The Kentuckians, or Girlish Dreams Is How She Ended in Elephant Architecture

Upon the visit from my mother, I was informed my paternal grandmother, Joan, has lung cancer. She had a stroke last fall, and she survived her daughter, my aunt Julie who passed last year of what was originally breast cancer. Grandmother as we, the grandchildren, call her sounded much better to me on this call I made to her a few days ago. She has been attempting to go through speech therapy for the stroke. Grandmother would get her masters in English Literature after she had four kids and in her 30s. Grandmother taught one of my first English courses while I was in high school. She taught Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, some Robert Frost Poems, The Highwayman poem, Jack London’s To Build a Fire, and one I can’t quite remember about finding a Lake in snowy woods which I will ask if she recalls on my next call or visit. I remember that it was during that class I decided I wished to speak poetically, and that I would have to read tons more of poetry to accomplish such a vast feat. My father would purchase me the Barnes & Noble complete collection of Shakespeare’s works. I took that edition with me when I flew for the first time alone on a plane around age 15 to Kansas to visit family there. I read Julius Caesar from the beginning to the end beginning on the plane ride. I actually hadn’t been reading too long when I began reading Shakespeare. I really didn’t have much interest in reading until I was around 11 and then I began playing Pokemon on the Gameboy color and taking Latin at age 12. I remember studying Latin Grammar, translating pages of religious texts and finding myself immersed in that language and then on to Shakespeare. What a beautiful world to experience. But, I digress: Grandmother’s class, alas. She put the love of literature directly into me. She and I would spend time together afterwards when I began my reading career (because it was game-on after that! I was frequenting every bookstore I could find and heading straight to the Classics, or Literature section) and she told me about her childhood days when she began reading and going to libraries. She laughed at herself when she remembered her first visits to the public Library. She remembered thinking to herself that she wanted to read every book in the place starting with A and ending with Z. And she tried too. She started at A and began working her way down the alphabet, but she didn’t get too far; she laughed and related: “Girlish Dreams” is how she ended.

Grandmother adored Truman Capote and lapt every word of In Cold Blood up when it debuted. Just like myself, she loved every minute of her life in college, English Literature and Creative Writing classes. She wished to be an author herself and I read one of her short stories, It was London and Kate Chopin-esque romance ending in a Tolkien or Native American mythos where a girl finds romance with a stranger somewhere far away in a cabin off in the snowy forest and when the sun also rises, only a deer is in the mist from whence he left.

My grandfather, her husband, would leave the world earlier than the rest in his 40s. From the stories surrounding their love life, the trebled woe would amplify because they were “truly in love”. One hears of all the divorces and unhappy marriages all about but Grandmother was truly and earnestly in love with that staunch man from the Navy, my grandfather, they called Bus. She would never remarry nor entertain the thought of dating again. And as the ages rolled, she would entertain herself with the finest Shakespearean actors the stage had ever seen in her lifetime. When I studied Hamlet word for word in my English classes we would watch Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and I would talk and laugh and talk with her about the play because she had already known him to be the best. She loved visiting Germany with her brother and she always told me that that was where she loved it the most to visit and would pick visiting Germany again. My visits with Grandmother would often entail visiting bookstores in The Mall, grabbing coffee, or food and she would have some book or piece of historical information she had been studying. One of my last visits she had “the Talk ‘’ with me (I think back laughing to myself). She secretly slid a copy of a book called “None Dare Call It Conspiracy” I believe the title was, and she gave me an oral history of things she experienced during the 50s, 60s and 70s. My Grandmother is an exceptionally intelligent woman. She was the type who could make things happen in the political realm of life. The type you wouldn’t want to see knocking on Abraham Lincoln’s doorstep because you know the game would be on then.

Last updated April 20, 2024