My grandmother, Mary Ellen Kincaid, left me a lot of great memories and stories, along with two mysteries-a little one with a key, and a big one with none. The big one may take, literally, forever to solve.
One of my favorite 'Grandma' stories is about a day in the 1940s when she took a train from Covington, Ky., where she had been visiting my Aunt Jo, home to Paris. It was a time when Americans could travel by train to almost any town in the country.
"Local" trains often stopped at places that were little more than crossroads. (Once, on a trip through North Carolina my train stopped at a little town and the crew got off and went to lunch). Grandma was traveling at night, and several stops before Paris she misheard the conductor's announcement and got off. The train was leaving before she realized she was in the tiny town of Berry, a good 30 miles from home. There wasn't another train until the next day and no way to let my grandfather know where she was; he went to bed early and, nearly deaf, couldn't hear a telephone ring nor talk on one.
A couple who alighted from the train with Grandma were kindly, took her home with them for the night and put her on the next day's train.
There are two remarkable things about her trip. One is that it's hard to imagine Grandma traveling alone; the second is that she spent the night with people she didn't know. She was rather nervous and tended to be suspicious of strangers. She was raised and lived more than half her life in rural communities in central Kentucky. Lexington, then with a population of 50,000 or so, was the very occasionally visited "city." Her world had been one in which everyone knew everyone else and their dogs, and everyone belonged to the same church, the same lodge, sent their children to the same small school (my mother's graduating class numbered three) and voted the straight Democratic ticket.
When my grandparents moved to Lexington, Grandma viewed her new surroundings with caution and acted accordingly. She saw city people as different than the ones she was used to living among. On a visit to Covington, while standing on a corner waiting for a bus, Grandma studied passersby for a time and finally said to my mother, "Emma, these people look strange."
She did love to shop in the city and, in the last years of Grandma's life, Mom would take her downtown in Lexington, riding the bus. Because she was used to shouting so my grandfather could hear, Grandma's whispers were at the level of normal conversation. Fascinated by the people on the bus, often she would make comments to my mother about them or what they were wearing. Embarrassed, Mom would signal for Grandma to turn down the volume.
She did what good grandmothers do in that she spoiled me when she got a chance. I loved to spend the night with my grandparents. Grandma always cooked what I liked and let me stay up as late as I wanted, reading my way through vast stacks of comic books left by my Uncle Billy. She was religiously conservative and sang hymns as she went about her housework. But now and then she would sing something funny, like an extra stanza of a hymn that would never be heard in church.
Despite her reserve, she could be tough when the situation demanded, like a lioness protecting her children. My grandparents lost almost everything in the Great Depression, but moved on and made out with what they had left.
Grandma survived tuberculosis when she was young and always gave the appearance of being frail, but when she had a major heart attack in her fifties, she surprised everybody by recovering fully. She lived without another heart problem for 30 years and came within two weeks of outliving even the youngest of her siblings.
Grandma secretly smoked cigarettes. I knew it, but my mother didn't. My mother smoked, but kept it a secret from Grandma. She didn't drink either, but she and Grandpa had an apple toddy every Christmas morning.
My grandmother also saved things. A few of the little items have come down to me-a small milk can, a dinner bell, a tin that once held my grandfather's Prince Albert pipe tobacco. Inside the tin is a coin purse, and inside the purse is a key. A key to what? She left me a small mystery. And a bigger one.
Grandma herself is the other mystery. From where I live in 2008, I sometimes think of her now as a kind of time traveler, walking out of the mists of rural 19th century Kentucky into the complexities and confusion of the urbanized 20th and never quite being at home there. I have a photo-booth picture of Grandma and I often look at it and wish I could know what she knew, wish I could see the world as she saw it. But no one can enter entirely into another person's world; we can go only so far. As with the tobacco tin, the coin purse and the key, life offers mystery within mystery, one mystery after another. To paraphrase Pogo, "We have met a mystery and it is us." Mysteries within the great mystery. I'm hoping to know more in heaven.
Bob Horine is an Episcopal priest and author. He can be reached by e-mail at horinerb@insightbb.com.