As happens from time to time, my regular posting in this webspace coincides with the birthday of a loved one. This time around, it’s that of my surviving grandmother, a lifelong Iowan currently living in Cedar Rapids; prior to moving there, she had lived for decades in Tama. I believe her birthday present made it to her–I sent it off in time for it to do so, at least, though I haven’t received delivery confirmation quite yet–and I’ve no doubt that I’ll be talking to her again soon. (I last did so on Christmas Eve, when we exchanged holiday greetings, and I’ve been writing her in response to her cards and notes, keeping her apprised of how her family in my part of the world is doing. I am trying to be a good grandson, even if the effort is later than it perhaps ought to have been; I have noted before the kind of person I used to be.)

It’s not my grandmother’s first birthday, of course, not by a wide margin. It could hardly be so and she be my grandmother, after all. Nor yet is it the first on which I’ve sent her gifts or called or written or some combination of the three. So it’s not the first time I’ve thought about it, or considered the differences in family positioning between my parents’ families, or between my wife’s and mine.

On the side of the family in question–my dad’s, for ease of reference–I’m the older of two children, the eldest of six grandchildren, and the eldest of a number of great grandchildren I do not remember if I ever knew it. (Dad’s family is mostly in Iowa, and I never have lived in that state; the lifelong distance means some things that would have been “normal” for me to know are outside my knowledge.) My daughter is my only child (that I know about–and I doubt that any precede her, or I’d expect I’d’ve heard something about them by this point); my brother’s son is likely to be his only one, and there’re a couple of cousin’s kids in there–but my girl’s the first out of her generation of Dad’s family. For Mom’s…not so much; I’m the third from last grandkid, and my late maternal grandmother was the second to last of ten born. (If memory serves, some of her elder sisters were mothers before she was born. If.) And I’m younger than my wife, who was herself the second child of her parents–and her father was not the oldest of his parents’ kids, either.

It happens, then, that I am forty-two years old and with a child of my own, and I still have a living grandparent, even if I don’t see her often and my daughter has seen her surviving great grandmother maybe twice or thrice in her life (and one of those was in her early infancy, so there’s no way she remembers it, though there are pictures). I don’t think Dad had his grandparents quite that late (I’d have to look at records and do math); I know Mom did not, and I know my wife does not. Nor do I think that many others my age do; some, sure, but not a great many.

As such, I make sure that I mark my grandmother’s birthday. It’s an unusual thing to have gotten to keep so long, as I well know, and I am not unmindful of the gift I have been given in having her be part of my life for so long.

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