My grandmother and I never really got to talk books. She had a lasting legacy on my life in many other ways. She introduced me to coffee (mostly milk and sugar in a tiny “collectable” Arkansas mug), helped connect me to my Comanche heritage and was around for plenty of play dates. But we just missed the window where we could talk about books. Stories and authors. Reading in general.
It’s natural that we didn’t (I was young when she died), but it still hits me with regret. I think some of the reason is how central reading is to my family. My mom has mountains of horror and thriller books. My uncle is a nationally published and recognized poet. My adopted sister (technically aunt (another story)) has a love of reading and making comics. And all three of them grew up under the influence of my grandmother over several different decades. I can’t help but feel she was the source and that I just missed my own time to build a words-based connection with her.
I did get some glimpses of that connection, though. One of my favorite books as a kid was a personalized storybook with me as the main character. She had special ordered it from one of those mall kiosk places. You pick a genre (space, pirates, knights and princesses, etc) and fill in a word bank for things like the child’s name, favorite food and pet’s name. Then, 4-6 weeks later, COD, you get your personalized story book. It was like magic back then to see my name and things familiar to me in a real printed book. I read it ragged,but it wasn’t exactly a book to dissect and discuss.
I imagine we’d have a lot of the same tastes. I say that, in part, because of a book I inherited from her: The House of the Nightmare and Other Eerie Tales. It is full of classic and modern stories, some fiction and some taken from real life, all expertly combined. It is a great collection that I’d recommend to any horror fan. Sentimentality aside, it is one of my favorite books of stories.
In the shadow of her passing, though, I didn’t appreciate it, not as much as the other small trinkets. It was physical things I latched onto back then. The bottle of her perfume (that she was never not wearing) was precious for her smell. The little coffee cup I used all the time (long lost after countless moves). Hell, even some spare change from the cupholder of her car (the late eighties Z28 Camaro that would ferry her to her death) were more precious to me.
But now, when older memories have been replaced by newer and so much more life has happened, it’s the book that I turn to when I want to feel a connection to her. We never got to talk about books when I was little, but there’s something about knowing she’s flipped through these same pages that’s comforting. Reading the same words and following the same stories through their twisted and dark plots. I’ll never know her thoughts on the book, but it is definitely well-read, its dust jacket long gone and its pages yellow.
I wonder at times what it would be like if she hasn’t passed when she did. So much in life would be different than it is now. It’s honestly hard to say. I can daydream about getting her a Kindle or seeing so many books being adapted to movies and shows. Wonder if her politics and mine would be aligned or have clashed. I’d gain an aunt and lose one sister. Have those imagined conversations over cups of coffee.So many things would be changed by a wave of that magic wand.
Most of all there’d be a moment in time that would’ve gone much differently. A morning full of excitement to go on a trip to the Memphis Zoo after a fun sleepover. The growing sense that something was wrong, but a young mind that can’t quite put the pieces together. Finally the sharp crack of knuckles on the front door, loud and setting off the unspoken tension. That was the moment, just before the two police officers came in to talk to the grown ups, when everything might’ve still been ok. Before the blurry weeks of grief and upset lives and countless ripples through our family.
That’s the moment she could’ve come home, late and apologetic but alive, arms full of breakfast. Ready to brew some coffee and hit the road. The moment I’d ask a genie to change. Luckily or unluckily, it’s not a choice I get to make.
We never got to talk books and we never will. But we can read this one together and maybe that’s good enough.
The Barberry Writers 