Essie B.

For no reason and every reason, I'm thinking about my grandmother today.  My maternal grandmother was a woman with a knack for sourness.  

I suppose it's hereditary.  

I used to dread her visits.  Our whole family did.  She would huff through the door and stump through the house, trailing an oily slick of disappointment.  She was disappointed with us, disappointed with our day-to-day accommodations of her presence, disappointed with the betrayals of old age.  But most of all, she was disappointed with a life that had failed to render the entitlements to which she felt she'd been born.  Raised as an orange-grove heiress in Florida but reaching middle age's finishing line as a divorced working woman, she'd planned for one life and found herself living another.

Being something of a connoisseur of disappointment, I would bait hers, flourishing fabricated details of my own life like a bullfighter waving her cape.  When she asked me what I weighed, I rounded up ten pounds.  When she asked me if I had many friends, I whittled my number to zero.  It was petty- but pettiness was our shared coin, our means of transacting the business of being together.

When she died, her funeral was stocked with people who expounded on her virtues.  How she was funny, or encouraging, or a good listener.  She'd helped one woman decide to go to back to school.  She'd hosted sparkling parties for her friends.  She'd made them laugh.

I often forget: We are, each of us, more than the worst of ourselves.