8:23 p.m. - April 01, 2002
oh, fiddle faddle!
I was sitting next to my 87 year old grandmother at Max & Benny's Deli today and she was talking about how she was always good at math and was going to be a math teacher when she graduated college in 1935, but they didn't like women in the teaching field back then so she was a secretary instead. She paused after that, and said, for some reason, "I didn't like history." And that set off this huge tidal wave in my brain that pulsated heavily and began with 'wow, this woman is ancient', all because, in the few seconds it took for her to say she didn't like history, my mind had already thought about what she must have learnt in history, in the 20's and 30's. No WWI, no WWII, no MLK, JFK, all the letters, anything, anything at all. Instead, she lived through it. Holy fucking Christ, and she was staring at me because I was staring at her, her wrinkled little face with bifocals and her apple cheeks and gray eyes and permed snow-white hair. She went flying in a little pre-WWII plane with her brother, who was a pilot and would turn loops just to tease her, his little sister...my grandmother. Later a student of his crashed the plane he was teaching in and they both died. 1935. She was 20.

I always have weird visions in my head of everything before, say, the 50's, being in black and white, because our culture is a highly visual one, and that's all you ever see in old movies, because they 'hadn't discovered color yet,' as my grandmother put it. 'They didn't discover sound until later either. The movies were silent and we had to read what the actors said scrolling at the bottom of the screen.' My grandmother. In 20's Oklahoma dresses, hair black as night, staring at the fuzzy silent big screen, reading the lines, perhaps with a boy in suspenders and knee socks, not yet my grandfather because he didn't come along until much later. She's sitting next to me, eating a big bowl of chicken mish-mosh soup and drinking an iced-tea. Outside, her 2002 Buick is parked that she just bought last week. 'If someone had told me I was going to be living in Chicago, or alive at all in the year 2000, I would have laughed,' she said.

She met my grandfather working for the president of the university, clerical work, since she couldn't be a math teacher. My grandfather was a travelling bookseller. He came into the office and asked her where a professor was. She told him; he left. Six weeks later, he called the office back. 'Is Mary engaged? Is Mary married?' he asked a coworker. ('Well, that was clearly a bunch of bull,' my grandmother says now.) However, she wasn't engaged, and wasn't married, and so he took her to a movie, if you believe her, or a basketball game, if you believe him. But she has the last word, always will, since he died when I was seven and he was 80 and never said anything to me anyway except to tell me not to play on his remote control chair. My grandmother still signs all her documents with his name: E______, Mrs. Francis Henry.

She gets carried away remembering the loops of the airplane and tosses her spoon on the floor. 'Oh, fiddle faddle!' she exclaims, waving away the waiter who rushes to help her pick it up.

'Grandma, Fiddle Faddle is a snack now," I say, giving her my spoon.

She chuckles, giving it back. 'Now don't make me laugh.'

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