Like most Americans, I'm of mixed heritage. On my dad's side, as you can guess by my last name, I'm 1/4 Italian and 1/4 Pennsylvania Dutch. On my mom's side I'm 1/4 Ukrainian and 1/4 British.
I never knew my paternal grandfather, as he died before I was born. My maternal grandpa died when I was in my freshman year at college. Other than my great-grandma's death when I was about 6, his was the first death I had really experienced of someone close to me. I was glad that the summer prior a friend and I had included a few days visiting my grandparents when we were on a week-long holiday. Grandpa was already ill, so we stayed in a motel, during our visit.
I mainly want to talk about my Grandma (maternal) and Grandmother (paternal), as they, in quite different ways, had a big influence on me. I'll talk about my paternal Grandma first.
Grandma lived about 8 hours from us in Canada, so I didn't see her as often as my other Grandmother, who just lived about 6 or 7 miles away from us. But I did see her 1 or 2 weeks a year, in concentrated times every year. Sometimes I even saw her more, but that wasn't the norm. They had a small farm, 2 or 3 acres, where they grew all kinds of vegetables, walnuts, plums, had chickens and another acre for alfalfa that they sold (the alfalfa, I mean). The other crops they used themselves, and when we visited them late in the summer we always came home with jars of canned fruits, vegetables and jams from the farm.
Somehow or another the Ukrainian side of Grandma sort of rubbed off on me. She was born in Canada, but her parents came over as young adults, so she was first generation in the new land. I remember Grandma fixing wonderful borscht with fresh produce right from the garden, and also cabbage rolls and the like.
This beaded purse that you see here was made by my great-grandma, who also made very wonderful pysanki - the Ukrainian Easter eggs. We had a few of her decorated eggs at home too. I later took a graduate class in Ukrainian Easter egg decorating, which was, I think, my only art class, other than art appreciation in all my college years. My eggs looked like child's creations, especially compared to Great-Grandma's.
Even though Grandma was born in Canada, she had a sort of earthiness about her that later seemed not unlike a lot of the people I later met in Slavic countries, especially the outlying area of villages and the like. As I became more engrossed in work in Eastern Europe/USSR/Russia and with emigrants before that, I began to develop more of an understanding of Grandma and I felt like we sort of clicked, even though we didn't necessarily talk about it. Sometimes Mom would say something about Grandma that I would correct; but, of course, there were lots of things Mom knew about Grandma too that I didn't know. But sometimes I was right just by understanding her cultural heritage.
I never really had a sense of the other ethnic heritages that comprise my background, and I just seemed to hook on to the Ukrainian link. I ended out studying Russian, though, and not Ukrainian, but I could usually understand a lot of Ukrainian because of the similarities. Russian was just taught more than Ukrainian and I thought Russian might be a little more practical, especially since it was the lingua franca for the whole USSR at the time. Really, it was because of this link to the past that I studied Russian though, instead of some other language or area study.
I was really hurt when I only learned of Grandma's death after the funeral had already taken place. Mom said she couldn't find my phone number. I don't think either of my brothers went, but I would have gone out to the funeral from the Midwest, where I was at the time. I still would really like to make it back there though for old-time's sake, but who knows if I ever will.
So now on to my paternal Grandmother. Grandmother was very proper and insisted on addressing her properly consider her being considerably older than us grandkids. She was sort of like that in other ways too. But she could also be a lot of fun. One winter when we got snowed in, which is a really big deal in Seattle, she walked all the way from her place to ours! It's quite hilly and it's rather amazing that she could do that in the snow. But we all had fun sledding then. I should add that my other Grandma was fun too, but in a different way; we did a lot of outdoor things then that set of grandparents, like camping, fishing and mushroom picking.
As I grew older and began sensing/experiencing problems vis a vis my life path and dad's profession, Grandmother became sort of a confidante to me. I felt like I could talk to her and she understood me. So we developed a pretty close relationship too.
I have one regret about an end of life thing related to Grandmother too. She knew she was beginning to fail in her mental capacity, developing old-age dementia (she lived to 99), and wanted to pay for me to come visit her while she could still appreciate it. At that point in my life I was angry because I felt like my life wasn't mine, but a fall-out of dad's work and I was tired of people always having to help me and I couldn't do anything on my own. Heck, I couldn't even buy plane tickets out of Russia without a Russian friend's intervention most of the time, despite the fact that all the Aeroflot people there knew me. So I didn't want to take one more thing from another person. I'm sure she didn't understand that though, and I didn't explain it. So I'm afraid I hurt her when I didn't mean to, I was just dealing with my own issues.
This necklace that you see her was given to me by Grandmother; it was a gift to her from her mother. I not too long ago bought a silver polish that you could dip silver into, but it was pretty tarnished, so needs to be polished even more. The directions made it sound like you shouldn't repeat it too many times, so I thought I'd come back to it another time to polish it more.
Do zavtra ('till tomorrow)...
~ Meg
