Before going to bed last night at a friend's house, my youngest called me to say, "Daddy, I won at Bingo!"
Her prize at the fundraiser she had attended was a $5 gift card at a local ice cream store.
After I hung up, my mind went back to 1999 and an extra weekend away I took on a business trip to Florida. On that weekend I visited my mother, who had been widowed just a few months earlier.
While staying with her, one night she took me to her Bingo game. "Oh no, here comes Anne!" one of the other old ladies said.
The joke was that my mother was always lucky at the game of chance, and she was. She won again that night a couple of times. It happened so often that after a while it didn't seem like luck at all. It was just the way it was for her.
My daughter was only a few months old the night my father died. He never got to meet her. My mother, naturally, after a half century of marriage, was still in shock the next morning when we went back to her mobile home to gather her things for a brief visit across the bay where my wife and kids were waiting.
If ever there was a scene I found therapeutic, it was my aged mother holding my infant daughter, just hours after kissing her husband's body good-bye.
They met again, a few times, grandmother and grand-daughter, but less than three years later for the last time on a visit back to Michigan. My youngest child cannot remember this visit, though photos exist.
Her brothers do remember; the oldest remembers playing the card game, War, with Grandma. "It was the only game I knew," he says now. He was not quite eight years old at that visit.
Two months later, my mother was dead.
I don't think I have played or even thought about Bingo more than a handful of times in the past nine years. But today I couldn't stop thinking about all the things my daughter never knew about her Grandma. They just never got the chance to know one another.
But maybe, as I told her today, somehow her grandmother's lucky hand got passed down to her. Born eighty-three years apart, sharing genes, stranger things have happened.
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2 comments:
It's wonderful that you keep your mother's memory alive in your daughter's life. Although my maternal grandmother died when I was four- my mom would tell me stories and give me insights in her life...I've treasured those all these years!! My paternal grandmother died when I was older- but I lived 10,000 miles from her- it was also through stories my father told me which kept her alive in my heart.
It is amazing how DNA- family traits- and other things appear to pass down from generation to generation. What a wonderful mystery.
Bravo for your daughter winning the 5 dollar gift card!!
Do you remember that she won at bingo the night before she went into the hospital the last time and when we were moving her to the Hospice facility she told me to make sure I got the money she had won and to give it to the grandkids? On the Friday night in the Hospice she said to me that she was feeling better and maybe she should go back to the bingo. Then she said "Everyone would look at me and say 'What are you doing here, you're supposed to be dead." Funny things she said that last week. My older grands, her great grands, still remember her teaching and playing lots of games with them.
Thanks for bringing back the memories.
Love, Nance
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