My First Teacher

How Example Became Inheritance

The magazines my grandmother read fifty years ago still sit on a bookcase in her northern California cabin, silently waiting as if she might come back for them. My grandmother has been dead more than forty years, but her yellowing copies of Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Day, and McCall’s hurl me back to my adolescence, to a time when I was hungry for examples of women who didn’t apologize.

I open one of the magazines and read about tennis great Billie Jean King taking on chauvinist Bobby Riggs and beating him in straight sets at the Houston Astrodome. Another issue reveals the real reason Cher filed for divorce from Sonny: “involuntary servitude.” I don’t pay any attention to the plethora of ads for feminine hygiene spray or shiny-vinyl floor cleaner.

It’s June, warm in Mendocino County, and I’m at my grandmother’s cabin for a family wedding. We call it a cabin, but it has central air and a separate dining room. It’s the first time since I was twenty-two that I’ve been inside the house. My cousins have spent summers here for decades, but nothing in the cabin has been moved.

Her sterling silver vanity set complete with mirror, brush, and comb still sits atop the lacy runner on her dresser. Her extensive collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books line the shelves in front of her green Naugahyde recliner. I can practically hear the squeak of her crepe soles on the cork floor of her bedroom.

After my grandfather died, she kept a handgun in the nightstand for peace of mind on the many nights she spent alone here. As a kid, I’d sleep in the twin bed next to hers on the other side of the nightstand and worry about getting up in the night to pee. I don’t look to see if the gun is still there.

My grandmother was a large woman who wore emerald jewelry, laughed with her head back and mouth wide open, and could often be seen holding a crystal tumbler of Scotch. She loved men more than women and placed high value on education and adventure. I have a black-and-white photograph of her riding an elephant in India about two years before she died at age seventy-four.

But the most enduring impression I have of her is when she was sitting across from me in her Berkeley apartment on an overcast December morning and agreeing to send me to college. Thanks to her generosity and belief in me, six weeks later, I lugged my yellow Samsonite up three flights of stairs into the off-campus dorm at Chico State University.

By the time I was a senior, my career in journalism was taking shape, and I’d finally grown wise enough to see what an immense, life-altering gift she’d given me. I wanted her to know this. I sat down and wrote her a letter telling her how deeply grateful I was and how profoundly her generosity had changed my life.

As was her habit, the day after she received my letter she wrote a response on stationery labeled, “Memo from the Big Cheese.”

That night, she died of a stroke.

I received her letter three days later, an experience that seared into me the vital importance of not waiting to tell people what they mean to you.

I don’t know why my cousins have preserved her house in an almost shrine-like fashion. But I suspect that even for my male cousins, she was the type of inspiring, larger-than-life figure who deserved commemoration and enduring respect.

As a twelve-year-old, I was hungry for examples of women who lived life on their own terms. The magazines in my grandmother’s cabin remind me of what I was searching for, but not what I ultimately found. It’s taken me decades to realize that my biggest teacher was the woman who lived here—who funded my education, traveled the world, and never once asked permission.

Looking around my grandmother’s living room, I can’t help but wonder if she ever knew what a role model she’d become. I don’t know the answer, but I do know she taught me the most by being herself.

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