Grandma Gideon

What can I say about Grandma Gideon? My maternal grandmother, she was. She loved music and she played organ and piano in church for as long as I can remember.

My earliest memories of her are visiting her at her house in Los Angeles. It was the house where my mother was raised. Grandma was a wonderful cook. She cooked meals when we visited that were amazing. Kind of down home cooking--nothing fancy--but yummy! She had a collection of cookbooks that would put Food Network to shame!

She was a strange lady in some ways. Odd habits. She used to use a flashlight in her house in the evenings for fear of running up her electric bill. Maybe she was a woman ahead of her time and was "green" before the term came to be. Hmmm...

Another thing she used to do was get out of the car while it was moving. Grandma did not drive, so when we would take her home after church, she would open the door and start to get out of the car even before the car stopped. No seatbelts back them. I don't know why she did that. She was always in a hurry and seemed to have a lot of nervous energy. So maybe she figured that if she exited the car without waiting for it to stop then she could save a second or two! Who knows?

She was not an easy person to know. She was depressed, but it manifested as anger, criticism, and irritation. She could be kind, but to those of us who knew her well she was a difficult woman, to say it nicely. I don't think she ever forgave herself for the divorce from my grandfather, and that was evident until she died.

Early pictures of her show that she was a pretty little girl and a beautiful woman. I would never have known that, because by the time I was born she was 47 years old and was just old and frumpy and plain. She wore these ugly "jersey" (wash and wear) dresses that made this 47 year old look like a 77 year old.

Around the time I was ten years old, she sold her house in LA and moved to the valley to be closer to all of us. My mom toted her around to look at houses (along with all four of us girls) and she finally settled on the house in Panorama City where she lived for some 30+ years.

When she bought the Panorama City house, there was a family living there who had planted a Christmas tree in the front yard. It was probably 8 to 10 feet tall when Grandma bought the property. The little girl cried about leaving her Christmas tree, and Grandma told them that they might as well take it because she probably wouldn't live much longer. This was in 1958 and Grandma died in 1993--some 35 years later. (However she moved out of that house in the last years of her life, but the point is that she didn't die soon like she said she would. When she died, that tree was about 30 feet tall or more.)

That was the them of her life for as long as I knew her--that she wasn't going to live much longer. After awhile, when we would hear her say that we would all just roll our eyes and glance at the people around us with a knowing look.