I Remember Grandma

I remember Grandma.  The orange kitchen.  The orange plates, napkins, hair, clothes.  Orange was her color and orange was her.
Once she knitted me a thick, orange sweater, with long orange fringe on the sleeves and around the collar and bottom.  It was way too big for me, but she was practical and said I would grow into it
I never appreciated that sweater when I was a kid, I mean, who wears orange?  Just when I was ready to wear that sweater, I lost it.  My stepmother discarded it along with all of my other stored items when dad died.  How could she?  How could she?
But back to grandma.  we called her the Balla Busta:  Yiddish for a ball buster.  Red hair (orange, really) with two other redheaded sisters.  Born on the lower east side of Manhattan.  First generation from poland.  She met my grandfather, Charles Saul Heilser, when she was 15 and he was 16.   She fell hard for "saul"   they married two years later.
Young and idealistic, they moved from the lower east side out to Brooklyn's jewish ghetto, Williamsburg.  From the walk-up they began their lives together
I don't recall exactly what grandpa did for a living at that time; it was inconsequential to their story and their lives,  but it was a few years later, in his early twenties, that he somehow got himself hooked up with the plumbers.  How he ended up being the organizer for the first plumber's union, going on to building that union, is a mystery to me  I don't have all those details and I'm not sure it matters.  What I know was that grandma fought along side him for over 10 years as they built that union.  They were threatened, possibly even with death, as they stood up for the workers there.  Grandpa was a charismatic man: I always heard how the men loved him, how they really would follow no one else, but that he could not be anything more than an "organizer" in the union, never the president or any other office, because he was Jewish.  Still, he held his head up high.  He always had grandma to tell someone off when they would criticize him or discriminate.  You'd get a piece of her mind.  They built that union with the help first of the communists, but to become more legitimate, they ended up making deals with the democrats, and most likely, the Italian mafia. In fact, over Sunday dinners grandma told us all that if we every voted Republican, she'd kill us.  It was the Democrats who stood for the workers,  the Democrats who made their union legitimate; those republicans want to abuse and take advantage of the workers.  She would have none of it.
Grandpa was elected every two years.  So even though he made good money, and were able to move out of Williamsburg out to the beach at Far Rockaway, they never lived in anything bigger than a one bedroom apartment.  That was just in case he would lose an election, so they kept their overhead low.
He never lost an election until one year  for some reason, some political coup occurred in the union and he was ousted from his "organizer" role.  Grandpa sat on the couch for two years, devastated.  What else could he do?  Flaming, fiery grandma, picked herself up and went to work in the sweatshops to save the family.  She stole milk to feed her babies.  She survived; she made sure they all survived.

I wonder why this story about grandma is so important to me?  I have always wanted to write about her, even though grandpa was the person everyone admired.  He got the credit for what he did for the American worker, but we all knew that without grandma, he could never have accomplished this much.

It reminds of a quote from a 13th century Japanese Buddhist sage,  that goes something like: "women support men and then in turn cause men to support them".  Grandma did that.  She had the strength, resiliency, and grit to support someone as powerful as Charles Saul Heisler.  In turn, he took care of her even after his death, even sending one of his union official friends, Sam to comfort her and who she would marry as her second husband.

I wanted to be like grandma and to some degree I am.  I am certainly not the child-like, dependent personality my mom is.  Although mom is a strong survivor: beauty and charm enabled her to be taken care of by the richer, dominant men of the New York social register.  She wasn't like grandma though; she tore my father down so much that he had to leave her for a woman more like grandma.
I was able to grab grandma's strengths and work side by side with my husband to build a Buddhist organization in Northern California.  He and I are partners, and now we can be credited equally.  We dance the dance of soul mates, weaving in and out of each others shortcomings, filling in the gaps like water flowing through crevices to build something from nothing.

But back to the year grandpa lost the election.  I was a child then in the late 60s.  I remember the conversations among my parents and their siblings:  what are we going to do?  how will grandpa survive this blow?  Fortunately it only lasted two years; he ran again and was re-elected and never lost again.  For over 40 years, Grandpa took care of his men, they took care of him and grandma was the strong foundation for them all.

Little girl bullied but transcendent

She and her mother were always a bit more sensitive, more artistic and, yes outwardly sweeter than the residents of the Brooklyn apartment complex along the bay.  They were also more physically beautiful.  The mom looked like a combination of Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood.  When she dressed up and went to Manhattan with her husband, they were often stopped for autographs.  Her husband would nod knowingly when people asked about his wife, “Didn’t we just see you on Broadway?”  Yes, he would say, this is the new ingénue Mandy Olsen, taking off on his wife’s first name, Amanda, and totally Anglicizing their German Jewish last name to sound like a legitimate actresses name.  Then they would proceed to sign autographs.  Her face was totally familiar and her beauty of the Hollywood kind.  Little could they guess that she was just a housewife, a woman who married too young at a time when it was not common for a woman to know what gifts she possessed. 

Her daughter combined her mother’s dark beauty with her dad’s sandy, Scottish-looking redhead complexion.  Big hazel eyes, a big smile, long auburn hair, and freckles.  She was in love with performing, possessing a voice with natural power, tone and range.  She would dance and sing on the streets of new york, performing for crowds on the busses and subways, dressed sometimes in a tutu while pretending to be a prima ballerina of the New York City ballet.  She was truly a female of the next generation, full of open-hearted zest and fully prepared to share her gifts with the world.  All this was generously given until that one day on the bus when a woman yelled out, “Why don’t you tell that kid to shut up?”  The girl cowered onto her mother’s lap, asking “why?”  Mom said that some people are just mean.

Yet, somehow, they didn’t know this in their DNA.  They didn’t know that people less complex, less nice, found their open sunniness to be a threat and wanted to quash it, actually looking for ways to diminish them and make them close in.  Some people were meaner, and these thin-skinned women let them get inside, let them take their glow.  They would kick themselves off and recover, only to be hurt again. Somehow they weren’t full within themselves, knowing that they could rise above the cousin who purposely stuck her foot out to trip the girl, or the neighborhood kids who called her “baby, baby stick your head in gravy”; or when they threw rocks at the poor stray cat the girl tried to save.  Somehow they were always surprised, at first wondering if it was they that had done something wrong.  They could never just say, what an asshole that person was and brush it off.  It would stay with them, causing a very small amount of self-doubt about themselves to always reside within.    

All through her life the girl would face these types of people.  Her biggest lesson was to know who she was and to not seek praise outside herself.  Vanity was, after all, one of the seven deadly sins. 

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New York in the 50s was truly transcendent.  I say this because I want you to understand the feeling that my parents experienced being young, beautiful, and in love.  Yes, I am the daughter you just read about.  I wrote that in the 3rd person because I need some distance from some of the experiences I had and the "karmic" energy of my mother that had been transferred to me.