Generations
This afternoon Mo drove our wee family to my Gran's nursing home in Irvine. We celebrated Gran's one hundred and first birthday on St Patrick's Day this year; the Bean is fifteen days old. It was important to me that they meet, Gran and her fifteenth great-grandchild, soon after the kid's birth.
Gran's body is wearing out. She can't stand unaided and one arm is no longer very useful. Her hearing is fine on her right, not so good on the left. Her eyesight was never great - now, it's hard to tell how much or little she sees. She appreciates company but doesn't say much. She's present and partly absent at the same time. But when we came in to the day room and I bent to her ear to tell her we were there and Mo showed her our daughter, the smile that came to her face was like the sun breaking through an overcast sky. Such smiles are rare but unmistakable. Gran didn't say much, as usual, but as I held the Bean on her lap, she took the child's hand in her good hand and began to rock her.
(I thought this evening of how large a part Gran played in rearing me, us, and of the company we were for one another, oddly-matched friends when her peers were distant or dead and I didn't fit in with mine: the two of us at night in my mother's flat's front room, an old horror film on the box, Gran knitting, me idly messing with Airfix soldiers or Star Wars figures, two mugs of tea, peace.)
A span - begun in Donegal in 1906, continued in Glasgow in 2007.
Gran's body is wearing out. She can't stand unaided and one arm is no longer very useful. Her hearing is fine on her right, not so good on the left. Her eyesight was never great - now, it's hard to tell how much or little she sees. She appreciates company but doesn't say much. She's present and partly absent at the same time. But when we came in to the day room and I bent to her ear to tell her we were there and Mo showed her our daughter, the smile that came to her face was like the sun breaking through an overcast sky. Such smiles are rare but unmistakable. Gran didn't say much, as usual, but as I held the Bean on her lap, she took the child's hand in her good hand and began to rock her.
(I thought this evening of how large a part Gran played in rearing me, us, and of the company we were for one another, oddly-matched friends when her peers were distant or dead and I didn't fit in with mine: the two of us at night in my mother's flat's front room, an old horror film on the box, Gran knitting, me idly messing with Airfix soldiers or Star Wars figures, two mugs of tea, peace.)
A span - begun in Donegal in 1906, continued in Glasgow in 2007.