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Lavender Blues*

Sometimes I hear Martha Stewart talking to me in one ear.  I hear Robin Williams in the other.

Robin’s yelling, “Carpe Diem!”

Martha’s whispering insider-trading secrets to me. Or she’s reminding me that it’s time to clean and trim all holiday candlewicks to 1/4 inch lengths and individually wrap them (in silk bags?) for storage to ensure smokeless flames and longevity during future candlelight vigils.

(I suppose I should go see someone about these voices in my head, but I’m kinda enjoying the company.)

It’s easy to be derisive about Martha, but I need to come clean and admit that last year I signed up for a Pottery Barn decorating class. They emailed me about their free seminar on bedroom decorating tips, and so I politely R.S.V.P’d and brought my friend Debbie along.

There we were–more than 30 women–gathered around a fluffy, short-sheeted bed in the pre-opening hours of the store. The key to those lovely display beds? The bedding is doubled over to enhance the heaping highness of the comforters…but you can’t actually crawl into them unless you’re very small. Tinkerbell-sized.

Pottery Barn employees spent 20 minutes demonstrating proper bed-making techniques and debating with our assembled group whether military folds versus hospital-bed folds made for more perfect corners. I whispered to Debbie that I hoped no one ever came over to my home and flipped up my comforter to check out my bed-making skills. I must have been a poor geometry student, because  90-degree angles mean very little to me. Instead, a bed inspector would likely find my wadded-up pair of socks I kicked off in the middle of the night; Possibly some dust bunnies reproducing beneath my bed.

Here we are, four decades past the women’s movement of the ‘60s, and the Sisterhood was gathered to discuss–not women suffering under Taliban rule; not the plight of young girls in Thailand or Russia–but the various lavender-scented oils that could be added into each laundry load of sheets.

So that’s my confession. I signed up to spend a morning discussing thread count and Egyptian cotton and short-sheeted beds. I wondered what I was doing there the whole time.

I happen to appreciate beautifully packaged presents and lavish bows and lovely, graceful homes. And hey, someone can scent my sheets with lavender any day! But fast forward to the ebbing days of my life, and I suspect I might look back and wonder why I spent even 20 minutes contemplating hospital-bed corners. Tonight, though, sleep eludes me, and I am thinking about hospital beds…specifically, my thoughts are with my 97-year-old Grandpa who is occupying one.

He was admitted to the hospital a few days ago with severe pneumonia and other complications. Although he’s resting calmly this evening, one of his lungs is entirely collapsed, and the other is functioning at 20 percent capacity. His heart is tired from the years of life and the present effort to move blood and oxygen through his body now. We’re expecting him to pass from us sometime soon.**

On his 96th birthday last year, I wrote a bit about Grandpa with his strict adherence to the rules of English grammar and the application of his red editing pen on my vacation postcards. This weekend, so many other random memories of my Grandpa surfaced:

At least twice when I was young, Grandpa pulled his money out of one bank and opened a savings account in another to get me a stuffed toy: Crocker Bank’s Cocker Spaniel or Security Pacific’s circus animals. I remember delightedly showing my animals off to my dad (who promptly phoned Grandpa to lecture him about the losses he was incurring by moving his money around). Grandpa, famously frugal with his funds, seemed unperturbed by any losses. He just enjoyed watching me play with those stuffed toys.

I remember Grandpa stopping by the house a few days before my wedding to ask me how he and Grandma could help. I thought a moment and then realized that in the frenzy of preparations, I hadn’t purchased sawdust shavings for my hamster’s cage. I’d leave on my honeymoon, and Sebastian would be sitting in soiled sawdust! Grandpa climbed into his car and went in search of cage filler for my rodent.

Grandpa never won an Olympic medal or any trophies. He didn’t publish a best-selling novel. He didn’t distinguish himself by finding a cure for a dreaded disease. He never painted a masterpiece nor launched a multi-national, trillion-dollar company. Instead, he took the time to double-knot my shoelaces and button my sweaters.

My sister and I, sometimes our cousins too, had sleepovers at my grandparents’ house. Grandpa would fix us hot cocoa at bedtime and add blankets to our beds in case we were cold in the night. Grandpa called chocolates “chocs,” and made root beer floats with 7-Up. We had both treats in abundance when we were with Grandpa.

Maybe it’s the nature of being a grandparent and retired, but if Grandpa was parsimonious with money, he was generous with the time he lavished on his grandkids. He’d shuttle us to the library when our parents were too busy. He’d swim with us when we couldn’t swim alone and no other adult wanted to splash with us in the pool.

In the end, I can hardly name last night’s Grammy award winners in each category. I definitely can’t name award winners from previous years. But I vividly recall Grandpa helping me make hammocks for my stuffed animals on his backyard clotheslines.

The long rows of white sheets flapped in the breeze. Wooden clothespins held up our pillowcase hammocks. None of the laundry smelled of lavender. But when I remember Grandpa lifting me up to put my teddy bears to sleep in the pillowcases, the memories smell like love.

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