Grandma Cody

Day 88....

Tomorrow is October 23. Anna and I have joked about that day as perhaps, "the day" for the call. We need to find the silly and ridiculous in our situation to be light and to pass the days of waiting. Sometimes it all is quite silly. But, I want to share another thing about what tomorrow really is. It would have been my grandmother Cody's 113th birthday. Yes, kidding aside, it is significant that it is her 113th as those numbers do seem to be a recurring part of our serendipitous experience, but also that she was part of our female lineage and an interesting and courageous woman.

Last weekend while I was home in Livermore I decided to help Doug organize more of the garage. We moved here last December 30 and there is still some unpacking and organizing to do. Shortly after we moved in Anna continued her decline, the weather was terrible, the yard needed to be landscaped and we needed to feel settled in so some things have been left undone. While going through boxes on a shelf in the garage, that is to be my art studio one day, I found somethings I did not realize that I had. It may have been that Greg, my brother, had this box with albums from our dad and mom and left it with me, but I am not sure. I had not gone through it. I thought I had already seen all of the photos that they left behind. As I leafed through the photos and pages I found a couple of things that I had been looking for. One was the date of my grandmother's birth. In my father's handwriting on a genealogy form it was written as Oct. 23, 1897. I knew she always lied about her age as she was very concerned about becoming old. Now I realized it would have been her 113th birthday this weekend. The second was an address. Mom saved three letters of correspondence with a cousin's wife in Chicago. I thought I lost all threads of connection with that side of the family. I was thrilled to find a way to contact some member of her family of origin.

I also found some old photos of mom and her mother and father that I may have seen years ago, but I am not sure. Upon finding the letters I went straight to my computer to see if I could also find a phone number. I called the lost cousin and left a message. The next day she returned my call. It was very special, really, to find this lost piece of my mother. She left behind poems and writings about her early life in Chicago and San Francisco that gave me the understandings I had been looking for for such a long time as to why she had such a difficult childhood. Right after her death in 2009 I did some research in old Chicago Tribune newspapers and discovered a lot of information that filled in between the lines. With this information I spent hours and hours reconstructing her early life story and writing a 65 page volume. I shared some of the details with my new found cousin and she shared the perspective that came from her family's side of the story.

What I was told was familiar to me. It is what I remember mom telling me, Cody was never really accepted by her husband's family. She was also blamed for the breakup of her marriage. From the perspective of my grandfather's familiy she took the children away to San Francisco selfishly. From what I understand there was another reason. As I talked with this cousin on the phone I realized that an unflattering judgment about my grandmother that was formed seventy years ago was still alive and part of the family lore. It needed to be enlightened and corrected. What was so interesting about this was that I realized that never at any time was there anyone who could stand up for Cody as a witness to all that she endured, defending and supporting her. She had to do this all on her own. The strength of my grandmother and the courage it took to face her challenges at the time of the Great Depression is very inspiring.

I sent the story as seen from my mother's eyes and from my interpretation to the Chicago cousin. I hope that she is reading it and understanding that shiksa that married Frank in 1919 during the time of the roaring twenties when life was fun and glamorous. My mother was born in 1923 during a time of great affluence. She was loved by both her mother and father and lived a rich life in a vibrant Jewish family with a protestant mother. That spelled trouble from the beginning. When the Depression hit. the family fortune was lost. The power of the money that created the bond between my grandparents was gone. Years of poverty and instability, moving from place to place wore out any semblance of togetherness until there was nothing left between Cody and Frank. Cody was asked to raise her two children in a terrible tenement house in the south side of Chicago. It was humiliating and terrible. Finally when my mother was the age of 14 my grandmother took her two children and moved back to San Francisco for good near her sister and parents. She did not take them away because she was a selfish woman, she took them because she was a hurt and broken woman who wanted a better life for her and her children. My grandfather was also a broken man who never could reconstruct a stable and honest life for himself and his family.

So, tomorrow it would have been Cody's 113th birthday. Mom would have remembered her mom and sometimes on October 23 she would go to the cemetery to honor her. Now that mom is not here I will remember my grandmother. Now, perhaps since I was able to tell her side of the story to a member of the family who had only known another side, she will now see my grandmother in a new light and there will be some healing and some vindication for her. How wonderful to think of that, to think that the telling of the story after all of these years could create some healing about the memory of my grandmother's life. What a gift that is to me. So, October 23, 2010 is a very special birthday. "Grandma, I told them. Carol heard me."

this is something that my mother left behind that she wrote about her mother during their trying times......

"Anyone who suffered my mother took into her heart. I remember two very classic examples of her care for others, first during the Depression and we were living in Chicago at the time in a very large old apartment hotel. It was extremely ugly and had its share of cockroaches and rats, in fact it was a slum, even though it did not seem that way to me. Any way, my story, old people who had very little to eat used to roam through the halls and knock on the doors for food - one very old shabby lady used to come to our door - her name was Bessie Wobedo (that is what I remember her name to be.) She was so unkempt and I remember drooled from the side of her mouth and had stringy white hair and wore a frayed and unclean black coat. Mother would invite her in and share food that we had with her. Mother sensed that I was quite uncomfortable entertaining this lady and she would tell me how sorry we should be for poor old people and she would always welcome Bessie, as though she were always glad to see her. I hope that now I could do the same as well, but back then it was very hard for me to understand her compassion for others. She gave of her time to many others in this apartment building at this time but her heart was very distressed because we had to live there and she so wanted us to have a better life."

Cody in the 1950'5

Coral Lucille Thomas, "Cody" (named after Buffalo Bill who bounced her on his knee) was born in Butte, Montana, October 23, 1987 and was my grandmother, Anna and Sara's great grandmother. Happy 113th birthday, you are in my heart and my memory.