I accidentally dropped it on the shag carpet below. Having the attention span of a tsetse fly myself, I quickly went on to the next sticker. Several minutes later, my grandmother’s vacuum noisily inhaled my bee sticker while I continued to work. It was only a few minutes later that I realized what happened and I began to cry.

Really cry. In fact, I was in six year old, full liquid meltdown as I wept over my lost bee. Seeing my sorrow, she turned off the vacuum and then quickly learned the cause of my sadness. She assured me that it would be ok. Grandmother left the room and returned with the morning newspaper. She carefully spread out the pages, opened up the vacuum canister, and then dumped the contents of the vacuum onto the paper.

I can still see, with my six year old eyes, grandmother carefully working through the dust, dirt, and the hair as she sought the paper bee. After several minutes, she triumphantly held aloft the paper bee and returned it to me. Like the woman who searched for the lost coin, my grandmother's eyes twinkled as I stopped crying and joyously held my bee that had been lost.

And in this way, memory becomes metaphor.

Grandmother was always wading through the difficulties and the filth of this life to help and care for those she loved. I will miss her.

And now it’s her turn.

Now she is the one who has gone on to a different place, a better place.

Those of us who love her are impoverished by her absence, but were made far richer by her presence.

Today is a hard day, but today is a good day.

Several years ago she shared a poem that she wanted read at her funeral. It follows.

After Glow

I’d like the memory of me to be a happy one.
I’d like to leave an afterglow of smiles when life is done.
I’d like to leave an echo whispering softly down the ways,
of happy times and bright and sunny days.
I’d like the tears of those who grieve, to dry before the sun
of happy memories that I leave when my life is done.


I will miss you, Grandmother.






(Grandmother and Squealer, August 2003)