Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dick Tracy, and my OTHER Grandma

Although the finale of my week in San Francisco was greeted with a formal "denunciation" and disownership by her son, my father, the favorite part of my vacation in the city I feel I was destined to, but never will, live was taking a day trip first through the redwood forests of Muir Woods National Park and then down a winding road through northern California vineyards to my paternal grandmother's hometown of Santa Rosa. I hadn't seen Grandma Margaret since I was in high school, probably when I was thirteen or fourteen, but we wrote pretty constantly after my mom's dad died and through the first few years of my college education. Sadly, the last communication I remember having with her was when she sent me a beautiful painting of a seaside town on the edge of an ocean filled with sailboats, on the side of one of which she had painted my name.

I have always felt a special bond to Margaret, even though she has been virtually nonexistent in my life and despite the fact--maybe, perhaps shockingly, because-- she woke up one day in the family mansion she was sharing with her husband and his family in Bombay and decided she was living a life she could no longer tolerate and decided to leave my father to the mercies of a local orphanage at the young age of two so she could return home to northern California. She is a woman who loves art and travel as much as I do. Like me, she has relatives to be proud of like her grandmother, who was among the first graduating class where women were permitted to enroll at Stanford because her father had donated the land that later became the foundations of the school's campus, but she also has less impressive members, like her father who beat her and her sisters until he finally abandoned the family and her ancestors going further back, who were the Hatfields of the famed Hatfield/ McCoy feud. My memories of her one visit to our home as an adolescent were of a woman who spoke intelligently and with strength about things that seemed more interesting than the petty concerns my mother's side of the family seems to focus on.

My latest visit was full of great stories. She had moved into a new home and we first talked about the paintings on her walls-- some hers, some her daughter's (my dad's half-sister from Margaret's second marriage), some her son-in-law's, and some her step-granddaughter's. She then went where I didn't expect her to go-- after telling me her daughter's stepdaughter had just gotten married to an Englishman she met as an art teacher in Portland, she asked me if I was dating. I was a little disappointed-- here was a woman I thought would understand my current disinterest in romance of any kind. I made a comment about how it was my current feeling that a woman needs a man about as much as a fish needs a bicycle without going into the specifics as to why I felt that way and her response was an unheeding, "Well, I suspect we'll receive another wedding invitation soon."

Then the stories started: I told her that I felt torn about whether or not I was interested in tracking down the history of the Beat generation in San Francisco as an English major and asked her if she owned the art gallery next to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookshop, City Lights, during any of the years when he and his crowd were there. She said, "Well, I wouldn't say we were friends so much as I was a constant pain in his side. I was constantly telling Larry he needed to keep the door into the alley [the alley which San Francisco has in subsequent times designated as Jack Kerouac Alley] between my shop and his shut, because he always had people hanging out about the shop, and without fail, a few of them would run down that alley headlong and smash their faces right into that open door. Between bleeding faces and the smell of the chickens being brought in by the Chinese restaurants around the corner in Chinatown for cleaning, I was constantly fighting to keep my entrance inviting to my own clientele."

I asked her why my granddad had decided to go back to India around the time when they had my dad and she reminded me that World War II was going on and that Indians were being targeted as potential spies for the Japanese. She told me how the FBI would go through her trashcans looking for evidence in her mail of where Dinshaw might be and she laughed at the thought of my granddad being romantic or smart enough to be a spy. She even moved to Los Angeles at one point, trying to get away from them, and then got so angry one day when she opened up the door to find another agent asking the same old questions on her doorstep. She covered her face with her hand as she chuckled, "It was really awful. He had this get-up on that looked like he was trying to be Dick Tracy and I kept trying to keep myself from laughing until he finally asked me out to dinner and I realized he had developed a bit of a crush on me after watching me and tracking me for so long."

And who would blame her? I only wish I really looked as much like her as my mother says I do...