There were other places I should have been that December day. In a silent room working toward a writing deadline. At my day job, completing action items whose only recent action involved me moving them from one week’s list of to-dos to the next. Or even at the gym, gritting my way through an explanation of what I’d been up to in recent years. (Yes. Years.) But instead, I was driving from suburban St. Paul to South Minneapolis in a rented yellow Ford Bronco fully loaded with the art of a widowed octogenarian woman I’d known for less than six months.
I met Diana that spring with the sole intention of delving into her involvement in The Silver Chain, ready to be dazzled by stories about the club’s monthly dances where she was once awarded a vinyl record for being the best dancer. Or club-sponsored camping trips that she organized with her first husband, Chuck. Instead, I found myself wonderstruck by Diana’s living room of blue wall-to-wall carpeting filled with paintings that documented visits to Split Rock, a goldfinch that once perched outside the kitchen window, and the brief and elusive springtime bloom of lilacs. All painted by Diana herself.
Hearing Diana’s life story and how she managed to thrive on the dance floor at The Silver Chain’s gatherings all the while enduring an abusive first marriage plucked me out of my fantasy about this club and grounded me in reality. A second marriage with a high school sweetheart brought Diana much deserved happiness. But now, after his death, she was alone in this expansive townhouse surrounded by her art. Art that Diana wanted to feature and sell in an art show. A show that I was determined to make happen.
A post-it note on the front door instructed me to travel downstairs to Diana’s basement studio, where I found her flipping through a yellow legal pad, jotting prices on business cards and tucking them into the lower left corner of each frame. “Wait. I need to adjust the price on that one,” Diana said, referring to a skyscape of flying cranes. When I questioned the reasoning behind her decision to spike the price from $335 to $880, Diana merely cited inflation.
The first night of Diana’s art show, she had a commitment at a gallery in White Bear Lake where one of her paintings was being featured, putting the task of selling her masterpieces solely on me. Two long folding tables awaited my arrival in the lobby of the Parkview Theatre where my friend Nora McInerny had been kind enough to share the space during her sold-out “Happy-ish Holidays” show. I organized the framed works, convinced that this captive audience of theatergoers was sure to splurge on these works of art. The crafted wool animals sold like wildfire. The framed paintings? Barely a trickle. One sold to a member of the audience. The rest, to friends I pestered via text. The first night’s total: $600.
I told myself the next night — a Friday — would be better. I’d have Diana in attendance. She would effortlessly charm theatergoers and amass a small fortune for her artistic ventures. Diana started off enthusiastic, indulging in buttered popcorn and bottled water, sharing her painting techniques with several early attendees. But as the crowd swarmed into the theatre and Diana’s hip started bothering her, she settled into a chair opposite the tables displaying her art. Then asked to go home.
With the theatre doors closed and Nora on stage, we drove across the city back to Diana’s townhouse. We chatted about the pencil drawn fox ornaments she’d crafted as Christmas gifts for family and friends, then planned a time to deliver the unsold paintings back to her home the next morning. I returned to the theatre to tally Diana’s sales for the night: $155. Only $50 if you didn’t count the two small paintings I purchased while reloading the Bronco. And yet, despite the disappointing results, I couldn’t help but feel immense joy.
Spending time with Diana and doing something kind for her helped me regain my footing and tap into something I’d lost touch with in recent years. It was a side of myself. Someone I forgot I once was. It was the feeling of being a grandson.
Grandma Trudy sometimes failed to pick me up at the airport when I’d fly in from Bemidji. My calls from a pay phone were met with puzzlement. “Your flight is today?” “I thought you were arriving at eight!” But that didn’t even matter because I knew this was the start of an unbelievable adventure. Of Showbiz Pizza and Diet Rite Cola, cable TV and card games followed by a five AM alarm to tackle the labyrinth of garage sales she’d masterfully plotted out on a map. However short or long the visit, I nestled in the knowledge that I could do no wrong.
We laughed at her spaciness and called her the Rose Nyland of Richfield. Dove into suburban ditches to pick wildflowers for her crafts. Rolled our eyes at her eccentricity when she joined a sector within her singles group comprised entirely of clowns. And threw up in our mouths a little as we found long-expired items in her refrigerator that she swore she’d purchased only days earlier at the local market. But it was in her orbit I felt both the excitement and promise that life had to offer.
When I moved to Minneapolis for college, I kept her at bay. I bristled at her lack of planning and grew to see her spontaneity as pure chaos. I believed her style and approach to life no longer matched my imagined fabulousness. The very woman who inspired me on how to live. I had changed from adoring grandson to an uncertain and yet incredibly arrogant young adult.
But if she noticed or was hurt, she never let it show. Maybe it was because after years of dating, she’d finally gotten serious with a man named Curt. A man that some called “The Lounge Lizard.” A friendly but bigoted, loud-talking man with sailor tattoos and a shock of unruly white hair. When he whisked Grandma Trudy off to the Gulf Coast of Florida, many in the family were relieved. Not because Grandma Trudy was leaving, but because Curt would be gone.
I saw her only twice the next sixteen years. Once during a visit to Florida in 2005 where I spent the night at her and Curt’s place in Punta Gorda, a brand-new mobile home that replaced the one destroyed by Hurricane Charley. And then, the last time, in 2013 when she had returned to Bemidji after parting ways with Curt, who had opted to pursue the single life in Las Vegas.
She sat in her wheelchair looking out the window when I entered, my mother by my side. “Grandma?” I said questioningly, afraid her memory lapses might now include me. She turned, her eyes immediately lighting up with excitement. We talked like no time had passed even though it clearly had. She was now back in a town she’d vowed never to return to after divorcing my grandfather. She thought my mom — her former daughter-in-law and longtime nemesis — was my new wife. But I have to believe she remembered me. Even if she’d forgotten I was gay.
The next morning, we ate breakfast in the nursing home’s dining room. She raved about the cooking and confided to me about her boyfriends and the many other men at the home who wanted to date her. “Who was that woman with you the other day?” she asked innocently. I informed her it was my mother, Peggy, who was once married to her son, Larry. “Nice lady,” she said gently before returning to her scrambled eggs.
It was time to go. I wheeled her back into her room and told her how much I loved her. The times with her that changed my life. Both of us knowing this was it. We hugged. She cradled my head as she had when I was a young boy. And then, her gaze returned to the window as I stepped out.
A cold rain flooded the roads as I navigated my way to Diana’s townhouse that Saturday morning. I knocked at the door a couple of times until finally Diana appeared in a bathrobe, apologetic for oversleeping. I returned her many paintings to the downstairs studio before we settled back into the blue carpeted living room where our adventure originated. Diana delighted as I counted out hundred-dollar bills for her sales, then surprised me with a fox Christmas ornament, a token of not only her appreciation but friendship.
The rain morphed into snow as I backed out of Diana’s driveway. We waved until I turned onto the main road. I couldn’t make sense in that moment of what I’d done in the past forty-eight hours of my life. Or what had truly motivated me to make the trip in the first place. All I knew was that it had brought me closer to the person I once was. With attributes that I wish I’d done a better job of preserving in adulthood. But in that visit, I realized they hadn’t been lost. They were waiting to be rediscovered all along. XO Paul