क्या हुआ??

These days I wish my grandparents were still around. I know they were all quite old when they died (my dad’s dad would be 100 years old if he was still alive) but now that I think back, I feel like I missed out on so much.

In the case of my mom’s parents, they died when I was a sophomore in college. I don’t know if it was physical distance or my own nervousness around them (I have no idea, I was just weird like that) or that I just didn’t know what to talk about with them…but I never really formed any sort of deep relationship with them. Grandpa was this weird health nut who was into philosophy and sending me huge jars of vitamins for my birthday. Up until University, all I cared about was that he would somehow become a Christian, because that’s the kind of person I was. I remember towards the end of his life, when he knew that I was going to college, that he seemed very pleased by that. He was so sick then, that it was getting difficult to communicate with him. But one of the last times I saw him alive he gave me $100 out of his wallet to use on textbooks. That was a pretty rare gesture for him (he gave my mom 3 bucks) so I can at least hope that he was a little proud of me at the end.

Now that I’m doing my M.A., I wish I could turn back the clock a little bit. Maybe we would actually have something to talk about now. Or at least maybe I would be able to relate to him a little better when he’d start talking about his thoughts on life.

With my grandmother it’s pretty much the same thing. By the time I was old enough to really care that I had a grandmother, she was getting pretty sick. I tried to have a few conversations with her when she was feeling up to it. The one I remembered best was when I asked her how she made it in her marriage for over 50 years. She replied that she had thought about divorcing my grandfather so many times (and most of her children wished she had, to be completely honest) but she had made a promise before God and believed strongly that marriage was meant to be for life. I respect her so much for sticking to her principles (and completely kicking the bottle at the same time, while my grandfather constantly had alcohol in the house) but the sacrifices she made as a wife and mother have really motivated me to accomplish all I can in life. She’s gone now and I can’t tell her what I’m doing or that a woman in our family is in graduate school. That I’ve accomplished so much without needing a husband to “allow” me to do these things. I really hope that she’s with me in spirit somehow.

As far as my dad’s parents. I wish I had the chance to know them at all. They both died when I was a baby, so all I have are old pictures, the stuffed dog toy that my grandpa gave me and stories of how they would call every weekend to ask how I was doing. I was pretty much the first girl born in the Bowers family in a long time (I think my grandpa may have had a niece or two, but I’m definitely the only female grandchild, and my dad had one brother). It’s amazing to me how this gruff old man doted on me. He grew up in a farming town in Iowa with an abusive father. Left in his early teens with a mule team, built roads all across the country, stole my grandma from her fiance in Kansas (he shot himself in the head…and lived), then they went out to the desert in Yuma, Arizona and lived there…in the freaking desert…while my grandpa helped build the Imperial Dam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Dam Yeah, my gramps built that.

Then they moved out to California, and even though Grandpa was 36 when WWII started, he joined the freaking marines and went out to Guam to build airstrips. I have no idea if he saw any violence…but anyway he was there.

After coming back to California, he spent most of the rest of his life as a construction worker. Those guys with the huge machines working on the roads? My grandpa.

I wish I could have talked to him. I wish I could hear his voice just once. I don’t know much about my grandma except that people called her Goldie, and she was really really pretty.

All in all, I just hope maybe they can see me down here. And I hope they’re thinking that this mixture of genes which turned into me has been a worthy addition to the bloodline. 

To end this post, I want to quote a poem we just had to read for Urdu class. The poetess also came to class to discuss her work. Anyway, it’s very short, but I feel like it really describes how I feel in relation to my family and where they have come from and where I am trying to go.

—–

Mera qad

Mere baap se uncha nikla

Meri maa jeet gayi

——

My stature

Has come out higher than my father’s 

My  mother is victorious