Closer still....

Four Generations
By Amy Wilensky


The first time it happened Lily was just a few months old. We were sitting on a bench in New York’s Union Square by the fountain after shopping at the outdoor greenmarket: my grandmother, mother, daughter and me. My father had gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar as soon as it opened. Our plan was to rest up Mormor so she’d be ready to push the stroller—which serves as a sort of walker on wheels for her—in time to meet up for lunch.

A man walked by, middle-aged, polished in camelhair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiled at my grandmother, whose rosy cheeks and coronet braids give her a Norman Rockwell appearance, but she was so focused on Lily she didn’t notice him standing there. I smiled back on her behalf, as I find myself doing these days, and watched him take in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing bags of produce and cartons of eggs, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under a daunting bunch of pussywillows.

"Is this four generations?" he asked, stopping for a moment, addressing the question at me, and for an instant I thought he meant was that the name of the park. Then, it hit me, so obvious, although I’d never used those words before to explain or define it. I took it in through his eyes, the group that we made: My nearly-90-year-old grandmother’s finger being grasped by my four-month-old child, three women, one girl, related by blood, divided by experience, bound by both habit and love. A moment: so ordinary for us that we'd forgotten it actually wasn't. Together, our lives span nearly a century.

"Yes," my mother finally answered the man, and I knew it had taken her, too, by surprise, this recognition by a total stranger of a bond, a privilege, we had never overtly acknowledged.

"That's just terrific," the man said, shaking his head in amazement. "Just wonderful. I hope you know how lucky you are.

I do now. Since that afternoon, four years ago, there have been many more incidents like this one, so many that I am no longer surprised by how observant people actually are. Our unique situation has been noted, and commented on, and even celebrated here in New York, where I live, dozens of times, but also in my hometown in Massachusetts, where my parents and grandmother live, on every vacation we’ve taken as a group, at weddings, in airports, walking down the street. Often, the observation is followed by a wistful explanation of loss--the new baby who will never know his grandmother, the parent who died too young.

We call my grandmother Mormor, which means “mother’s mother” in Swedish. She was born in 1917 to immigrant parents who spoke Swedish at home. Amazingly, I knew my great-grandmother, her mother, who worked as a cook and a maid in rich people’s homes and raised seven children. I remember her, just barely—white hair braided and pinned up like Mormor’s, her standing in a lobby somewhere with a black-and-white tiled floor, the smell of the nursing home she lived in for the last few years of her life. From what I understand, she was a forceful, determined person, extraordinarily capable, with a streak of humor and irreverence she passed on to almost all of her children. She taught my grandmother to cook, and my grandmother taught my mother, and my mother taught us, and now—although she is just four—I am teaching Lily. The ability to roll piecrust, the gift of creating a meal for people you love, is one of the few constants in a world that has transformed itself overnight, or at least it seems that way to my grandmother.

She tells stories, if you push her a little. The same stories I heard as a child I now beg her to tell Lily; I don't know if my mother heard them too or if life was then being lived in the present. When Mormor was four, ice was delivered by horse and buggy and milk in glass bottles left on the porch. Auntie Gustava gave my mother her first doll, and my mother took her first steps to get it--a story we have all decided is indicative of my mother's determination and will. The world at large was changing, in ways apparent and with still hidden ramifications. World War I ended, and Hitler became the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. Women had—just—won the right to vote, and the world’s first birth control clinic opened in London—seven children in one family was still commonplace but not for long. Betty Friedan was born, but the Feminine Mystique was still more than forty years from publication--the women whose life traps Friedan mourned were my grandmother's children, not her. Mormor was the most academically gifted of all of her siblings, but there was no question of her going to college. She put herself through secretarial school and later—after raising three children—went to work at the local high school, although she never considered herself to have a career.

My mother, the oldest of those three children, was born in 1942 and came of age in the 60s. In defiance of a bigoted uncle, she drank from a water fountain marked “colored” on a trip to Alabama. Later, she went to college, marched with Martin Luther King, moved into her own apartment in Cambridge, and began working as a teacher in her own hometown--far afield was never a choice. From the moment my mother was born, according to my grandmother, she was “the image of her father,” not just in looks but in temperament. My grandmother still says this with a hint of confusion--how could she have birthed this creature so unlike herself? The year of my mother's first job, with her own hard-earned salary, my mother bought herself—in what strikes me now as a statement of freedom--the first of many racing-green colored MG convertibles.

As a child, I always knew my grandmother and mother were different from each other. In fact, over the course of my childhood, I saw up close the dramatic trajectory of my mother’s life from one like my grandmother’s, centered on home and family, to her reentrance into the workforce when we were small, to her return to school for the advanced degree she should have earned twenty years previous, and her eventual role—and finally the fulfillment of her destiny—as an educator and leader of a community. This message was not lost on me. I remember my grandmother showing me her own high school year book in which she was the only girl in the class not in the “homemaker” track—this due to the fact that her grades were too high, not to any sense of real possibility. My grandmother still begins sentences with the words, “I would have loved to….” and I wince, feel the weight of my mother’s choices behind the words. But my mother does not regret the years she spent in a life that didn't quite fit--she has us, and as the world changed around her, she was ready and waiting to meet it.