My grandmother is 100 years old. She has survived war, poverty, hunger, immigration and the loss of everyone who could possible relate to her. She is almost totally blind and deaf.

Hayden, my mother and I visited her today.

“Happy mother’s day,” I said weakly, propping Hayden up so the light might hit his face enough for my grandma to see him.

She began stirring, trying to get herself out of bed. My mother insisted she lay still.

“David?” She asked, pointing to me.

“Yes, Grandma, it’s David and Hayden.”

“I need to speak with you,” she whispered, pointing near the side of her bed, indicating that I should sit next to her.

Reporting dialogue of my grandma is difficult. She is Russian and has spoken four languages in her life, but English was the last she learned, and it is challenging for her to find the words she wants.

I only know English, and even I have trouble find the words I want.

I moved to the side of her bed and squatted down, placing Hayden on his feet so she would be speaking to both of us. My mother squirmed and shook her head. She knew, just as I felt, that whatever my grandma was about to share with me would be, at best, unpleasant.

It wouldn’t be fair for me to write down here all that she said, for I am a born embellisher. When I sit down at the keyboard, the exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies liberate themselves from my mind. Also, what she said was not about me. In fact, I’m not sure if she even realized it was me after she began.

When I left her room, I felt like someone had beaten me with my own arms. So powerful was her plea, so palpable was her anxiety that I could hardly breathe for fear of losing my own sense of balance and purpose in this world.

She spoke of the war. She lived through several, but like most elderly people who speak of the war, she referred to only one in particular, the war that changed her life.

For her, this was the Russian revolution in 1917. According to the limited knowledge I have of her family, her father was an attorney of some sort in the court of Nicholas II (the last Tsar of Russia), making him an enemy of the rising provisional government who ultimately removed the Tsar. Later that year the Bolshevik’s, led by Lenin, overthrew the provisional government and established a new, socialist government.

My grandma had her family had no choice but to flee their homes, their country. She was ten years old. She never went back.

I do not know more of this story because my grandma never spoke of it. Even when asked, she would barely acknowledge she had a family before us. She might mention her brother, but this was a rare and cursory admission.

In 1994, while traveling in Germany, I tracked down her older brother, Leon-lev Zakoutine, who was living in a retirement apartment complex in Munich. He was a former intelligence officer and writer, publishing several small run books about religion and philosophy.

The young men who worked the desk at the facility in which he lived called him “Captain” for his senior status and warm handshake. (I hope I am getting the facts right here. I met him in my early twenties, when I thought my memory unshakable.)

He invited me to share a glass of Jagermeister with him and told me that my grandma was a very resilient woman, that she was extremely smart for someone with no formal education past primary school, that she had enormous dignity and confidence.

Older pictures of my grandma featured just the woman he described, but the person I had known my whole life was a distant, elderly Russian woman who argued with my mother and made polyester pants.

During our visit today, my grandma was none of these things–not the things that her brother described, not the unreachable grandma I had known.

Instead, she was a frail, 100 year old human being with so many burdens and fears, she did not waste a moment and shared them with me immediately.

“I saw bad things, people hanging, people shot, people killed. Right in front of me. I was sick inside. I am sick inside.”

This sentence is a mixture of things that peppered her 10 minute talk with me. I said nothing during this time. What could I say? My life is so very easy, so doughy and reclined, I felt as if I might burst into flames if I even attempted to console her.

“I cannot see. I cannot hear. I’m alone when I’m not alone. It’s awful.”

Within two minutes, my mother had taken Hayden out into the hall, a respite for her and a rescue for him.

“She wanted hugs and kisses. I bought her a car.”

The true focus of her message was her own inability to heal her wounds, to be the kind of mother she wanted to be. Her guilt over her lack of affection with my mother sobbed out of her and then sobbed out of me. Her tears had no choice but to run away out of her eyes as if they were ashamed, and I could do nothing but cry by her side.

I began to smooth what is left of her hair, and her sobs turned to a steady cry. This was not the kind of person I knew, that her brother knew. This wasn’t even the person she must remember from 90 years ago, the little girl from a well-to-do family in Russia.

Since my mind is unable to tether to any fact about her childhood, I painted her portrait. I pictured a beautiful child, all the privileges an aristocratic life could bring, darting through a lush garden in pursuit of her loving older brother.

A large house sits solid and safe in the background with a stern, important man sitting on the porch puffing away at his pipe. A woman carries two cool beverages outside, handing one to her husband, and taking a seat while holding the other. She smiles at his lack of smile, sips her drink and keeps her posture right.

The girl is happy, healthy and alive. She has no gift for premonition, no possible thought of life as it might be in 90 years. There is only chasing to be done, and she greedily seeks the small reward of her brother’s compliments for her upon his surrender.

Dignity, grace and determination simply cannot withstand the years. Many of us make believe that these things are important, that they make sense, that the world is lovely and large and we have a place in it.

Of course, this is all pretend.

 

I’ve made mistakes in my time. I’ve made big mistakes, little mistakes, mistakes that turned out to be beneficial (a mistake within a mistake).

I don’t think that have I made a mistake that I would consider ‘legendary.’

Yesterday, I may have done just that.

I was troubleshooting an email error I received regarding a system that I wrote. The system handles research proposals for a large group of people, and it is supposed to email the contacts for the proposals when a certain action is taken.

It did. And it emailed everyone else… Across the state.

About 3,000 emails went out to be precise. Emails to my boss, to his boss, to her boss, to everyone in between, on top, on the bottom and at the sides. Everyone in my division received it.

But that’s not the part that makes the mistake legendary. Testing of new systems always yields unwanted results, and this wouldn’t be the first time that something was sent erroneously or just didn’t work.

The aspect of my mistake that makes it so, so much worse/better, is that I was using a test proposal I created during the troubleshooting process.

The name of the proposal?

“Detection of Methane in Central Valley Couch Cushions.”

*sigh*

 

A couple of nights ago, I was leaving my father-in-law’s house with my three-year-old son, Hayden. I picked him up on the sidewalk, planning to carry him to his car seat in my truck.

Normally, Hayden would walk to the truck and climb in, but I was parked on a fairly busy street in our town, Gibson Road. Although it is technically a residential street, someone had the terrific idea to allow four lanes of traffic on it.

Sure, this eased the gridlock, but it also turned Gibson Road into something of a highway.

As I was preparing to step out and around my truck to put Hayden in, I saw a car swerve a bit out of the lane into the shoulder/bike lane/street parking area, the same area where I was about to be.

The car corrected itself quickly, and as it approached, I prepared my sharpest glare, looking like I was suffering both constipation and diarrhea at the same exact moment.

Once the car was close enough, I could see that the driver was either dialing a phone number or texting a message. My guess is that she was texting, based on her young age and the rapid movement of her fingers.

I stepped back onto the sidewalk as she passed. If she plowed into my truck, I didn’t want Hayden and I to be in the line of fire.

She didn’t crash, but I did see her swerve again after she past me. I felt such rage inside at her recklessness that I considered whether or not I could get a shot off, had I a gun and any knowledge of how a gun might work.

This idea remained after I calmed down and strapped Hayden into his car seat. Perhaps it would be fair for me to take a shot at a driver engaged in dialing/texting. It’s not like I would be perched on the roof of my father-in-laws house with a sniper rifle, taking shots at the first site of a cell phone.

I would have to retrieve my gun from the holster in which it resided, unlock the safety, aim and shoot. The car would be moving away from me, making a successful hit much less likely, and if I had Hayden in my arms, I’d have to adjust my stance to support his weight, maybe even try to fire from the hip.

Seems fair to me. Of course, I wouldn’t want to hit any innocent drivers, but then I thought that this should be part of my equation. If you don’t want pedestrians taking shots into traffic, you, as the innocent driver, need to preemptively take out the cell phone user.

Rather than just shaking your head at a texting/dialing fool, you would feel compelled to run them off of the road immediately to deter any gun happy people from firing off.

It’s a win-win solution, I think. Cell phone users will think twice before dialing or texting, if they know they might be driven off of the road or shot at.

Of course, the obvious solution to this problem is to make driving while dialing/texting a felony. After all, how many of you would drive home even more drunk if there were no DUI laws?