My grandfather had shoes big as frying pans, and he used to let me stand atop them while he and I partner danced in his basement. He wasn’t particularly graceful, so I’d curl my toes to anchor myself as he slid us around the damp room that smelled of ping-pong balls — small strides for him amounting to large strides for me. A gentle giant with an Elvis lip-curl, he spent his workdays as a lineman for the phone company and his off-time, apparently, amassing records.
I can still hear the sound of a ’45 dropping down onto his treasured turntable, the staticky hiss of the needle as it made contact with the record. His record collection was so large, it filled an entire wall of shelves in his South Dakota home, and my sister and I would run right into that room almost the minute we arrived from Arizona for our visits. We’d be sure to listen to Walk Right In, Sea Cruise, Teen Angel — songs that propel me back in an instant when I hear them now.
Upstairs, my gorgeous and hilarious grandma would be snapping green beans from their garden, swishing around the kitchen in the ugly-prettiest polyester robe, floor-length and patterned in flowers the color of my childhood: harvest gold, avocado green, rust. Her filed fingernails, always painted a delicate pearlescent pink, were seemingly always prying and poking at foodstuffs in the kitchen (not likely what she wanted to be remembered for). “I’m never full,” was her constant refrain, usually said while squinting her eyes devishly, her front teeth tapping together as she crunched on a green bean, a crab leg, a pistachio — whatever was left.
If your grandparents are like mine were, they will thin their belongings as they age until there’s almost nothing left. The painted gray house with the cozy Murphy beds and garden will be sold when they move to a little apartment that’s gentler on the knees. The gold vanity stool on which your grandmother sat painting her nails the color of backscratches, or putting on fuschia lipstick from a golden tube, will be rehomed at her last garage sale. And the vintage record collection that lives in your soul will be quietly donated to charity after she passes away, your grandpa’s way of preparing for his own death: ridding his closets of things relatives might fight over.
By the time my grandpa died, there was little left from inside that home where I danced atop his shoes — a mantle clock, some jewelry, a half-empty bottle of White Shoulders perfume. One exception was an amber-glass sugar dispenser with an aluminum top, likely purchased at a dimestore at a deep discount. I remember it on the circular table in the kitchen where my grandma snapped peas and, decades later, on the counter in their knee-friendly apartment. After my grandma passed unexpectedly in 2002, my grandpa took it with him to his assisted-living apartment. A Depression-era boy, he made such things last and last and last.
Today, it sits on my own kitchen counter, looking like nothing special but containing so much more than the sugar. Every time I use it, every time I look at the chipped base of it, I think of them both and their wonderful little house, their green garden full of mosquitoes and curling green vines, my grandmother’s hands tipping it over the last morsel of cold Christmas lefse, my grandpa’s hands tipping it over his coffee, and I know what a wonderful thing it is to have been their granddaughter.
The Second Magpie 