Grandma Power

Last night we saw “Neil Berg’s 100 Years of Broadway.” It featured some remarkable Broadway stars, like Carter Calvert [It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues; Cats] and Sarah Joseph [Phantom of the Opera] and Ted Louis Levy [Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk; Jelly’s Last Jam] and Robert DuSold [Showboat; Mamma Mia] and Rob Evan [Les Miserables,; Jekyl and Hyde].

Berg said that his Broadway vocation was highly unlikely, since the only person in his family who had anything to do with show business was his grandmother, who told dirty jokes at an old people’s home. She was the one, though, who believed that he could make it in his unlikely occupation and kept encouraging him. Then Carter Calvert dedicated her recreation of “Memories” from “Cats” to her grandmother, “TuTu,” who every week, when Carter was getting turned down in all her auditions and thinking she should move back to Cincinnati and live with her mother, sent her an encouraging letter and “a check for just the right amount to get me through the next week or month.” [Helen says no one appreciated that more than Carter’s mother.]

That got me to thinking about the influence of grandmothers, and grandfathers.

Josh Hamilton, the amazingly talented outfielder of The Texas Rangers, while still in the minor leagues, got strung out on booze and dope. He went so far down, below the bottom, that everyone else gave up on him, but when Josh showed up on his grandma’s doorstep one bleak morning, without a prayer or a hope, it was she who gave him both and brought him back to himself. It was his white grandmother, “Toot,” that Barack Obama credits with raising him and loving him into an identity beyond the division of race. It was their grandfather who believed in his grandsons so much, the ones who called themselves “The Beach Boys,” although their new sound must surely have been strange to his Sinatra-listening ears, that he mortgaged his house to finance them. My cousin, Carole Ann, and her husband, David, are raising their now eleven-year-old great-grandson, even though they are pushing [or maybe even pulling] eighty years of age.

It set me to thinking about my own Grandma Mac, and how after my high school commencement, my mother complained that Grandma Mac clapped with embarrassing enthusiasm each time I received an award. During the Great Depression, my parents and older sister and I often lived with Grandma and Grandpa Mac, as did seven or eight other aunts, uncles, and cousins, although usually not all at the same time. From Grandma Mac, I learned that it is possible to be happy and hopeful even in the midst of chaos. And that it is okay to be embarrassing in your enthusiasm about your grandchildren.

When we lived with Grandma and Grandpa Mac, when my mother would spank me for some imagined infraction, I am told that my grandfather would go out into the back yard and cry.

The world needs more grandmothers who encourage the little ones, even when they aren’t little anymore, and grandfathers who weep over the pains of the little ones. Be not stinting in your enthusiasm, or in your tears.