Grandma Ham

"Your gradma's name is Fannie Ham!" the entire seventh grade GEMS group stirred with excitement.

In a way I always thought it was funny, that Grandma Ham's name was so silly, not too common, though she tries to be the most normal and common woman that ever was out in society.

Take her closet for example. It was the summer of 2007 and I was working as a nurse's aid in Churchill, MT. Grandma Ham was so proud that she had the luxury of service from her very own great-grand daughter. Surely I would allow her to live peacefully and comfortably, away from the mumbo jumbo abnormalities from other residents she apparently witnesses every day. In her Spring and Fall wardrobe she owns precisely seven slacks, organized in color from white to peach to blue to navy and finally to black. "Seven?" she would ask as I neatly clipped the cuffs to the hanger. "Yes, Grandma, seven."

"Goot." Oh, and Grandma Ham speaks with this articulate, need-to-make-sure-they-know-I'm-Dutch way. The foreign 'r' in "Surrre" or the hacking 'h': "Hhhave a candy." I believe she is third generation Dutch, so her grandmother and mother spoke it.

The bedding must be neat, no wrinkles, no uneven draping. If it lay askew, the loss is hers. She must sit and stare at it all day. As she crochets or reads or reads in her diagonal corner chair, a spot where her bed is so visible, she must remain in the presence of a kitty-wampus bedspread. And while nurses and cleaning ladies and nurse's aides and visitors come and don't do a thing about the bedspread, she must give herself up to an abnormality, to a potential discovery that Fannie Ham may not be as put-together as she desires.

Grandma Ham was originally Fannie Droge. The eldest of seven children, she also assumed the responsibility to clean after her siblings and to help her mother prepare meals. She cleaned while her siblings aided their father on the potato farm.

"So it is true that our family line has been here for over a hundred years,Grandma?" As she explained her history we folded "scrubbie" netting together, she showed the way to fold, how many times to fold the netting, where to pin it, and where to cut.

"Why, yes, hunny. I don't suppose Grandma has thought of that. Our family has been here for over a hundret years." I thought of how people now don't stay in one place anymore. They move, and lineages tied to places are broken often. Bigger dreams, newer places.

"So how did you meet Grandpa Overweg?"

"I wasn't too old, probably your age when I traveled to Warshington to clean for a family. One day I was out for a stroll with a friend when I met him. He offered to buy me ice cream, and I accepted." As we passed pins to one another, she continued folding and securing the netting--a practice she knows well--and she continued. "He didn't have a family. He was orphaned as a young boy and since had lived with brothers or sisters and always grew up very poor. When it came time for me to go back home, I asked my father if he would hire another man. Dirk came to Montana, but Daddy would not allow us to live in the same house, so Dirk had to live in Bozeman. Twenty miles was much further back then, and I rarely got to see him. Daddy bought him working gloves and boots from an old JC Penny that used to exist in Manhattan."

Grandma Ham held the netting while I continued to cut on our marked lines. "So then what?"

"Although it was nice to know he was in Montana, I still rarely saw him. But soon he had earned enough money from Daddy to afford another place to live." And soon Grandma became an Overweg. It was a goot, solid Dutch name.

They had a daughter named Genevieve Ann, and five years later another daughter Delores. They grew up and began their families. Gen's oldest Mike is my father, and here I am. And there I was with Grandma Ham, connecting the generational gap between us.

Grandpa Dirk died young, when my dad was about six or seven, and so Grandma Ham with all her health problems moved into the independent side of the retirement home when she was in her fifties and about ten years later she met and married Grandpa Ham, her name thus being Fannie Ham. Grandpa Ham died when I was six or seven.

She is 93 this year, and each time we see her she says, "This could be the last time..." as thought she is saying, "Well, it's been good to know ya. I'm off."

For all the ways Grandma Ham desires normalcy and expects normalcy from other people, she herself has taken detours and has explored new territories. And although she believes that a bed spread should never be crooket or that there should never be no more or no less slacks than seven in her Spring attire, her name suggests otherwise. Her name says that she has taken chances and has lived.



***Grandma called me the other day to say that Grandma Ham had a dream. She told the dream to Aunt Nell, her sister, sure that the dream was true.

"You must call Laurissa," she said in such a worry.

"Is she okay?" Aunt Nell said to her in confusion, "Fannie, Laurissa is just fine. She is in DeMotte teaching."

"No! She got fired!" Grandma Ham said, "Yes, they fired her because she could not teach in Dutch. But that is okay, because she moved back to Sioux Falls and she is going to marry one of Josh's brothers." Josh is my brother-in-law and he has three younger brothers. I'm friends with all of them. And Grandma Ham desires that I should find a man to marry before she dies, so that she can rest in peace. (Because a single woman off and on her own at 23 is surely an abomination.)

Aunt Nell assured her that no, I was not fired and that no, I was not going to marry one of Josh's brothers and that yes, I was doing just fine and I still had my teaching job.


***Grandma Ham called Aunt Nell in a panic one morning. "They're going to arrest us!"

"what?"

"You and I, we wrote fraudulent checks, and now they are going to arrest us!"

Suddenly, Grandma Ham has difficulty distinguishing reality from her dreams. For a woman so tied to normalcy, her dreams certainly suggest a crazier, more complicated, more exciting, more imaginitive Laurissa-like mind. I believe I am Fannie Ham's great-grandaughter after all.

Fear God for nothing?

This morning, I need to be doing my last minute things--printing handouts, making those final annotations for a Sophomore discussion of Jubilee, planning English 9 after three days of writing (where to go. where to go.), and of course, figure out just what I'm going to do with American Lit.

On Monday, the semi-standing walls I built around the Am. Lit. structure fell apart. Students were overloaded, not sure where to go, wanted less homework, wanted less of everything (but that case didn't last long). Yesterday went okay. Today, things may fall apart, and that's not okay. But maybe it has to happen.

This morning I read in Job. Yes, where else do we go when our most reliable resources in life fall down and shatter around us?

And I was struck by what was said: "Does Job fear God for nothing?" Those words spoken, of course, by Satan. And I wonder the same. Do I fear God for nothing, and so my faith comes easy? When I get the stink-eye from a couple guys wondering if I'll really follow through with what I say, I realize that I fear God for the fact that when my biggest stabilities (a working, breathing, growing classroom) is stripped from under me, He is still the rock.

God is comfort, but he's not a teddy bear; God is love, but he's not a boyfriend; God is peace, patience, kindness, but he's not an Oprah talk show.

This week and beyond, when all my walls and foundations are tumbling down, I need to learn to fear God. As a country and as a people on earth, we must learn to quit looking at God and talking to God and talking about God as though he is the little pleasure-filled things built only around our happiness.

Lord, take those stupid foundations, tear them down, rip them right out from under me, and replenish emptiness with Christ.

Fear the Lord for the fact that he is God.

Are dreams real?

In a dream I cried. I hate crying.

I was crying that it felt lonely on my own, that the rocks I thought were boulders were only sand, which developed the epiphany that I would run away. I began to pack my blue suitcase. I was so good at this--packing I mean. Toothbrush, contact solution, jeans, T-shirts, socks, a few pictures, my Bible. I had done this many times before. My parents moved from one rented home to another, from one state to another, and after high school I moved from Montana to Iowa to Alaska to South Dakota to New Mexico and now to Indiana.

All this so far is true.

My dream continued.

"Why do you suppose that is?" My gradmother faded into the background.

"Why what is?" I was still throwing clothes and books into my suitcase.

She stepped forward. "Why do you think you need to run?"

I stopped.

"I enjoy being by myself." And then, "I'm better off that way."

Then, like only Grandma could, she said bluntly, "You think that running away is your only way to gain independence? You think that being on your own qualifies you for adulthood? You think that stepping away from the pressure of the here and now will make it go away? You think that when you have a job to do and you feel insufficient that Christ can't be sufficient for you?"

I stopped packing.

"What's in your heart, Laurissa? You claim to be independent. You claim adulthood. But you are scared, and you're supplementing whatever you believe is missing with glorified dreams of running away."



Bam.

That Life-Changing Thing

This weekend I did something that could steer my life into one of two directions: #1 Everything would change; #2 Everything could stay just the same.
And here's a mini-lesson on the word "thing."

By inserting words that say "thing" three times into the beginning paragraph of this blog, I create not only the most ambiquous claim, but I avert confessing what I actually did.

When I hate the word "thing":
When students use it for lack of a better person, place, and you guessed it, thing.

When I love the word "thing":
When I get to post a blog that marks the biggest potential event of my life, and when I can't keep it in any longer and need to say "something"


I pray your potential life-changing things actually do happen.