What grandchildren actually hold against us
By Delia Marchetti, Staff writer · · 2 min read
Nobody has ever held a cookie against a grandmother.
I asked twenty people in their thirties and forties what they remembered about their grandmothers. Not the nice version. The real one. I told them I would not use names.
Nineteen mentioned food. All nineteen were fond.
The twentieth was a man whose grandmother could not cook and knew it and took him to a diner on Route 9 every Saturday for eleven years instead. He remembered the booth. He remembered that she let him order the adult pancakes. He did not remember, he said, anything she ever told him, and he had been trying, lately, because she has been dead a year and he would like to have something she said.
What they held against the grandmothers was something else. She did not come to the recital. She came to my brother's games and not to mine. She left after an hour. She was on the phone. She had a boyfriend and we were not allowed to talk about him. She moved to Arizona.
Last August my colleague wrote that the rules on the sleepover list are the price of the second sleepover, and that the grandmother should pay it. I agreed then. I am less sure now.
The twenty people I talked to could not remember a single rule from a single list. Not one. They remembered whether she showed up. They remembered a grandmother who drove four hours for a piano recital where the grandchild played for ninety seconds. They remembered the one who did not drive forty minutes for the graduation.
A woman in her thirties told me her grandmother missed her high school graduation because of a church trip, and that her grandmother had explained this at the time, reasonably, and had sent a card with money in it, and that she, the granddaughter, had understood then and understands now, and has not forgotten it for one day in sixteen years, and does not expect to. She said she felt petty telling me. She told me anyway.
So the list may be the price of the second sleepover. But the sleepover is not what the child keeps. The child keeps the driveway. Who pulled into it. Who did not.
One woman, forty-four, told me her grandmother came to every single thing, the games, the plays, the spelling bee in the cafeteria that lasted eleven minutes, and sat in the back and left before the end so she would not have to talk to the woman's mother, with whom she was not speaking. The woman did not know about the not speaking until she was thirty.
"I thought she just liked to beat the traffic," she said.
I asked whether knowing changed how she remembered it. She said she was still deciding.