TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

My maternal grandmother, the matriarch of our family, died 25 years ago this year. She still visits me in dreams now and then. Her name was Elizabeth, but everyone called her by her middle name, Ann. Her grandchildren did not call her Grandma or Mimi or one of the more conventional titles. No, we called her Dabel—and I was to thank, or to blame, for that name. It was something I’d babbled as a baby, and it stuck.

My memories of Dabel are still as crisp and as pigmented as ever, all these years later.

She drove a gold Datsun. The radio station she preferred played what I would now call “elevator music.” Instrumental but not classical—more like “easy listening.” Like Muzak. Dabel, driving around in her Datsun, whistled like a warbler. She whistled more musically than anyone I’d ever heard. 

She could bake and she gave great hugs, but in many ways, she wasn’t your typical grandmother. She was divorced, living in her own apartment alone. She worked—out of necessity—in a men’s store in a nearby mall. My mother would take my sisters and me to visit her there, and I remember walking among the racks of suit jackets and pants and shirts, like walking in grass as tall as I was. Sometimes we would hide in the racks. I remember the smell of wool. 

It was a special treat when she would walk us down to the cookie shop in the mall and buy us M&M cookies as big as our heads. Or she would take us to lunch in the cafeteria of the Lazarus department store. Grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk never tasted so good.

Today’s poem touched me because it made me think of my grandmother. It made me think of her care, but also about the life she had after her marriage ended. I know her life didn’t look the way she’d expected it would. I wish it had been easier. Still, she could whistle like a songbird.

Country Night
by Laura Newbern

My mother’s father was cruel to my mother’s mother.
I know this, but knowing means nearly nothing; the man,
seen by me, was a tall man who beautifully wore
a hat, in the old way, standing beside the door of a car
on a dust road.
Like a sentence, the poem is half
in sunlight, half in shadow; sometimes cloaked 
in a dark night: my grandfather driving,
Nat King Cole on the radio and 
my grandmother humming along.
I’m in the back, little, and deeply in love
with him, and with her, and the pines rising
up and away from the world on either side
of the car, and how he would say as we rode through the dark 
a wolf is going to come out of those trees and eat you. I know
that is a story for children; I know my grandmother
hummed like a warbler, yellow glow
in the deep wood, for most of her life. The poem,
like a sentence, is sometimes in sunlight.
Even at night: the bird will sing.

“Country Night” by Laura Newbern from A NIGHT IN THE COUNTRY © 2024 Laura Newbern. Used by permission of Changes Press.