Yellow Means Speed Up

There was a time that I was embarrassed to call my maternal grandmother, ‘Mumsy.’  I was neither British nor 5 years old, and the name felt awkward and juvenile.  Of course, I was in my early teens, so I was awkward and juvenile.

In retrospect, the name Davalee Bohnenkamp chose to have her grandchildren call her could not have been more fitting.  Though she wasn’t British, there was a certain properness about her.  A stern-ness that inspired children such as myself to sit up straight, keep our elbows off the table.  Be seen and not heard.  

My earliest memories of my grandmother are not really of her at all.  They are of epic phone calls between my mother and her, punctuated by visits where Mumsy and Mom would work on extensive sewing projects or redecorate a room.  There were ornaments every December accompanied by extravagant, ruffled Christmas dresses that required scratchy lace tights. 

Ruffled dresses, scratchy tights.

Every other summer, and the occasional Christmas, my family would fly from Seattle to Missouri to visit.  Mumsy’s home was immaculate.  By the time I can remember, her children had grown and left, and she had been widowed for years.  It was perhaps the absence of children and men that allowed her home to become what it was: a rich haven of floral prints, delicate accents, and ornate oil paintings.

My sister and I would tiptoe from pristine room to pristine room, enjoying the air conditioning that blasted away the sticky heat of a midwest summer.  We snooped through the forgotten belongings of our mother and aunt in their childhood room or played monopoly with our cousin.  We watched our uncles play tennis on the courts behind the house and climbed the low hanging branches of the juniper tree at the edge of the driveway.

Christmases with Mumsy were lively affairs.  The whole family would gather on Christmas Eve for food and conversation.  The night culminated in the shuffle shot gift exchange, where we all competed for the best items, and one of my uncles would inevitably go home with a pink scarf or baking tins.  The party would commence again on Christmas morning, when presents were opened and everybody could hunt for the pickle ornament hidden on the tree.  The prize for finding it was provided by Mumsy, and it would range from five dollars to one hundred, so I’ve heard.  The honorable distinction of finding the pickle was never mine.

Mumsy never went home with baking tins.

The summer of my 16th birthday, Mumsy invited my friend and I to her house for a tennis camp with my Uncle Marvin.  She had witnessed one of our abysmal losses on the courts, and where our coaches saw mediocrity, she saw potential.  Also, no one in her family had ever been abysmal at tennis, and damned if she was going to let that start with me.

Though our days began and ended on the courts, the time in the middle was our own.  Mumsy would work the daily jumble on scratch paper so that I could do it too, and we’d give each other hints on words the other struggled with.  We did crossword puzzles without the help of the internet, the table littered with encyclopedias, the dictionary, and the almanac.  

In the evenings, Mumsy would take us out to dinner somewhere in Park Hills or Farmington.  I remember her racing through a yellow light on the way saying, “Now, your driver’s ed teachers and your mothers won’t tell you this, but yellow means speed up!”

One Friday night, we returned from dinner to find traffic backed up all the way down Main Street.  Mumsy explained the-foreign-to-us concept of cruising, where the youth of town would drive from one end of the strip to the other blaring music, showing off their cars, and checking each other out.  To further enlighten us, she rolled down all the windows in her white Chevy Malibu and turned up the classical music until the speakers shook.  The three of us crept through main street, our heads thrown back in laughter as teenagers peered wide-eyed into our car with expressions of shock and amusement.

Graduation at Pacific University, Oregon

I went to graduate school an hour and a half away from Mumsy.  She and Mom came with me to help me get settled.  I had purchased an entertainment center from Sauder.  It was the kind that came in a big, heavy box and required fourteen hours of assembly if you were an engineer, more if you were not.  We opened the boxes and arranged the pieces neatly on the floor, ready to begin.  Mumsy swiped up the instruction booklet and began to read, “Place part A into part B, and use part C to secure.”  We muddled through for a while before I asked to see the instructions for myself.  Mumsy peered out over the top of the pages, her eyebrows raised.  “You don’t need to see them, because I am telling you what they say.  Now, just connect parts F and G using four part Ls.”

Throughout grad school, I spent the occasional weekend with Mumsy, braving the curvy backroad drive from Rolla to Park Hills in my ’89 Cabriolet.  We still did the jumbles and the crosswords.  We spoke about books we’d read, current events, and the topics of her most recent Monday Club.  I’d pour over old albums, marveling at the pictures of Mumsy as a young woman and watching my mom, aunt and uncles grow up through the pages.

Mumsy regaled me with stories from the past and present.  She told me about the time the Jehovah Witnesses showed up at her door wanting to speak to her about religion. She invited them in for tea and listened to all they had to say.  Then she brought out her bible and her book of Morman and began sharing her thoughts on various religions.  She laughed gleefully when she told me, “As keen as they were to come into my house and tell me what to believe, they sure didn’t like it happening to them!”  It was probably the only time Jehovah Witnesses have been seen running away from a house.

Mumsy told me about meeting her husband, Marvin.  Their first date was Mumsy’s high school play.  She acted the lead while Marvin watched on from the audience.

She told me about the time she was at the theatre seated behind a man and a woman.  The couple kept leaning together, making it impossible for Mumsy to see.  “I blew gently on their necks so that they felt just a little draft and learned not to lean in that way,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

One of my favorite pictures is of Mumsy brushing my mom’s hair.  My mother was three or four years old at the time, neatly clothed in a dress and patent leather shoes and seated on the kitchen counter, her legs dangling down.  Mumsy stood behind her, radiant, with hair and make up already complete. It could have been a poster for the fifties.  I know there was a time when Mumsy wore thin-waisted dresses, cooked elaborate meals and spent her days keeping children and keeping house.  

But to me, Mumsy was Alfred Dunner pant suits and Diet Coke with a straw.  Little Debbies for dinner and omelettes from the Schwann’s man for breakfast.  She had email and online banking, and she played and won thousands of Spider Solitaire games, keeping track of the numbers of the few games she couldn’t solve.  She owned and actually used an iPad and a Wii at the age of 80.  She played ping pong at 85.  She was as likely to spend an afternoon at the symphony as she was to spend it watching a Cardinals’ game. 

Mumsy at Greg's baseball game.

We call aging, ‘growing old’, but it isn’t growing so much as it is becoming smaller.  We become more stooped, less energetic.  We see less, hear less, and remember less.  We become less able to care for ourselves.  

Fortunately, with the enormous support of her children and caregivers, Mumsy was able to spend most of her life at her home, which she designed herself, right down to the front door with it’s door knob smack dab in the center.  She lived with her two cats, Putty-Tat and Tinker Bell, who enjoyed the kind of lives most cats can only dream of.

Living the good life.

When pneumonia and an infection made it impossible to keep Mumsy at home any longer, her children made the difficult decision to move her to Parc Provence, an assisted care facility.  It is the kind of place that at one point, Mumsy would have appreciated.  It’s halls are adorned with handsome wood wainscoting, elaborate crystal chandeliers, and enormous golden bird cages.

When I visited Mumsy at Parc Provence, it was so saturated with old people in wheel chairs that I had a hard time picking out which one was her.  Her head was slumped, her back curved, her ankles swollen.  Her cheeks were hollow, and the gleam in her eyes was gone.  When I spoke to her, she seemed unable to understand what I was saying, and I couldn’t understand what she said in reply.

My mother and I sat on either side of her while one of the workers played guitar and sang.  We occasionally tried to engage her in conversation, but her head would droop down toward her chest and her eyes would close in sleep.

Then Nathan, a young, attractive, care giver, walked by.  He cocked his head to one side, smiled, and waved at Mumsy.  She smiled right back and lifted her hand in greeting.  I, on seeing she had awoken, asked Mumsy if she was enjoying the music.  Her head dropped down toward her chest.  Her eyes closed in sleep.  My mother and I exchanged a glance.

Twenty minutes later, when Mumsy was still sleeping, we decided to leave and let her rest.  As we said good bye to one of the workers, I glanced back.  There was Mumsy, sitting erect in her chair, listening to the music with the hint of a smile on her face.  My 91 year old grandmother had feigned sleep to get rid of us.  

I’d have been offended except that I could see her again.  The woman who blew on the necks of strangers, who befuddled Jehovah Witnesses.  The woman who rolled down her windows, blasted classical music, and laughed out loud for all the world to hear.

Mumsy was mischievous and proud.  Generous with her time and with her money.  She was clever, well spoken and well read.   She surrounded herself with the people and things that she loved.  I count myself fortunate to have known her, and to have learned by her example that life was meant to be lived.

Living big.