My grandmother, sister and I were having a coffee the first time she saw my first tattoo. With pure horror shaking her single malt scotch voice she said, “Sosha, what in the hell is on your arm?” I told her, attempting to sound both nonchalant and confident, that I had gotten a tattoo. Her eyes widened in shock and then she immediately licked her thumb and tried to rub it off.
My sister, Angie, the wild child of the two of us, watched this unfold from the other side of the kitchen with barely containable glee. Therefore, I did what any self-respecting big sister would do and threw her directly under the Gran-piloted bus. I blurted out that I didn’t see what the big deal was since Angie had a bunch of tattoos.
Gran looked at me with a mixture of incredulity and disgust and said, “Well, of course, she does. Your sister has always done exactly what she wanted. I didn’t expect this from you. Have you lost your damn mind?”
Therefore, when the tattoo artist asked me what she would think of the piece I had done to honor her, I told him that in all likelihood, I would just wear long sleeves around her.
Gran has never been one to mince words or pull her punches. She tells you exactly what she thinks such as the time that she told me – from her hospital bed – that she was certainly glad that I had gotten “some of that weight off of me” because as she said, “It made me so mad that you had let yourself go like that. I thought that I had raised you better.”
She has also never been one to ever hang out contendely in the box that she has been placed. She has done things her way well before the time that women were supposed to be doing things their way. Gran has always done exactly what she wants.
My grandfather kept mad money in a brown paper bag stuffed down in one of the coolers of his bar. One time his stash got wet and he sent me home with it so that my grandmother could dry it. She dried it as she packed us a suitcase. She put the dried money in her purse and we left for her sister’s in Virginia.
She called my granddad when we arrived.
She has never been your stereotypical grandmother. We certainly don’t always agree and at times it feels as if we are parted by the ocean of grief, heartache and loss that we have endured together and are two tired to swim for shore. Yet, I will be eternally thankful to her. I am thankful for my gran; that she has always been a constant in my life; that she has been an unwavering source of love; that she has never given up on anyone. I am thankful that she took my sister, brother and me in, working 12 hour days at a shoe store, trying to provide us with some stability after our world had been shaken to it’s core. I am thankful that at 87 she could work circles around me and anyone else my age; that she demanded manners and respect; that she was liberal before liberal was cool; that she taught me, even more so than Winston Churchill, to never, ever, ever give up. I am thankful that she is the definition of grit and determination.
Gran hasn’t smoked in close to three decades and I never have, but my idea of achingly cool will always be defined by red lipstick rimmed Lucky Strikes without a filter (it’s the filter that kills you, she’ll tell you) and coffee as black as an oil slick and now I’ll carry that image with me everywhere I go for the rest of my life.
A reminder of her, her effortless cool and the fact that I have, in fact, lost my damn mind.
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
