In Memory of All Lost, R.I.P. Janie McMahen H.

My father's mother and I had a very close bond---Sunday June 28th was the ten year anniversary of my Grandmother's death. *

I miss her every single day.

Growing up, her family was poor,basically sharecroppers. She knew education was her only escape. She was accepted to Mississippi College for Women in the late thirties. She went to school during fall, winter, and spring, but during the summer she would come home to Belzoni and pick cotton in the hot, hot, hot Delta heat. She was a tiny lady, probably about five foot, and her little hands were probably chewed up by the prickly cotton bolls.

Before he died, her brother, my great uncle James Olan, told me she never complained.

She taught me how to read before I went to school, developing this huge library of books in her house just for my siblings and I. She edited the grammar, the food choices (i.e. ice cream and candy became yogurt and fruit), and added Bible verses.

She was very devout, but not in a Religious Right way. In 1998, when I told her how W. was making abortion a wedge issue in the upcoming Presidential campaign, she shuddered.

It was the same kind of disgusted shiver she gave when I told her Faulkner had created the rape scene in Sanctuary to titillate the public into buying his book. (Sanctuary was his first commercial hit).

We cooked together-- -she made a binder of recipes. She also had huge binders of instructions for arts and crafts projects that we'd create at her house. We would take long walks to gather assorted flowers and leaves, which we would press in wax paper.

The bright yellow Gingko in fall is still my favorite tree.

She was on the health food/ organics/ vitamin craze about three decades before it hit, and completely overdid it. She spent a hundred plus dollars each month on vitamins. When I was sent away to Escuela Caribe, she became more and more restrictive about what food she would eat. She also began taking more vitamins.

Her liver couldn't handle it- she had a long painful death. My father, a doctor, says she was one of three people in the United States to die of a Vitamin E overdose.

My last Sunday in Montauk, twice, in the early morning and late afternoon, I went to the beach. I sat on the sand and thought of her, and watched the waves.