Maga

Well, after a few weeks of teetering on the brink, the inevitable: My grandma on my mother's side (we call her Maga) has died. I think she was comfortable in the last few days, and she was in very good hands. After telling her sister and a nurse that 'her bags were packed', she basically fell asleep.

From the moment it started to look like her latest slide was one-way, my memories of her have been getting sharper. I think that knowing I wasn't going to see her again was causing me to sortof 'finalize' my impression of her. In any case, here are few facts (which might be a bit wrong) and recollections:

- She grew up in one of those little towns on the French-German border that was sometimes French and sometimes German. I think for her it was mostly German.
- She came to the US with my grandpa (who died before I was born) fleeing the second world war
-There she and her husband built up a dedicated group of friends founded primarily on the love of chamber music, but also on intellectualism and nascent liberalism. All of these emphases were passed on to their three children. I think they were perfect examples of the 'New England Liberal Intellectual', a group that the US has been ignoring recently, to it's detriment.
- My first impression of her was the feeling that she was a little eccentric and quite no nonsense. This, and her preferential treatment of my sister, was explained to me as arising from the fact that she didn't know quite what to do with little boys, having herself only had girls.
- She ate the brown bits of bananas, claiming that this was 'the best part'
- The comforter in her bedroom (the only room in the house with air conditioning) was freakishly soft and smelled of flowers
- If she thought you were trying to pull a 'fast one' on her (which I often was), she had a characteristic 'ah a' (her way of saying 'no you don't') which, if you were being especially bad, was accompanied by a wagging finger.
- On the other hand, she gave me candy. To the consternation of my mother, this was typically just before bed after teeth had been brushed!
- She had remnant german words for all kinds of things. The one I remember most was something like 'hast du genugh gegessen?' which basically means 'are you full?'
- She was quite well off indeed, and was able to fund three major family trips. The first of these was to Martha's Viniard. I don't remember too much about that trip except that I was quite good at the 'ring grabbing' merry-go-round, I really wanted to go to the arcade and a family bike ride (my bike was vastly inferior, as I recall). The second was to a coastal house in Main. It was there that I discovered a Bill Cosby comedy record, which I memorized word for word. The third was to a castle called 'Mohonk' in upstate New York for her 80th birthday. Later I would discover that this was a favorite escape for my favorite science fiction author, Isaac Asimov!
- I once went to stay with her for what I think was a month one summer. There I went to a camp called B B & N. I also remember watching a documentary on Troy, discovering the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles about 6 months before any of my peers in Canada and exploring her seemingly endless basement among many other little things.
- In her later years, she lived at an old folks home called Kendall and where she was eventually joined by her two brothers and her sister. Jane and I visited her twice there, once when she was quite well and living in her own apartment, and once when she was still somewhat active, but having trouble mentally. While active, she was 'getting into all sorts of stuff' as my mom put it, joining various committees etc.

So if you were wondering where I get my little quirks from, I can only say that it is likely from this side of the family. My grandma was eccentric, extremely intelligent and committed to the cause of amateur music. I didn't see her much, but I'm going to miss her.