Link To The Past

movie she thought we sho
on Sunday.
It warmed my heart to think I
had actually introduced my stub-
born grandma to a few hours of
entertainment she would have
passed up without my insistence. I
hated to think of her stuck in that
second floor walk-up with stairs
she could barely climb. How we
pleaded with her to move to a
high-rise where she could have
easy access to friends, activities, an
elevator. But she refused to go.
This was her place.
I often wondered how she filled
the days, alone in that place of
hers. She'd tell me that she spent
Wednesday laying out clothes for
the beauty parlor on Thursday,
and Friday recovering from the
previous day's activities at the
beauty parlor, and Saturday wait-
ing for me to call her and make
plans.
I wanted to give her a life. All I
did was discover that the shopping
mall rents wheelchairs. My grand-
ma was delighted to be carted
around, helping me debate over
new jeans.
When my grandma had a small
stroke two months ago and wound
up in the hospital, I thinI she
actually enjoyed all the attention
and pampering at first. There,
things were done for her before
she had to admit she couldn't do
them herself. Meanwhile, I snuck
her a corned beef sandwich and
kept her supplied with her favorite
publication, TV Guide. She said it
gave the best horoscopes.
As it became apparent, after a
second scare, that she wouldn't be
able to make it back up those
stairs to her apartment, my grand-
ma turned off the television. She
rejected her favorite Hershey bars
with almonds. She grew tired.
Here I was thinking she hadn't
exactly been independent for a
long time. Even before she got
sick, she would Shave been lost
without family to do her shopping

REMEMBERING

on page 92

A friendship with a Navajo woman
fills the void lefi by a childhood
without grandmothers.

ELIZABETH COHEN
Special to The Jewish News

S

he took me on long walks
over the mesas, carrying a big
pinon-wood stick.

I was a bilagaana, white woman;
she, an ancient Navajo who couldn't
believe that I lacked the knowledge
she considered most basic, like how to
collect wild flowers to make a tea that
eases menstrual cramps.
I met Grace Cupp two years ago
when I was living in Gallup, N.M.,
and working with her granddaughter,
Lori Alvord. Grace shared a home
with Lori and her husband, a practice
long common among the Navajo,
where the lives of different generations
are intricately intertwined and bal-
anced.
Over the months, Grace and I got
to know each other. Though maybe I
am flattering myself, I think she took
a shine to me. She often asked me to
take her places — to the hairdresser,
where she had her silvery hair permed;
to the toy store to buy presents for her
grandchildren; to Earl's restaurant on
Route 66, where she'd drink coffee
and tell me about her life. I'd listen as
her thoughts skipped over the decades,
from the influenza epidemic of 1918
to the Vietnam War to the Republi-
cans' 1994 Contract With America.
She had opinions on everything and a
wry sense of humor. When I asked her
what she thought the first time men
walked on the moon, she shrugged her
shoulders and asked, "What did they
go there for anyway? It's too cold."
I loved listening. Something in me
was hungry for the connection I made
with her; it felt spiritually nutritious.
As I quietly passed time with Grace, I

Elizabeth Cohen, a New York City
writer, is working on a book about the
first Navajo woman surgeon. This arti-
cle originally appeared in Glamour.

realized that she was satisfying some-
thing that had been missing from my
life.
When I was a child, I was in awe of
children who had grandparents; mine
had died when I was a baby. As an
adult, the feeling that I had been pre-
ceded by a shadowy, missing genera-
tion intensified. The grandmothers I
did not know began to feel like empty
chairs at the table of my life, silences
in a place where I wanted to hear
voices. They had experienced life in
another era; they were
another tier of female
energy, extending out
from another century.
My grandmothers' pic-
tures hung in oval frames
in my parents' hallway,;
and I often stared at their
faces, searching for the
shape of my bones, the
color of my complexion.
My maternal grandmoth-
er, an Irishwoman named
Julia Dolan Beach, had a
slender nose, fair skin, a high brow
and soft, caramel-colored hair. My
father's mother, Celia Schonberg
Cohen, an immigrant Jew, was tiny
with huge eyes, thick dark hair and
olive skin.
But who were they? What were
they like? How did Nanna Julia like
herjob as a nanny? Where did Bubbie
Celia meet her husband? How did
they court? Though I asked anyone
who might know, no one in the family
could answer my questions.
As I got to know Grace Cupp, I
felt, for the first time, a link to the
generation in which my grandmothers
had lived. One day, Grace confessed to
me that when she came upon dead
animals, she worried about ghosts.
Suddenly the family stories about
Nanna Julia being superstitious about
having 13 guests made sense. When
Grace talked about how whites had
treated her because she was a Navajo, I
understood how similar life must have

.

been for Bubbie Celia, a Yiddish
speaker from the Ukraine. Listening to
Grace's stories about her job as a
teacher and about her husband, a
trader on the reservation, I began to
feel historical gaps filling in.
It's sad to think that behind me in
time are two -women whose bloodlines
are mixed together in the chemistry of
me, but who somehow have left no
visible imprint on my world. No one
thought to make a tiny box of my
grandmothers' favorite buttons or snip
a swatch from a favorite
dress. The things they
experienced seem to have
vanished forever. It
reminds me of the way
water closes up so com-
pletely around a tossed
stone; there is so little
evidence of their lives.
When Grace Cupp died
recently at 91, I was hun-
dreds of miles away in
New York City. I wanted
to go out and walk across
the mesa as she did every afternoon;
but instead I walked down the con-
crete boardwalk of the East River, with
the smells of salt, wind and river and a
distant barge drifting by. Grace would
have noticed those smells. She would
have wrinkled her nose in her particu-
lar way and said something about the
temperature of the air and the
strength of the breeze.
By sharing with me the details of
the path she took as she moved
through life, Grace Cupp gave me a
bridge to the distant country of
before. It is a place from which I
always felt removed, as though I float-
ed alone in time, with no connection
or tether. Grandparents are the human
threads that tie us to the past; and
while mine are severed, Grace gave me
something else — a slender skein of
friendship, like a colored rung in a
Navajo blanket, where it is said that a
spirit can reside. O

Grace
shared the
mesas of
her life.

2/27
1998

91