Grandma Blanche.

My dad gave the eulogy at his mother's funeral yesterday.  He said that what he wanted to do was tell people a little bit about her life, because she never said anything about it herself.  And it's true, she didn't.  Dad knew things because he talked to her all the time; ever since my grandfather died, twelve years ago, my father and his mother talked on the phone every day.  I had no idea.  But even then he didn't know a lot, because Grandma hated to talk about herself. 

She was born in 1914, and her parents were Polish immigrants living in Newark.  We're told that her parents were actually pretty wealthy, that they owned a pearl button factory.  Grandma had two brothers, Adolf and Stanley.  Stanley was the oldest.  My dad thinks that Grandma was in the middle, and Adolf was younger than her, but my uncle Bob thinks that Grandma was the youngest, and Adolf was the middle child.  There was an influenza pandemic in the United States in 1918 and 1919, and between twenty and forty million people died, and two of the people who died were my great-grandparents, in 1919.  Grandma's two brothers were sent to an orphanage, but some relatives took in Grandma, because at five years old she was old enough to clean their house. 

What we haven't been able to figure out is when she changed her name.  Her given name was Bronislava Solek.  By the time she got her nursing license, she was already going by the name Blanche.  I'm guessing that the relatives she lived with didn't change her name, because they didn't even teach her to speak English; Grandma only spoke Polish until she was ten years old.  But as a teenager she spent some time in a convent, and I think it was maybe there.  Grandma wanted to be a nun, but the other nuns in the convent told her to wait, to not decide so young, and they paid for her to go to nursing school.  She went, and she became a nurse, and I guess after a while out in the world she decided that she didn't want to be a nun either. 

I remember when I was little, she told me about the night my grandfather proposed to her.  She was working in the emergency room in a hospital in New York City, and it was New Year's Eve, and she was supposed to have the night off, and she and my grandfather had dinner plans.  She didn't know it, but he was planning to ask her to marry him, and he'd made reservations at a fancy restaurant, bought roses and champagne.  A big snowstorm came in that afternoon, though, two or three feet of snow.  The hospital needed extra nurses, and they were snowed in besides, so she called Grandpa to cancel.  Instead of just cancelling the plans, though, my grandfather drove all the way from Paterson into Manhattan, in the middle of a blinding snowstorm, and by some miracle didn't get into an accident on the way.  And he stayed at the hospital all night while she was working, sleeping in a chair in the waiting room, and when she had a break she came to sit with him, and that's when he showed her the ring and asked her to marry him.

The other story I remember her telling was from before that, from before she met Grandpa.  At the end of nursing school, all the women in her class had to go take their licensing exam, and the statewide exam was in a different city from their school.  I think she went to school in Newark, and the exam was in Trenton.  According to Grandma, the school paid for them all to stay overnight in a hotel in Trenton the night before the exam, so that they could get a good night's sleep and not have to risk travel problems and missing the test.  Grandma said that all of the other women were studying all evening, but that she had never been to Trenton before, and she didn't want to spend her only evening there stuck in a hotel room studying.  And besides, she said, if she didn't know the material by the night before the test, she was unlikely to learn it well enough to remember it in the morning.  So she went out, bought herself a nice dinner, went to the movies, went out dancing.  And then aced the exam the next day.

The priest who did the funeral Mass was a young man, and very serious, and he asked me at the wake if my grandmother had taught me to pray.  She went to church whenever she could manage it, and she prayed the Rosary every day, but no, she didn't teach me to pray.  What she did teach me was to have a good time, to enjoy myself as much as possible.

Comments

[Jackie M.]

I wanted to say: the engagement ring Chris gave me was Blanche's. Not the one you would have seen her wearing -- Emil gave her a second, fancier ring at some point when he got a better job, though Chris doesn't know the exact circumstances. The setting on the old ring is really wafer thin, and I'm always so terrified of losing the diamond, and there's no way I would have ever thought to bring it with me to the East Coast not knowing in advance that we would making an extra trip... but I really wished I had it with me.

Have you noticed how everybody's first- and second-generation immigrant relatives always have much, much more interesting stories then you would assume from just looking at a pile of black-and-white photos? How you always wish you could have known them, you know, way back when? Barbara's Aunt Helen was telling stories this week, too, and I was actually getting a weird sort of... narrative envy? Does that make sense?

Bob has this thing about everybody talking to everybody whenever anybody calls on the phone, so he was always trying to get me to talk to her when she called during our holiday visits. It irritated the heck out of Chris, because he knew I felt really awkward and guilty talking on the phone to someone I'd never met in person. And sometimes Bob won, and sometimes Chris did.

(But he really was a very, very serious priest, wasn't he?)

[Jed Hartman]

Thank you for posting these stories. Especially the snowstorm/proposal one--that's a great story.

Hope you're doing okay.

[Haddayr]

I am really sorry; thank you for writing about her. She sounded like an interesting, smart woman and a wonderful grandmother.

When my Granddad goes I will be inconsolable.

[Ellen]

These stories are a fitting and wonderful tribute to your grandmother and her memory. Thanks for sharing them with us.

You've been in my thoughts.