Bennie Lou

Digging into past memories is a hazy, troubling endeavor.  One random thought might trigger a distinct image or feeling, but it's hard to comprehend the story behind it all.  I know there are many tangles of memories back there, somewhere, but it seems impossible to tease out anything of sense or significance.  Lately I've been thinking about my family.  I guess that's something you do when they're not around all the time to harangue you, but this post is about my grandmother.  Enter my fragmented portrait of Bennie Lou Chakerian.

I remember my grandmother as a quiet, patient woman.  She knew us well, "us" being my siblings and myself.  She always had a jar full of dried apricots handy to quell any whining, as well as a tin of Le Petit Écolier biscuits, perhaps standing by as a reward for good behavior.  Although I remember eating plenty of those without doing anything exemplary.  She didn't seem to mind at all when we came for a visit.  Particularly, she never seemed to mind that my siblings and I would run with abandon through her small home.  I would explore every nook, every dresser drawer, just seeing what sort of stuff I could dig up.  She had plenty of toys and games for us: chess, checkers, playing cards, Lincoln logs, and various other puzzles and challenging nic knacks that I can't even name.  I would play endless rounds of speed at the dining room table with my sister, Laura.  She crushed me every time, of course.  My little brother was too young to partake in a lot of these, but we had our own dynamic as well.  (He would later learn how to decimate me playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3.)

My sister once told me how she would win at Gin Rummy with my grandmother.  She quickly discovered a way to cheat by seeing the reflection of the cards in Grandma Bennie's glasses.  I imagine my grandmother knew right away, humoring her in this little deception, but it's an amusing story that speaks to her patience.  She would never get mad at us, no matter how wily and obnoxious we could be.  Every so often she'd walk out to her backyard patio, have a seat, and light up a cigarette.  Maybe this was her momentary escape from the calamity we brought with us every weekend.  A brief respite before coming back inside to entertain the grand-kids.

Having spent most of my life in Los Altos, I was never very far from my grandmother.  She lived in a small gated community just off of El Monte Road and Foothill Expressway.  We would roll up in our GM Stationwagon, dial her number on the intercom (050#), and spend the afternoon in this little retirement complex.  I remember it being lush and green, well maintained and manicured.  The duck pond occasionally had a few duck friends that my brother might point out.  The swimming pool, too, was frequented by more ducks.  I don't remember many of her neighbors, though I do remember one giving me unsolicited life lessons such as, "Never trust anyone!"  Duly noted, crazy lady.

Grandma had a couple of old Honda Accords in the garage.  I would later inherit one, and the constant pull to the left and screeching tape deck would come to be a part of my life during my college years.  I imagine she noticed the little quirks as they accumulated, too, but something tells me they didn't bother her one bit.

I remember a smattering of details about the house.  The small room with two chairs and a television, complete with channel knobs and rabbit ears.  This was not a home where the family typically gathered around the TV.  There was also a small atrium with a few plants, a couple of ordinary bathrooms which always smelled like floral disinfectant.  It was a somewhat ordinary house on the surface.  Neat, tidy, yet modest and plain.  Birds bathed in the fountain outside.  It's a scene of serenity, at least in this retrospective.

I was always fascinated by the various trinkets she accumulated over the years.  I enjoyed the small photographs with their elaborate, die-cast frames.  I recall once seeing a photograph of my father at approximately the same age, around twelve or thirteen years old.  It was a surreal moment that stuck with me over the years.  There's a guy who isn't me but looks very similar to me.  I look at my Dad now and see a world of differences, but every now and then I have those moments where I realize I'm slowly turning into him.  This home wasn't his childhood home, but perhaps some remnants made their way here to Bennie Lou's penultimate residence.  Maybe we even played with some of the same trinkets.  Wandering around my grandmother's house in this free manner allowed me to explore my heritage through collected objects and photographs.  I only have a vague sense of our family history in words, something I would enjoy knowing more about presently, but through my young eyes I simply observed what was in front of me.

Grandma Bennie probably (based on my thorough calculations) enjoyed the family visits over the years.  Her husband was long since deceased, and her home in the foothills of Los Altos was the long-standing meeting place for any holiday get-together on the Chakerian side of the family.  I've already mentioned her incredible rice pilaf.  The thought of this food alone really brings me back to those earlier years.  I see images of my young cousins and aunts and uncles, sitting around the table at Thanksgiving, specifically the designated kids' table.  These periods of bustle and activity populate my memories of that house.  The happy memories seem to have distilled over the years into even warmer feelings.  And this somehow makes it that much more devastating to imagine the quiet that would loom over my grandmother's house after a family gathering.  I like to imagine she would feel immense relief and satisfaction, finally able to read a book in her peaceful home and revel in her thoughts uninterrupted.

But I also project my feelings of what I would feel in her place.  Would I simply be alone, or would I feel lonely, too?  Having lived with family and roommates (who essentially become family for better or worse) throughout my entire life, I have trouble fathoming what I would do in the midst of such solitude.  I can't really know how I'll feel later in life, but presently the thought leaves me feeling bleak, like a vacuous silence will inevitably take over and consume that happiness.

But it's a matter of perspective, and whatever fears and anxieties I have of aging are an inseparable part of the so-called Golden Years.  It's up to me to fill that silence with whatever I can.  I like to imagine sitting in my small library, filled with books accrued over a lifetime (or maybe it will just be a handful of Kindle reading tablets at this rate), meeting with my friends and shooting the breeze.  People will come and go, leaving me with small morsels of thought to chew on during the repose.  Maybe these fantasies are a defense to quell my fears.  Maybe I will just pass quietly without a peep.

My grandmother passed away quietly, patiently even, at the Veterans' Affairs Hospital in Palo Alto when I was about sixteen years old.  It would've been 2002.  I remember having recently received my motorcycle learner's permit, and I could ride my Honda dirt bike down Foothill Expressway to visit with my Dad and Grandma in her little room.  She was bedridden for some time before her death, afflicted with a sort of leukemia incomprehensible to me at the time.  We watched her grow smaller over those few years, but her mental state remained in decent constitution until the end.  I remember her being fatigued, but it wasn't too scary to see her.  I was sad, but it was a necessary taste of the reality of things.  I don't really know how my Dad did it.  He remained so composed during this time.  I've never really shared my Dad's sense of spirituality through religion, but I had to admire his fortitude and acceptance in losing his mother.  As I recall it, he was attending a church service inside the VA when Grandma Bennie passed.  Seeing him after was surreal; he didn't react at all like a person who just lost their last parent.  I don't think he was merely saving face, but he seemed to have made his peace in a way I don't yet understand.  I wonder if he ever gets uncontrollable surges of emotion from this experience, but I have to concede that my Dad handles his feelings very differently than I do.  I may be more like my mother in this way.

Digging into the past is hard.  It can be frustrating and emotional.  And how much do I trust the skewed perception of the young boy that was me?  While I come a fraction closer to understanding some ephemeral feeling, the process also seems to turn over more stones than I can possibly know what to do with.  There are many gaps to fill in, but doing so creates a cascade of mysteries.  I am heading towards something, but in two dimensional space that asymptotic 'something' will not come close to a complete picture.