Pam Hanson is a contributor, with her mother, Barbara Andrews, to A Cup of Christmas Cheer.
When I was growing up, going to my Grandma Rock’s house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for a weekend was such a special treat. As the oldest of four siblings, it was my “retreat” for a few days with my mother’s mother.
While my pharmacist grandpa spent long days at his drugstore, Grandma Rock and I played miniature golf, shopped for paper dolls, read books in companionable silence and went out for suppers of spaghetti and chocolate milk (to my dear nutrition-minded mother’s horror!).
My favorite part of the night was “midnight snack.” As an adult I realize now that “midnight snack” came much earlier in the evening, but the name stuck!
Grandma would lay down her knitting needles and skein of yarn and head out to the linoleum-tiled kitchen to fill a tiny paper cup with M&Ms, mini-marshmallows and cashews. I’d sit in the big white faux-leather chair near the enormous stone fireplace, painstakingly erected in the 1930s when my grandparents had the house built, my feet propped on the big hassock, and munch my treats while grainy old black and white movies with actors like Clark Gable and Bette Davis played on the TV screen. Grandma sat in her red leather chair at the end of the room, her knitting needles constantly clacking.
Happier times could not be had.
When my mother and I were asked to write the short story “Calling Grandma Jean,” which appears in the Guideposts Books Christmas collection A Cup of Christmas Cheer Volume 1, I immediately thought of the black rotary dial wall phone that hung in the hallway in Grandma Rock’s house.
Writing this story was bittersweet, because the saddest time I used that phone was to frantically call an ambulance and my mom when I was not even 11 years old. My grandfather had suffered a fatal heart attack, and Grandma tended to him while I dialed.
Like my mother, Grandma Rock loved me unconditionally. And I have always felt beyond blessed to have had and still have such wonderful caring women in my life.
