Maternal grandparents

My mother's parents were a big part of our lives growing up, because they were nearby.  As a U.S. senator, my grandfather was in Washington, D.C. when the Congress was in session, and in Utah when it was in recess. They had a very nice apartment in Washington for the time, not large by present standards but in a very good building.  They lived in the Berkshire Apartments on Massachusetts Avenue, on the 3rd floor.

When they were in town, we had Sunday dinners with them.  Now, as an adult, I imagine we missed some weeks (obviously if anyone was sick), but that was the normal plan in my memory.  We lived in the Silver Spring Ward and they were in Chevy Chase, so we would not see them at church, until 1962.  Then we returned home from our road trip to the Seattle World's Fair and moved into our new house just in time for me to start the 4th grade.  (My parents lived in that house for 44 years, until they gave it up for a Salt Lake City condo.)  That move placed us in the Chevy Chase Ward, so now we were all together.  Sometimes, then, they came to our house for Sunday dinner.

We got invited as kids for our own visits, too, sometimes overnight.  There was a sofa bed in the study which could be pulled out for me and Carolyn (or whoever's turn it was) to share.  Gram usually operated with us in pairs, and Carolyn and I were the two oldest.

The Berkshire was a fascinating place to a kid.  There was a grocery store in the basement!  If Gram needed something she found she was out of, she could call downstairs and I could be sent down to get it and tell the manager to put it on the account for Mrs. Bennett in apartment 3-whatever-it-was.  He would gravely ask me a couple of questions to make sure I really was Mrs. Bennett's granddaughter, and off I would go with a head of lettuce or a pint of cream.

There was a soda fountain downstairs too, and sometimes coming in from the parking garage Gram would offer to buy us a soda.  Climb up on the shiny chrome stools at the counter, and peruse the menu with excitement--we didn't get this offer every day!--and pick a root beer float or an ice cream soda.  This is where I discovered that I didn't like malts but I did like milkshakes.  There was a beauty salon too, but that didn't matter to us at all, though we knew that our grandmother went there to have her hair done every week.

An apartment building was a house with an elevator, and sometimes, only with a grownup, we would get to go up to the roof.  There wasn't anything up there to speak of except a strong breeze, a vantage point to see the surrounding area, and novelty value, but it was fun to do.  Once I remember we were supposed to be heading somewhere for a specific purpose, and we started whooping around and going up and down to random floors, exiting on the run and circling back in, and we disturbed someone who brought us up short and asked where we belonged; whereupon our grandmother got a call.  Reined in and reprimanded, we were left thoroughly chastened.  This was not a building full of children, and we were guests.  We were to behave if we wanted the freedom to come and go without sternly accompanying adults.

There was guest parking along the side and back of the building, and the apartment was on that side of the structure.  If you crossed the parking there was a small play area with swings, slide, and a merry-go-round (the kind that has been declare unsafe and removed from everywhere, that you grabbed the metal arches set into the platform, and pushed by running on the ground in circles).  This area was enclosed in a fence, surrounded by trees, and, happily, visible from the apartment's kitchen window.   This meant that we could go play and be called in from above when dinner was ready.

One of the traditions of those Sunday dinners was ice cream.  Gram asked us once what she should plan for dessert, and at the time we never had ice cream unless we went out for it, so we said, ice cream!  She thought that made her life very simple, so ice cream reigned on the Sunday dessert menu forever.  She used to serve Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies with it, and they are still one of my favorites.  Thin, sweet, and crisp, they are hard to find now, but they still make them.  We just called them 'Grammy cookies.'  She had a collection of little demi-tasse spoons as souvenirs from their many travels, and she offered them to us as ice cream utensils.  So after dinner, we would all select our favorite itty-bitty spoon and sit with a scoop of ice cream in perfect bliss.  Eating with those spoons was an undertaking, and it only prolonged the pleasure.  Thus, a simplification of hosting dinner became a delighted tradition for us. (My favorite spoon was a bright enameled turquoise.  I have always loved that color.)

I wish that we lived close enough to any of our own grandchildren to have so many opportunities.  We do get to see them at least yearly.  We have had to raise our own kids far away from any of the extended family, and we have not had the funds to travel as much as we would wish.  Cousins are names on a list to them rather than personal relationships, for the most part, and that is a loss. There are some ways in which they have been able to know each other better as adults, as so many of them end up in Utah for school-- single, and as newlyweds. I am grateful to have so many memories, and I hope that our children feel the same blessings of belonging despite the separation of geography.