{"id":561,"date":"2014-05-09T06:00:34","date_gmt":"2014-05-09T13:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=561"},"modified":"2014-05-16T09:32:48","modified_gmt":"2014-05-16T16:32:48","slug":"561","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2014\/05\/09\/561\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Mother’s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Happy Mother’s Day.\u00a0 My mother, Evie, is gone, but I see her smiling face every day whenever we’re here in Tucson.\u00a0 There’s a framed photo of her sitting on the top shelf in the library.\u00a0 The photo is right next to a small collection of leather-bound copies of my books.\u00a0 Those are special editions that my publisher sends me whenever one of my books hits the top ten on the NYTimes<\/em> Bestsellers list.\u00a0 I know my mother would be proud of me, and I’m grateful to her.\u00a0 I wouldn’t be where I am today had Evelyn Busk not raised me the way she did.\u00a0 And her child rearing philosophy was a direct result of the way she was raised by her mother, Cecelia Fromm Anderson.<\/p>\n

Which reminds me of something one of my long ago editors told me–an editor whose tenure with me was short but brief.\u00a0 “Judy,” she said, “the problem with your characters is that they always do things because of the way they were raised.”\u00a0 Try as I might I couldn’t then and still can’t view that as a “problem.”\u00a0 After all, characters are people, too, and all of us, fictional or not, are–for good or ill–a reflection of how we were raised.<\/p>\n

Because I was a young child when we left South Dakota, much of what I know about Grandpa and Grandma Anderson is the stuff of family legend rather than personal knowledge or observation.\u00a0 Grandpa Anderson, Andrew Gottfried, aka A.G., was a newly arrived Swedish immigrant who made his way to South Dakota where he found work driving a dray wagon.\u00a0 Cecelia Fromm was a maid-of-all work in a hotel that was, according to my mother, owned by Tom Brokaw’s grandparents.\u00a0 One weekend, at an after work party, A.G. caught sight of Cecelia dancing on a table.\u00a0 That, as they say, was that.\u00a0 Theirs was a love match, one that never wavered.\u00a0 When Cecelia died of a heart ailment in her fifties, the expression of utter shock and disbelief on Grandpa Anderson’s face when he heard the news was my first-ever experience of grief made visible.<\/p>\n

Grandma Anderson as I knew her was relatively short (compared to the rest of us), round, and sweet.\u00a0 When we went to South Dakota on family vacations, she put out the welcome mat and killed the proverbial fatted calf.\u00a0 She would cheerfully lay out a feast of pot roast, potatoes with their jackets on, and green peas fresh from the garden.\u00a0 One of my most vivid memories from South Dakota is of sitting next to Grandma Anderson on the back porch of their house in Summit, shelling peas, with both of us sneaking one or two from each pod as we went along.\u00a0 (Is there anything better than a raw green pea fresh from the pod?\u00a0 Oh wait, yes there is–sweet corn plucked from its stalk and eaten raw, too.\u00a0 That’s another thing Grandma Anderson taught me–the miracle of utterly fresh raw corn.).\u00a0 By comparison, if we showed up on Grandma Busk’s doorstep on one of those trips, hungry and tired after three long days in a car, she would grudgingly haul out a loaf of bread and butter and maybe, if we were really lucky, a pot of jam.<\/p>\n

Both of my paternal grandparents were toxic.\u00a0 My father often told me that he never knew what love was until he met my mother.\u00a0 I suspect that my mother’s insistence on moving from South Dakota to Arizona was based as much on curing my father’s arthritis as it was on escaping his parents’ sphere of influence. Soon after our move, Grandpa and Grandma Anderson sold their farm and moved to Summit and into the house in town where I remember them living.\u00a0 Being free of the farm meant they were free to travel, and they did.<\/p>\n

Originally, our house in Bisbee was a two bedroom affair, but it had a full unfinished basement.\u00a0 On one of their first trips to Bisbee, Grandpa and my dad turned the basement into a one bedroom apartment.\u00a0 Grandpa was a whiz at carpentry.\u00a0 I remember watching him laying the hardwood floor–eyeballing the spot, cutting the wood, and then unerringly fitting it into place.\u00a0 If he used a measuring tape, I don’t recall seeing it.\u00a0 Once work on the basement apartment was finished, Grandpa and Grandma turned into regular snowbirds, spending South Dakota’s harsh winter months in Bisbee, living downstairs.<\/p>\n

As a first grader, walking home from Greenway School one day, I caught sight of a stray puppy, a poor, ugly little mutt that someone had abandoned on the street.\u00a0 It was small enough for me to carry, which I did.\u00a0 However, once I arrived at the house, I attempted to convince my mother that the dog had “followed me” home.\u00a0 My mother wasn’t buying.\u00a0 She told me, in no uncertain terms, that the dog had to go.\u00a0 Heartbroken, I put the pup back out on the street.<\/p>\n

It happened that Grandpa and Grandma Anderson were visiting at the time.\u00a0 The next morning, when Grandma came upstairs for breakfast, she was wearing a long green sweater.\u00a0 During the meal I noticed that, whenever my mother’s back was turned, Grandma would slip a tiny piece of bacon or toast under her sweater.\u00a0 Not only had she brought the puppy back inside, she had already named her–Daisy.\u00a0 It’s one of the few times I ever remember my mother being overruled, but she was. Daisy became an integral part of our lives for the next twelve years.<\/p>\n

I don’t know where the “dog rescue” bit shows up on the human genome or in my DNA, but I know it’s there, handed down, generation to generation, from Grandma Anderson to me.\u00a0 It’s why Bella is sleeping peacefully on the back patio right now, saved from becoming a flat dog on that street in Bellevue three years ago.\u00a0 But Grandma Anderson’s dog-saving trait didn’t stop with me.\u00a0 It’s why my daughter rescued Snowflake, an unsocialized puppy mill mommy who was terrified of everything beyond the outside wooden pen that had been her prison for the first six years of her life.\u00a0 Three years later, Snowflake, has morphed into a lovely family dog.\u00a0 It’s why a year ago my daughter and grandson rescued a black twenty-pound pound puppy named Storm who is now a gangly, hundred pound Irish wolfhound which my husband refers to as The Galoot.<\/p>\n

And so, Happy Mother’s Day, Grandma Anderson.\u00a0 You never met your great-granddaughter, Jeanne T., or your great-great-grandson, Colt, but I’m here to tell you, they are both chips off your old block.<\/p>\n

Other than Daisy, you never met any of the dogs you helped rescue, either, but they all wish you a Happy Mother’s Day, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy Mother’s Day.\u00a0 My mother, Evie, is gone, but I see her smiling face every day whenever we’re here in Tucson.\u00a0 There’s a framed photo of her sitting on the top shelf in the library.\u00a0 The photo is right next to a small collection of leather-bound copies of my books.\u00a0 Those are special editions that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3nsBA-561","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":563,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561\/revisions\/563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}