Cool And Uncool Redux

I was talking about my cool and uncool grandfathers. It is odd that the cool grandfather was married to the uptight grandmother, a strict and rigorous and Bible-beating woman! And the uncool grandfather was likewise married to his own opposite, a woman who at least tried to consider the difficulties in the world and the differences in people. It was my mother's mother who was at least a little "laid back" by the adult standards of the day. It was a double-edged sword, though. Just as she might be forthright on some controversial topic of the day, she was also a teller of unvarnished truths about Life, and as she got older, the more I'd hear her tell of how wearying life got to be and how it wouldn't be any burden just to Give It Up! I guess I was a teenager at the time, certainly not twenty yet, and I knew it was perhaps something I didn't know how to handle. I remember uncomfortably smiling and grinning and nodding, but I don't remember what I said, if anything. It wasn't the kind of statements that you wanted to encourage an old person in, but I didn't know enough to say much about it—nobody would. I understand now much of what she was saying, though even now it makes me secretly tearful to consider it! I'm sorry she felt it and said it. I'm sorry I now have personal knowledge of it, but sometimes I'm sorry, too, that I have no one to share it with, to tell it to as she told it to me. I didn't know if it did her any good to speak her mind, but I can't help but believe that it did. But here I am. Even my sister—who was always dangerously close to sharing my grandmother's mindset—is already gone. And I remain. My elderly mother is not a likely candidate for that conversation, at least not for me. I don't know why, but one can be more frank with grandchildren or grandparents than with one's parents. It is simply so.