Secrets: The Saving Grace of a Grandmother

Waverly Oaks was a bike ride away from home and yet it was like crossing some great divide between a real and an imagined life. There were wooden benches under magnificent old oak trees, a small pond with geese and ducks, picnic benches scattered in the shade and a children's play area with a swing set, slide, and a downscaled climbing wall. The walkways were bordered with flowers and ivy and it was always cool, breezy and peaceful, a perfect getaway place for a child in flight.

I went back there the last time I was in New England, to sit on a bench and reflect on my grandmother's life and recent death. Things were not much changed - the climbing wall had been repainted and the children's area updated but the the peace was still there. In the middle of the day there were few visitors, one family feeding the ducks, an old couple walking arm in arm, a nanny with a stroller and a small, well behaved terrier on a leash. I sat and smoked and thought of the funeral yet to come and of all the times Nana had discovered me here after a family quarrel had gotten out of hand. It was a private place and she never told anyone where I ran to escape, she simply appeared and sat with me, sometimes bringing a plastic bag of breadcrumbs, sometimes not, and then taking me for ice cream before we made the short trip home, my bike carefully stowed in the trunk. She understood that sometimes being alone and sorting things out is the only remedy - more, she understood that her interference in my raising always had a penalty, so most times she dropped me a few blocks from the house and I pedaled home as if I'd been just around the corner. This is between us, she told me, Let's keep it that way.

Of all the people in my childhood, I think my grandmother influenced me the most. Despite her faults and flaws, she was an ever present force of stability and level headedness, of rational thought and protection. She knew how to respect and keep a secret.

Time, of course, marched stubbornly on and as we both grew older we discovered exactly how many things we disagreed on - she grew to be more conservative with each passing year, eventually being perilously close to an ultra right wing view of the world while I tested my liberal wings and tried to fly. In one of the more heated debates, she called me a naive, dope smoking, hippie anarchist - a phrase she had heard on the nightly news - and I responded by accusing her of being an old school, blue haired, intolerant elitist - a phrase I had picked up from an underground Boston paper - my daddy doubled over with laughter at this exchange and called us both too idiotic for words.

Sitting in Waverly Oaks on a chilly fall afternoon, I recalled this and other foolishness we had shared and was sad for the children who hadn't had the saving grace of a grandmother and a secret keeper.