I used to dread Tuesday nights during the summer. My husband has a standing rehearsal on Tuesday evenings, and my grandfather is at a mid-week farmer’s market. Just me and Grandma for dinner. With a long history of tense relations (which I’ve talked about most recently here), it’s become habit to view the night with a pretty high level of apprehension. Nothing overly bad usually happens, it’s just the lack of a, erm, “human shield” that makes it worse than other nights.
Even now, with my heart working back to a healthy place, and her mood so much better (mainly because she feels better, I think), it can be difficult to look forward to these evenings alone with her with any sort of relish. She and I are very different, and it can be hard to simply be friends with her. Sometimes it’s hard to get conversation started. After totally shutting down my emotional connection with her for a while, I’m having to relearn how to talk to her, how to enjoy her again.
Tonight felt like a big step forward to me. It was awkward, at first. I was tempted to turn on the news simply to fill the silence in between my insipid (but friendly) comments about our dinner (which was delicious, by the by). But I powered through, and eventually we landed on a topic that sparked some shared interest: the farm. One story led to another, and low and behold: a conversation! A real, live, adult conversation we both enjoyed! When all was said and done (including the dishes), we had spent over an hour over dinner and beyond, talking and smiling, and generally getting along like family is supposed to. It was lovely.
My favorite story of the evening:
“You know that summer we [my grandparents, and my mom and her sisters] spent in Florida? Well, a couple weeks before we left, your grandpa and I were at a conference in Boston, and a fellow asked grandpa if he wanted a summer job working for the Aerospace program designing a computer for a big, long-term shuttle they were designing. He said, um, yes! It took us 10 days from the time he got the offer to decide we were going and actually leaving, plus two days that the government spent talking to our neighbors to make sure we were good people. Anyhow. before we got the offer, we had already planted an early summer garden out there [waves to the side yard], and we had planted those Ace beets. You know the ones? That are good early or late? Well, when we got back at the end of the summer, they were the size of your head! We didn’t think there was any chance they’d be any good anymore, but we cut one up into pieces the size you would normally serve, and we steamed them, and they were perfectly tender and tasty! We couldn’t believe it! We canned a lot of pickled beets that fall.”
The Lived-in Life 