Savvy 3: Gert

I was thinking this morning about my grandma Gert again, presumably on account of Emily Dickinson, who turned up in a posting yesterday. Specifically, I remember Grandma Gert's red 1976 Chevy Nova with the black vinyl roof. Oh, that baby was a looker. My grandmother, a spiritual woman cloaked in many layers of skin and weighted down in turquoise, drove that Nova like an impulsive teenager. More than once, she pulled onto the quiet Main street of our town cutting off a tractor trailer that had begun to accelerate at the light.

Her maneuver brought on two distinctive sounds: the soft clanging of her clip-on earrings rattling against her shoulders, and the piercing, and almost unheard-of protest of a truck's horn, held down and down and down as the Nova led it, slow and easy, through town.

And this utterance, overheard by the child sitting in the front seat: "Respect for the elderly." These words transformed Gert's gesture from vigilante oddball to simply a woman whose faith in the world enabled her to take chances. What driver, after all, would mow down an eighty year old woman in a Chevy Nova? None, she reasoned. And she said so.

Those words - just those four - made me forget that she was recklessly at fault. I wonder now how I would have remember that scene had she said, "Oh, God, I'm so sorry!" or "Ach! I didn't see him." or, as surely my mother or I would have said, "Shit!"

I'll never know. Instead, I remember that Nova happily. And her in it. Wishing herself well, wreaking havoc, uttering words that told a story no one else would have written.