Category Archives: wild Grandmas

Thoughts from A-Broad

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Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. Gustave Flaubert

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home. Dagobert D. RunesDSC_0186

When I was a child I spoke like I child, I acted like a child, but when I became an adult, I stayed in the neighbourhood, I dwelt in the safety zone … until one day … I left, I realized there was more to life than security.

My daughter expresses continual surprise at how different the childhood of her children is, as compared to her own. My daughter went to the same elementary school as I had. (I think most of the teachers had left by then.)

My grandchildren live in North Africa, in a country with French as the second language, after Arabic. Minimal English is spoken in their Muslim neighbourhood. My nine year old grand-daughter rises grumpily for an 8am start at a local private school. Do not think Western style private school. The reason my granddaughter had been keen on this school was because this one had real washrooms, not a converted house bathroom that still had a bath-tub; there were four stalls for girls and four stalls for boys.

IMG_3193It was with great fanfare and delight that I initiated a doubles ride on the single speed bicycle as a way of getting her to school fairly quickly, which was very important last year when she was an eight year old who dawdled efficiently. “We are rocking the hood,” I said to her, as we pedalled the sandy partially paved street, dodging large stones and garbage. She perched on the mounted rear rack keeping her feet slightly apart, holding on to my seat with as firm a grip as her still small fingers could. Like clockwork, our traveling bicycle circus passed the local high school at their arrival time, forcing us to navigate at least two hundred students crossing the street. The head-scarfed girls were thrilled to say a bonjour-presuming I must be French. That day as we pedalled, I responded to a few of the greetings with a smile and either Allo or bonjour. Some of the boys made comments and my granddaughter said “Grandma they’re making fun of us, let’s just get out of here.” As I could not understand the Arabic comments, and saw only smiles and laughter in eyes; I didn’t think they were making fun of us. We were a novelty in their monolithic landscape, this mature blonde woman, with red streaks in her hair. (She couldn’t be a grandmother, for grandmothers would be fully covered in their long jellabas, and never on a bicycle.)

“Don’t worry Maisha,” I said, “they’re not being unkind. They’re just not comfortable in their own skin.”

“I don’t get it … You’re not a snake grandma, you don’t shed your skin. What do you mean?”

“Sometimes people aren’t comfortable with who they are, and then they make fun of other people, to feel better. If you feel okay about who you are, you don’t have to make fun of other people.”

Ah, my dear girl, (I thought) perhaps shedding skin is exactly what we need to do to become who we wantIMG_4854 to be.

Mark Twain’s words ring true: Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, especially as one shares peanut laden strong tea with new friends. 

Jocelyn is the author of Who Is Talking Out of My Head, Grief as an Out of Body Experience.

Time to act my Age

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On the cusp of Sixty

I’ve been told that sixty is the new fifty. People also tried to convince me that brown was the new black. It is what it is, as the next decade approaches with warp speed. The rounded numbers remind me that
time, even heart-breaking time passes. I have come through what I expect will be the most difficult decade of my life. (The aftermath of a tragedy that took three young lives.) Though heart-scarred, the calling on my life to a greater beauty, gives me an optimistic caution to proceed with a keep-on-walking hope, and a smile.

“ It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”
― Rose Kennedy

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My grand-daughter (age 8) sent a lovely poem by snail mail that arrived on time, the first verse gives her summation of her view. Simply stated:

Here comes your birthday, you’re getting old,                                                                                            You’re also getting very bold                                                                                                                What a great gramma you’ve become                                                                                                                  How I wish I could stick up my thumb!

I take that last line as a thumbs up. She states my desire to face the future with a boldness, with an expectancy that there is still much beauty in this world, and I want to participate, not spectate.

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”
― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

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“We all have an inner voice, our personal whisper from the universe. All we have to do is listen—feel and sense it with an open heart. Sometimes it whispers of intuition or precognition. Other times, it whispers an awareness, a remembrance from another plane. Dare to listen. Dare to hear with your heart.”
― C.J. Heck, Bits and Pieces: Short Stories from a Writer’s Soul

My journey has brought me to this day, this age and I share with the sentiment found in first Samuel (7:12) to say “Thus far has the Lord helped us/me.”