BunnyBlinks

All about my mother: An audio recording of the funeral service for Karen R. Brown (1943-2010), held in New Concord, Ohio, at Muskingum University’s Brown Chapel, January 8, 2010. Click here for more track information. Each track can be downloaded for private, non-commercial use. There are some amazing performers. I say a few heartfelt words before accompanying my friends Bob and Carol Jones on “Hey Jude” (track 13).

“Grandma Brown: Champion of the Little Things,” my eulogy for my Grandmother Marjorie S. Brown (1910-2010).

In his essay “How to Tell a Story,” Mark Twain distinguishes the “comic” story from the “humorous” story. The teller of the comic story “tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh at it when he gets through.” Unlike the “comic” story, Twain explains, “the humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”

For Twain, the humorous story was both more artful and more American. The humorous story requires a dead-pan approach to story-telling. If you know Russ, my Dad, you might already be thinking of him at this point. But he, in turn, clearly learned his sense of humor from his mother. It’s no surprise that Grandma would cultivate this dry sense of humor in her offspring, having herself seemingly inherited it from the best story-tellers at the turn to the twentieth century. Twain was born in 1835, a year of the earthly apparition of Haley’s comet. The comet’s next return in it’s 75 1/2-year cycle occurred in 1910. Twain famously and correctly predicted the the 1910 apparition of the comet would accompany his own death, just three months shy of the birth of my future Grandmother, born Marjorie Smith.

Marjorie married my Grandfather at age 27. While I have only ever known the man through stories, it is clear that a shared sense of humor helped draw them together.

One thing I’ve noticed in my 36 years of life is that old people like to tell stories. More than that, they like to pick the 3 or 4 best ones, simplify and refine them, and tell them over and over again. Grandma’s stories were fortunately worth repeating.

One story took place during the early days of aviation. Grandma’s husband had phoned ahead to announce that she and the rest of the family should be watching the clock so that they could step outside at some precise time, so that they might catch a glimpse of him flying overhead. That precise time arrived and, with Grandma and everyone else outside in the front yard looking toward the heavens, he pulls up the long driveway in his 47 Chevy — for the sole purpose, we can assume, of relishing in the playfully scolding looks on their faces when they realized he had them all staring at the sky for no reason.

To Grandma, it was these little absurdities, rather than the tallest tales, that would earn the heartiest laughs.

Or there was the one about how for many years on New Year’s Eve, her husband would procure the ingredients for his famous “arroz con pollo,” a classic Spanish dish of chicken with rice, then take the ingredients to the home of their friend who hosted the New Year’s gathering. He would prepare the dish at the home of the hostess so that it could be served up hot and fresh. One particular year, he convinced their hostess and friend, Alice, that he’d require her assistance in preparing an especially sizable and scrumptious feast. As luck would have it, he explained, he had gotten an incredible deal on four live chickens, and when he and Marjorie arrived at her house, wouldn’t she please help him with their slaughter? Now perhaps that story works better in 1950s Toledo than it would in a rural setting where it’s more common to raise one’s own livestock, but Grandma sure got a lot of mileage out of that joke — and when telling it, stone-faced, she’d always wait for you to laugh first. If you didn’t, she’d explain that you had to imagine the look on Alice’s face when they showed up to the party, without any live chickens, and Alice realized she’d been put on.

Fortunately for all of us, Grandma refused to follow completely in Twain’s footsteps. She would not go out with the next apparition of Haley’s Comet in 1986. Some in this room would never have met her if she hadn’t moved from Toledo to New Concord one year after the last time most of us could see the comet, in 1987. She’d intentionally moved here in years of good health so that she could be near her grandchildren, Stephanie and me, during our high school years. Each home football game Friday, she would eagerly await outside for the marching band, where we’d pause to perform on our march from the high school to Sherman Field.

But even before she moved to New Concord, she was an active, loving Grandmother, whether we were visiting her in Toledo, or she us in New Concord, or even in Spain.

There was the time Grandma arrived in Spain with her best friend in 1972 to meet Russ and Karen, who were traveling with one-year-old Stephanie. She had to explain to the customs officers just why, exactly, two 61 year old ladies were traveling with a suitcase completely full of pampers.

One of my earliest memories of Grandma Brown is when she visited us in late June, 1977, so that five days after mine and before hers, we could celebrate our birthdays together, sharing a celebration and a cake in our Thompson Avenue back yard. “Happy Birthday, Grandma and Greg,” my Dad had written in icing on the cake. That day, my first memory of my grandmother, was a celebration of her 67th birthday — a milestone, it would sadly turn out, that my own mother would never reach. That simple observation, for me, is a noteworthy reminder of just how long and great a life we have gathered here to celebrate today.

Stephanie and I loved our Grandmother. We would sit on the front steps and wait for hours upon receiving word from our parents that Grandma had begun the drive down from Toledo. She once babysat us for weeks while our parents were in Spain. When we were very young, she would read us Beatrix potter stories, nursery rhymes, and play us “Peter and the Wolf” on her record player — remember those? When we were a little older, she’d teach us the proper way to act as we approached adulthood. Yes, we would need good manners, of course. But we would also need to learn to play cribbage and drink “Boston Coolers,” which were like root-beer floats only made with 7-Up. This was presumably so that we would later in life be able to play bridge and drink Strawberry Daiquiris — or at least that’s how I’m choosing to interpret that particular lesson.

For Grandma, the little stuff was the big stuff. It’s tempting to conclude that her outlook resulted from having lived through the Great Depression, when anything worth celebrating would necessarily be limited in quantity.

Indeed, there was always something hopeful behind her outlook.

She taught high school English and Business. One thing she taught her Business students was how to recognize where a dollar bill was printed. Each bill has a letter on it A-L, which designates the location of the Federal Reserve Bank Branch where it was printed. She would often quiz me as a kid (“B” did not stand for Boston, it turns out. “A” did). If that knowledge strikes you as trivial in terms of what you need to know to run a business, Grandma, privately, would likely concur. She confided in me that as a teacher, it was important to assign something which everyone in the class could accomplish, even if it was something little — something like memorizing the locations of our Federal Reserve Bank Branches.

Once retired, Grandma never stopped being a teacher.

Her specialty was addressing the largest of topics with the smallest of lessons.

I don’t think Grandma considered herself a civil rights activist. But she taught you to hold doors for the elderly. She’d grab my little hand to pull me along to the fellowship hall in order to teach me the importance of welcoming a new family at church regardless of what they looked like. And she thoroughly demonstrated that a woman who outlived her husband by 45 years could — on her own — make sound business decisions, planning to provide for her own physical, financial, and emotional care, all of which would successfully carry her comfortably through to her very last breath.

Nor do I think Grandma considered herself an environmentalist. That would be too grand in scope. She did, however, make sure her grandchildren could recognize the silhouette of a tufted titmouse, or the call of a chickadee-dee-dee. She would also take us to the Toledo Zoo every summer, just as she would later accompany her great-grandchildren to The Wilds. She even went so far as to name the woodchuck she’d regularly feed with crumbs thrown out her Evergreen Village window. His name was Pip, by the way, and she’d ask you to remember he was a “woodchuck,” not a “ground hog,” which was far too ugly a name for such a cute critter.

Although she took guided tours to Spain, Israel, and Egypt, my Grandma probably would not have considered herself an adventurer. But tell that to Ellen Klies who, as a passenger in Grandma’s car on the way back from dropping my parents off at the Columbus airport, watched as my Grandma abruptly exited Interstate 70 saying, “Hmmm ….. I wonder where this road goes,” and headed off the long way back to New Concord via who-knows-where. If it was in God’s Green Countryside, it was probably worth seeing, and so Grandma went looking for it. Fortunately, they eventually made it back to New Concord, and I’m happy to announce Ellen is safely with us today.

At the end of each year, Grandma never threw out her wall calendars. They were, for her, simple diaries. Each day, she’d write one memory from that day. “Greg’s Birthday,” it would say on June 24. Another day might read “rode a camel in Egypt.” Yet another’s day entry might read “Sunrise at 6:44 AM. You see, there wasn’t a lot of space to write on each day, but there was always something worth writing down. “Armstrong lands on the moon,” might be written one day over from “Had dinner with Frances and Sue.” Her calendars proved that, to Grandma, the little things were just as important as the larger ones. Moreover, it was important to remember them.

Ultimately, her love of nature was only surpassed by her love of children. I remember coming home from college one spring break, and taking Grandma to Bob Evans after church. She asked me how classes were going. I began my long answer, but soon noticed she wasn’t really listening to my response. No surprise to those who knew her, she was instead waving, cooing, and making cute faces at the toddler in the high chair behind me.

Even in ill health in her last months, she would still miraculously muster up the energy to perk up when her great-grandchildren, 10-year-old Frank and 6-year-old Lara, would come to visit her in Beckett House. I feel blessed I was able to share in one of Grandma’s last wonderful family moments when she perked up just long enough to hear Frank, Lara, Stephanie, Stew, Russ, and I sing somewhat belated Christmas Carols to our family’s beloved matriarch. Talk about a little legacy! Grandma Brown had raised a family who, still reeling from the emotions of burying my mother Karen just one day earlier, could nonetheless get together and celebrate the beauty that still surrounded us. Not to mention we could improvise four-part harmony on the spot!

A few days ago, when it became apparent that my Grandma was not long for this world, our good friend and neighbor, Vera Duff, prepared a wonderful meal to help nourish us during our struggle to grasp emotionally what it means to lose Grandma Brown. But that day, Vera gave me more than just a meal. She gave me a story that pretty well sums this up.

“You see,” Vera told me, “Your Grandma was an excellent Sunday School teacher. She taught Covenant Class for us seniors. And you know, sometimes old people like to complain, they like to criticize young people for this or that. Your Grandma always reminded us that we shouldn’t do that. Instead, we really have to look out for the young people. Everything we do, we should do with the young people in mind.”

After my Grandma moved to Beckett house, Vera would write her letters assuring her that Covenant Class was still looking out for the young people. To her last days, my Grandma was indeed a Champion of the Little Things.

I’ll leave you with one final story:

In her later years, Dad and Uncle Stew lovingly and responsibly nudged Grandma’s trusting soul toward being just a little more cautious in her financial dealings. Telemarketers, after all, have unfortunately been trained to prey on the kindness of the elderly. But Grandma already had another source of protection — her humor:

One time, while Grandma and I were eating dinner at her cozy table in her Evergreen Village apartment, the phone rang. Grandma answered.

“Hello, Mrs. Brown!” said the voice at the other end. “I’m calling from AT&T. I’d like to offer you long-distance phone service for the low price of ten cents a minute! Does that sound good to you?”

“Yal, that sounds good,” she replied. “But there’s one problem.”

“What’s that?” the telemarketer asked.

“Well, you can’t connect me with the people I want to talk to!”

“Why’s that?” the unsuspecting telemarketer inquired.

“Well, all my friends are in heaven,” Grandma announced, with a wry smile that only I, not the telemarketer, could see.

The telemarketer thought for two seconds at most before explaining, “Well, I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Mrs. Brown. I’m not just a salesman. I’m also a church organist.”