Vivian of Biven's Arm

Some time ago, I wrote about my grandfather Hollis, a painter and academic of some note. As he died while I was only months old, I knew him mainly from documentary sources and the accounts of those who knew him. His wife and my grandmother Vivian, however, lived until the Major League Baseball players' strike, when I was eleven. That being the case, I have many vivid memories and a better first-hand understanding of who she was as a person, and yet I realize that I don't know so well about her the things I know about Hollis.

We would go to visit her in Gainesville some summers, arriving in a rental car from the Orlando airport late at night to find her waiting up for us. When I knew her, she remained quite independent, with the exception of the things she would call on her daughter-in-law's sister's husband (my uncle) to do. It seemed that these things often were the recovery of her cat Monkey from some tough spot on the property. Monkey had been my father's cat, and eventually became hers. He (or she?) was a mainstay of my childhood, looming large in my imagination even when I wasn't there. Monkey was easily one of the most miserable creatures I ever got to know, and seemed to live to a ripe old age purely out of spite. He seemed to be Vivian's most consistent companion.

Adorable nicknames for grandparents are as expected as they are unoriginal. We didn't fall into that. The name my sister and I had for Vivian was "Mim". It did not really reflect on her in any direct sense, positively or negatively: our other grandmother we called "Meme", which is fairly common in French culture (or at least the French-American culture of New England that I have any knowledge of). Our nickname for Vivian was, therefore, no more than a riff on the existing name for someone else. I guess that's kind of lazy, but she seemed to not take offense.

Something I remember very vividly is a stool she had in the kitchen. I guess that she had made donations to some environmental cause, and when one does that, they send more mail in a relentless campaign for additional donations. Most of those mailers had some kind of sticker in it as an enticement, and they all went on the stool. I loved that stool. The kitchen which held it was of very modest size. The front door led directly into it, as I recall, and was a Dutch door, as I believe they are called.

She sent gifts at Christmas that might make one think I was a college-educated adult. Commonly it was books, and not childrens' books. There was Archie and Mehitabel by Don Marquis, for one. Another was a book on environmentalism with a memorable inscription by Vivian apologizing for giving me a book which she was unaware had been endorsed by Rush Limbaugh. I bitterly regret that I don't have the opportunity to know her now that I'm older and more intelligent. I was reading heavy-duty stuff then, but understand more and can come up with thoughts of my own that I wish I could bounce off her.

There are a number of incidents that pop in my memory. I recall a trip we took to the art museum when I admired a little toy in the gift shop. I later asked for it as a gift, expecting that in payment I would have to suffer through a full tour of the museum once again. Instead, we drove directly to the gift shop  in her brown convertible Super Beetle, procured my little toy, and left promptly. In another memory, we are at the beach house, and she expresses great amusement at the deteriorated state of a band-aid on some scrape I had suffered. It looked to her as if it had been through a war.

Watching TV was prone to pitfalls. The tv was relegated to a room dedicated to that purpose, and was not central to her leisure activity strategy so far as I could tell. She was made rather unhappy by a song performed by Jim Carrey on In Living Color. She was also mystified by the existence of humanoid cartoon characters who had bizarre skin colors like blue or green. She took some casual interest in watching baseball, and was most amused by initially pristine uniforms which became hopelessly soiled as the players slid around on the infield.

Vivian died when I was still rather young, and while I was perhaps uniquely mature beyond my years in some respects intellectually, I remain very sorry that I couldn't have known her as I got older. I sometimes wonder what her insight might have been on this or that. Certainly, my family often has some idea, but there's no one that could really know. In any case, I'm glad to have known her. She was a special person, and integral in steering me in the direction I went in at that time.