Gaga Connie

Gaga Connie is Jer-bear’s grandma. I did not know that Connie was short for Constance until I went to her funeral. Connie was 92 when she passed away in Florida, and this Friday she was laid to rest in Connecticut as snow softly accumulated under a velvet grey sky.

She was buried in a plot next to her husband and near her father, just a few miles from the synagogue she went to as a teenager–the one her family helped found a few years after they left Brooklyn, where she was born.

When I was in high school I used to read a lot of obituaries. Whenever there were no customers and no inventory or cleaning to do at the dime store I worked at after school back in Kansas City I would read the paper. I looked at the weather, the international stuff, and, when no one was looking, I’d read the obits–but only the obits of people old enough to have been my grandparents. Anyone younger would have felt morbid. I liked the old-fashioned names. Mabel, Dorothea, Dolores, Vernon, Delmar, Cornelius. Many of the deceased fought in World War II. Others stayed home and worked at a factory or planted victory gardens.

It was always interesting to see whom the deceased is survived by. I always thought that was an interesting way of putting it. Survived by. Some of the dead were modest progenitors, others seemed to be the creator-of-nations types who were survived by families that could have populated whole towns. Gaga Connie is survived by three children, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Boo Boo is her second great-grandchild, and the only one of her children or her children’s children to be born in Brooklyn. Gaga Connie and her fellow Brooklynite met in August at her non-Florida home in Manchester, Connecticut–the same split-level house Jer-bear’s dad and aunt and uncle grew up in.

The elderly live with a lot of pain and a lot of frustration. My own grandmother was mentally sharp as a knife, probably able to beat my mom in Scrabble up until she was 85. But maybe not. My mom slays at Scrabble, but my Grandma would have been able to compete. She was at least ironing linens for her local church and cooking pies until then. It frustrated her to not be able to express herself–with words or cooking. It made her cranky.

I am told Gaga Connie, who suffered from brittle bones and bound to a wheelchair, was the same way, but that day she met Boo Boo, which was the first and only time I met her, she was all smiles. We were on our way up to Vermont for a week, and decided to stop by Manchester with Jer-bear’s parents. I plunked Boo Boo on the marzipan-colored carpet–the cleanest carpet I’ve seen. He was on his belly, with his arms spayed in front of him, scanning the living room. He saw his grandma, his grandpa, his great-uncle, Connie’s caretaker, Hyacinth, and Connie, sitting in her chair. I don’t recall what kind of chair. Boo Boo had a buffet of smiling faces to zero in on, but I think he saw a kindred spirit in Connie. Like him, she had just woken up from a nap, and like him, she could not walk.

Connie smiled at him and seemed to play coy–a winning strategy for a baby like Boo Boo, who makes it his business to make everyone in any cafe, restaurant, grocery store or subway car we enter pay him homage with a smile. Some people work for food, Boo Boo works for smiles.

He seven and a half months at the time. He was not crawling, and had not yet figured out his G.I. Joe body drag either. At that point his strategy for forward momentum was to roll and writhe in the desired direction. I’m sure it tickled Connie to see the effort that Boo Boo was making to hang out with her. Eventually, after some grunting and wriggling, and a helpful hand from a grandparent, Boo Boo found himself two feet in front of Connie, staring at her shoes.

Boo Boo had not met anyone as old as Connie, and he definitely had not seen orthopedic shoes before. Connie’s were shiny and black. Boo Boo could not bring himself to Connie’s lap, but he was certain he could bring himself to her shoes.

He strained mightily towards them. He stretched out his arm, and his hands and Vienna sausage fingers fell short. Gaga Connie saw his plight. And understood. She was unable to walk on her feet, but she scootched them closer to her great-grandson, and smiled at him. Boo Boo smiled back. He knows a co-conspirator when he sees one.

Boo Boo proceeded to pat the shoes with his doughy hands. Then, as with now, Boo Boo approaches all new things with the scientific method. A pair of orthopedic shoes requires the same amount of investigation as rock samples from Mars. An entity is not known until Boo Boo knows how they feel if he runs his fingers on it, how it sounds if he thwacks it with the meat of his palms. He must know if he can pick it up, and if the object can be picked up, how it sounds when it is dropped, or banged against another thing, like a wall. Also, can the thing be consumed?

Boo Boo was thankfully not impressed by the taste of Gaga Connie’s shoes, but he quickly discovered that the best thing about orthopedic shoes is that they have Velcro. Gaga Connie smiled down at Boo Boo’s head as he undid and did, and undid and did, and undid and did the straps of her shoes. Occasionally Boo Boo would look up at smile back, showing her the dimple she got from her father, as if to congratulate her on her impeccable taste in shoes.

At some point Hyacinth asked what everyone else had been wondering, and what Connie was perhaps too uncertain of herself to ask no matter how much she wanted to do it. “Can Connie hold Boo Boo?”

Let’s give it a try.

I lifted Boo Boo out of his shoe-related reveries on the floor and onto his great-grandmother’s lap. He looked massive there. I’m pretty sure Gaga was only five feet before she got older, and now she was child-sized. I hovered in case Boo Boo tried to squirm, but he sat still, like an obliging ball of mozzarella. Connie wrapped her thin arms around him like he was a life line, and in a way he was. He was another branch on the family tree and her line could continue with him, even when she was gone.

Connie looked at Boo Boo and made clucking sounds. Boo Boo knew there was something different about this person. Her hair was very white and he was enthralled by the grooves and crinkles on her face and tried to trace them with a smooth but uncoordinated hand. Boo Boo contentedly sat on her lap, strapped in by her wiry arms.

The rest of us stood around watching this interaction between the oldest member of the family and its youngest until someone, maybe me, took Boo Boo off Connie’s lap for fear of breaking her.

Another thing I didn’t know about Connie before her funeral was that she played the ukelele. Maybe that’s because she didn’t play the ukelele for Boo Boo when we went to Connecticut, but she did play the piano. Jer-bear and she sat side by side at the baby grand in her living room. Boo Boo sat on his dad’s lap, pounding his meaty fists on the keys while Gaga played a tune. I don’t remember which tun. Perhaps it was a show tune. She apparently loved to play show tunes.

The baby grand, besides being an instrument, served also as an alter of sorts to the family. Relatives I’ve met and not met smiled in framed photos, and you could see time transpire as the pictures went from black and white, to color photos of Jer-bear’s dad with a mustache and v-neck, to Jer-bear and his siblings in the giant cotton shirts of the nineties. It was a whole family tree, smiling at Boo Boo and Connie.