Lidy - Part 2

When I got back from Indonesia, I called lidy to thank her for putting me in touch with her grandmother in Holland. Lidy told me that her grandmother was in town and I should come see her. So I made a trip to suburban South Orange, rural New Jersey… the bus ride was a quick lesson in US cultural stratifications. The layers were as obvious as the red, yellow, white layered New Mexican cliffs.. through the wasteland of chemical plants right across the Hudson River from New York, to the burned down broken window abandoned lives and buildings of Newark, all the way to consumer-mart towns of new jersey. What an alien setting for the Dutch grandmother. 

When I visited the Netherlands, it was so bucolic, embedded with history, clean… with bicycle paths, wind mills, age-old slow flowing canals… Lidy’s mom picked me up. She is totally Dutch, with a characteristic upturned nose, and resembled the fast talking ambitious witty grandmother. When I got there, the grandmother was sitting at the table, with her purse in hand, I talked to her a bit, she had been to Indonesia, too. “The Dutch call Indonesia, the pearl among emeralds…” she had been to java and Bali. She told me how she framed me drawing I gave her, and how it sits on her piano at home… and how it will be passed on to lidy later on. I had drawn the Utrecht canals and bridges one afternoon. I decided to give it to her after she mentioned she use pd to row there years ago… what else can you give to a woman that’s experienced seven decades worth of life? Then I pulled out an etching of Central Park. She replied, “if you are not too embarrassed I should like to give you a kiss!”

Post smooch, I showed her my sketchbook from my travels. She too remembered being with her husband, watching gamelan for hours.. “you capture the moment”. Lunch was funny… around her, the conversation was about ER, Chicago hope, or other television shows, and moral dilemmas, she would make her comments, and I thinking I was the only one to hear them as she spoke.. and what she had to say was terribly more interesting than the chatter around us. She saw her grandson rub his hands on his lap before eating. Then she caught his attention and said his grandfather used to do the same thing. When her husband brought her to meet his parents for the first time, she remembered vividly the way her husband rubbed his lap proudly and nervously when presenting her.

There was a man on a park bench outside the window.. and very quietly to her granddaughter she questioned whether it was a burglar. Lidy reassured her they were safe. All the while lidy’s grandmother had her handbag sloped around her side. Then the conversation at the table turned to thanksgiving. They talked about birds…. lidy complained how her mom tricked her into thinking she could catch a bird if she put salt on its tail. As a little dreamer, lidy would go to the park with a salt shaker and pursued winged ones in futility. She proclaimed how unfair it was, then ever so inaudibly, the grandmother said she too was tricked as a kid. A Dutch tradition passed down the generations…. the turkey talk led to one very bizarre story.

One day, lidy had found a frozen turkey in their driveway. Her parents thought about roasting it, but lidy and her sister refused to eat it fearing it had been injected with cyanide or some other poison. What was a frozen turkey doing in their driveway anyways? Weeks later, as they were eating dumplings at their other grandmother’s house, the grandmother revealed the special ingredient was turkey. Lidy’s parents had given it to her a couple weeks earlier. The little clues to the history of the grandmother’s life were revealed to me through bits of unrelated conversation. Somehow, lidy brought up the Girl Scouts, and how they weren’t allowed to join as kids. In Europe, after the war, the boy and girlscouts were looked down upon because of how hitler had used it to mold the youth,.. the grandmother had been a girl scout, and her husband, too. Then lidy’s mom brought up how her father got an axe in the eye when he was in the Boy Scouts. At that moment, I had a flashback— in Utrecht, as the grandmother was showing me around the house, I remember she showed me a picture of her husband and telling me how he was blinded in one eye by an axe and how he decided to become an eye doctor after that event… she never told me why or how, and I thought it was bizarre that she would tell me something like that. But I suppose to introduce me to her husband, she brought up the critical event that shaped his life’s path.