I know this much is true: she was born on January 19, 1905. Much of Grandma Mandt's early life is shrouded in mystery. According to what she told us, she was born in Detroit, Michigan, but moved to Scotland with her parents when she was a baby.. Her parents had seven more children and eventually settled in Scotland. She told us that her name was Katherine Marguerite Smith, and her parents were Dominic and Oona (which sounds pretty Scottish, doesn't it?).
Grandma was full of stories about her childhood. She always says she was great with languages and became fluent in both the Scottish and Irish forms of Gaelic. She crocheted an altar-cloth for the altar of her church. She was wild too-- when I was a little girl I loved to hear about all of the dances she went to, and how she pulled of having two dates in the same night (one would drop her off at the back door and the other would meet her at the front door). She told us that she decided to come to America to live with an aunt when she was 18 because she had better chances for jobs on this side of the pond.
She never saw her parents again, and kept in contact sporadically with a couple of her sisters. It always seemed sort of strange to us that she had such a big, jovial family and she didn't want to have much to do with them, even though a couple of her sisters lived nearby in Ontario.
Anyway, if Kitty came to America to better her opportunities, I'm not sure she found the dream she was looking for. She married a handsome blueblood who turned out to be a drunk, had three kids, kicked her husband out, and raised the kids alone during the Great Depression. She always prided herself on being a working woman (she worked for years, even after she remarried and didn't have to work anymore). She lost her only son when he lied about his age to enlist in World War II and his ship sank a few months later. Another daughter died from complications of alcoholism in her forties.
But despite her hard knocks, Kitty made a happy life for herself. My favorite part of going to visit my grandma (her daughter) was getting to spend the night at Grandma Mandt's. Grandma would put the jungle sheets on the bed, teach me to crochet for the millionth time, and let me sit on the vibrating pillow. She always made fish sticks or corn dogs and canned corn for dinner. I probably would have turned my nose up at that menu if it had been served anywhere else, but I loved it at Grandma Mandt's.
We have a running joke in our family that on the female line, temper skips a generation. I'm one of the non-temperate (which means my mom and my daugher both have nasty tempers, lucky me) and Grandma Mandt definitely had a temper. When my mom was pregnant with me, Grandma insisted that the baby not be born on her birthday, because she didn't want to share (and I came the next day, because I'm accommodating like that). She loved to yell at us for cutting the fat off our meat (she lived through the Depression, after all). But in the next breath, she'd be stealing the scraps from our plate so she could eat them herself. She had relentless grudges-- if she got mad at you she might never, ever talk to you again.
When Grandma turned 90, we had a big blowout of a birthday party for her. Shortly thereafter, she decided she had lived all the life she wanted to live. Of course, she hung on for five more years, but she would have been happiest if she had gone out with a bang right after the party. She died right before Bryce was born, and I feel like he got some of her spunk.
After she died, my grandma (her daughter) tried to contact some of her aunts, to let them know what had happened. We never understood why Grandma Mandt kept her distance, but learned that she was the one with the skeletons in the closet, and specifically skeletons of her own creation, since pretty much the whole story of her childhood was a fabrication. She was born in Scotland, the daughter of Lithuanian serfs who had escaped the pogroms. She picked up her great language skills by translating for her parents, who spoke no English. And her wild behavior resulted in her getting kicked out and sent to live in the US with a distant relative she had never met before.
But I just can't understand why she felt like she had to create an alternate life history for herself? Was she worried that her husband's family wouldn't accept her? That she wasn't American enough for her children? Whatever it was, I imagine it was a heavy burden to carry for 95 years.
Over the last five years, we've gotten to know our Scottish cousins well. My grandma has been to visit them twice and several of the cousins have come to see us too. It's great to have a bigger, more extended family (and a great place to stay in Europe), but I've always been sad that Grandma Mandt couldn't tell us about her family, and had to shut herself off from them to keep the secret.
--originally published 5/28/06
No comments:
Post a Comment