Going Up

In the summer of 1965 my grandmother who lived with us took a six-week summer trip to Washington State. It had been her longest and most ambitious trip to date. Normally she took one or two trips a year with her older sister, Jess. They would vacation in western Massachusetts if it was summer and Florida in the winter, where they would stay with their only surviving sibling, an older brother. They were a sight---a pair of 5-foot, 1-inch elderly ladies with their Bingo night hats and valises boarding the Greyhound for Pittsfield, or on this trip, an airplane to Seattle, where they had a second cousin (or was it a first cousin once-removed?) living in Everett.

There had been a resurgence of World's Fairs or Expos in the '60s. The previous summer, my family, along with millions of others, had visited the New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. The Montreal Expo '67 was on the horizon. The Seattle Expo had taken place in 1962, and of course one of the largest and enduring attractions had been the Space Needle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Needle

My grandmother and great aunt were excited about visiting Seattle and The Cascades and Puget Sound, and of course the Space Needle. They had both come from Brooklyn, and for a time had been raised by Catholic nuns, because they'd lost their mother at a very early age. Jess never left Brooklyn where she was the matriarch of a large family. My grandmother had married in 1928 and emigrated from Brooklyn to North Jersey, and her descendants were smaller in number.


Here is an interesting site about Worlds Fairs and their history.

http://www.worldsfaircommunity.org/

My grandmother lived on the second floor of our house. You could hardly call her living space an upstairs "apartment"; it was more of a semi-finished half floor, or attic, with stacked up cardboard boxes and random junk, with an overwhelming odor of mildew and must. There was a plain bedroom, a practically unusable bathroom, and a central room with torn red linoleum flooring, an old sofa, TV, a mahogany coffee table and end table with lamp. That was it. My grandmother lived downstairs with the rest us during the day, but spent her evenings on the second floor. It was an enchanting but usually off-limits place for me. Sometimes I would  sneak upstairs at night and sit with her for awhile. A crucifix hung above the TV and another one over her bed. Nan (as we called her) would not smoke her beloved Kent cigarettes upstairs, but would instead eat hard candy as she watched Lawrence Welk or some other variety show of the era. She would always give me candy, and she also pressed dollar bills into my hand with the stern warning not to tell my mother, as if I were a spy and the money was some secret code or plan I needed to carry with me behind enemy lines . . .

While my grandmother was away my mother often took the opportunity to clean out the years of detritus that had accumulated over a few family moves and the blending of stuff from her mother's house with her own. Occasionally I dared to venture upstairs myself. I had never been in the bedroom before. I remember a rosary on her bureau, and  an old photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, possibly in her teens. She looked quite pretty in that portrait. The ceilings sloped, the wallpaper was corrugated and yellowed from dampness, the bed was a twin. My grandmother, now in her mid-60s, had been a a widow for over 10 years and had only one child who'd been stricken with polio at the age of 12, and then the child later married at age 18, already pregnant . . . this room was a lonely place to be.

But unlike most of my friends, I had never lived on a second floor, and I was always mystified at the way in which more of the world was revealed to me from the two small windows in her bedroom and two more throughout the floor. I would watch the cars and buses---altered and scaled down---as they passed below on the street. I could see a greater number of houses and yards, and people going about their daily routines, and I felt more omniscient and privileged gazing down from this second-story, almost dizzying, height . . . I must have been seven or eight years old when I'd first come up here, a time in my life rich in epic dreams. There were storage cubbyholes below the sloped eaves, and you could enter them through a weirdly-angled door, like a door in a play house, a little skewed and unreal, and the space in there was dark and dusty, and you could not see too much. Soon after discovering the cubbyhole, I had a recurring dream of entering these tight spaces, but the spaces would expand into long passageways that I would follow and eventually emerge onto a higher floor, and then reenter the passageway and come out on an even higher floor. On the third floor all the furniture was draped in long veils of light blue silk, and on the fourth floor there appeared enormous beds and sofas and ottomans of fine linen with green and gold embroidery---white, open and airy rooms---and by the sixth, or maybe seventh floor, I would emerge from the passageway into a realm of mostly formless and heavenly illumination.

When my grandmother returned from Washington State (and the Space Needle), I remembered asking her about her trip.


"It was such beautiful country out there," she'd said, elated, her life changed, her horizons broadened, "and every place you go the people treat you so nice."

She lived to the age of 94.