My grandmothers both died when I was quite young and they were reasonably old. I can probably count on the fingers of both hands the total number of encounters I had with either of these women; my maternal grandmother lived for most of her life in Indiana, and her visits to the various places where my parents and their children lived were few and far between. My father's mother didn't visit often either from her home in Berkeley, and we didn't move to California from Virginia until after she died.
I mention this so you'll understand that these were not particularly beloved grandmothers, such as many of my friends have had. And my parents were not the sort to indulge in any rending of garments or gnashing of teeth at these losses. Whatever grieving they did for their mothers was done out of sight of their offspring.
Nevertheless, when my Aunt Maria, an artist of some talent in various media, rendered a clay bust of her mother and presented it to her brother as a gift, I believe my father was grateful to have it and considered it a faithful likeness. In any case, he created a place for this bust in the house in San Jose, and when he and my mother retired to the foothills, a different place for it in Oakhurst. In that house, in fact, it was positioned over an armchair in which he spent a fair amount of time reading.
Now, though this was not a subject of open discussion in the family, my mother detested her mother-in-law, had hated the bust, and strategically positioned a lamp on her desk to keep the bust out of her view as much as possible. No sooner had my father died than my mother passed the bust along to her sister-in-law, my other aunt, who was delighted to have it. In due course, the possessions of my Aunt Anne, who also spent her last years in Oakhurst, needed to be distributed or disposed of, and my half-sister brought the bust of Bertha Stenzel to Berkeley, and presented it to me.
Still with me thus far? As some of you know, I have one brother who lives in Belgium and a sister who lives in New Zealand. There was no clamor on the part of either of them to take possession of this item, nor did my other brother, who lives nearby, suggest we work out an arrangement in which I could keep the heirloom for half the year and he the other half. So the bust was placed in a very unobtrusive place in the dining room of the house in El Cerrito where I lived for many years and I proceeded to forget about it, more or less.
Which brings us to last year, to my move into a place of my own, a move that necessitated a traumatic confrontation with masses of Stuff [about which more another time, I expect] including the aforementioned bust. Over the period of a couple of weeks and after a certain amount of soul-searching, I thought about making a kind of gift to my late mother: smashing the bust into smithereens in some ceremonial way. And so one day, over the protests of my next-door neighbor, who claimed to find qualities to admire in the item, I dropped the bust of my grandmother from about shoulder height onto the concrete path in the back-yard. Other than a tiny chip from the nose, nothing happened.
Well, that completely extinguished my enthusiasm for destroying the sturdy survivor. I put it down on the ground, next to a half-barrel in which some vines and ivy were growing, and decided I would let Nature have her way with it, even wondering whether rain would return the clay to a muddy state (which did not happen). I will have to liberate my grandmother from the oxallis soon, however, because oxallis will take over the entire yard if I am not careful.
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