Thanksgiving Queen

Three things about my grandparents' grave you may miss unless I point them out. The first is my bottom half, in white shorts, so telling on the smooth granite. Very professional.

Then, moving from pitiful to profound, note three names etched on the stone. My Dirkse grandparents had three children: a son who took over Grandpa's downtown Mobil station; a daughter, my mother; and the baby of the family, Gertrude, killed in a freakish automobile accident on a foggy night along the western shore of Lake Michigan. Gertie was a school teacher in the brand new Oostburg Christian School. Her name is at left.

Grandma Dirkse lost a daughter and heard the news from county cops who rang the doorbell late one night in 1949. The stone doesn't say all of that, and most anyone old enough to remember Gertie or her death probably can't. 

Then there's that ornament to the right announcing Grandma Dirkse to have been a lifetime member of the American Legion Auxiliary. She would not allow her only brother's death, in France, August, 1918, to be forgotten. My grandma Dirkse suffered two dreadful losses.

Mabel Hartman Dirkse was the only grandparent I knew. Both grandfathers never reached my age and passed away before I was ten. Grandma Schaap died three years before I was born. 

But during my life I came to see Grandma Dirkse growing from a different root. The Hartmans came to the new land in 1845, the Wisconsin shoreline all frontier. They were not seceders, not afscheiding. I'm not sure they were all that religious. The new land was wonderful, but it was only new land.

Years ago, with a giggle, Grandma told me that just after the turn of the century, as a school girl, she had to recite the Heidelburg Catechism in Dutch language even though she couldn't speak the Holland tongue herself. Grandma always was more "flexible" than the other grandparents, less theologically. But she'd married a man so old-country pious that he found it something he found it pleasing to relish the depth of his sin. You read that right. Grandma, relatives told me, had the arduous task of trying to simmer away the dreariness when it edged into darkness. She wouldn't let things get too spiritual.

When my sisters went off to high school and wanted to go to dances, Dad, a CRC preacher's son, wasn't taken with the amusement. Grandma told him, sweetly I'm sure, that it wouldn't hurt for him to loosen things up a notch or two.

My mother's only memory of her Grandpa Hartman is the time Grandma Dirkse, then a young mother, hauled her daughter along to a bar on Sheboygan's Indian Avenue, where she found her father and hauled him home.

Grandma Dirkse may not have been a prophet, but she was the first to wear a pantsuit to church. "Why Mabel," another woman said, "I never thought I'd see you wear a pants to church." She told the critic, "I never yet went without one."

Sometime before our daughter was born, a letter arrived. Grandma said the whole family awaited our daughter's birth because that little girl would be the first woman preacher in the CRC. That was a joke. Grandma Dirkse was a comic, not a crusader. When she was well on in years, she told my sister fearfully that one night she was sure there was a man under her bed. But then, she took a breath. "Of course, that could have been interesting too."

Grandma liked an occasional Old Fashioned, and her requests allowed my dad to have one too. She was a comic, her own kind of free spirit, and when I rehearse what I know of the other grnadparents--sincere, pious, deeply religious, it's Grandma Dirkse I can't help documenting her as, well, my particular saint. 

Still, when I remember her as I do every Thanksgiving, the effect is more serious than playful. Once, when I was a boy, she was the one who set the table's goodies. She was once the memorable Thankgiving queen.

I wasn't home for her last one. My sister's family had her over, along with my parents. But I can imagine the scene--the table drawn out into the living room, the unmistakable aroma of turkey and stuffing wafting bountifully, the tinkling of forks against my sister's holiday china, and Grandma being the last to finish.

When it was over, she slowly leaned into the car and sat be­side my parents for the trip home. She told them, clear and simple, it was a wonderful Thanksgiving. Then, her head fell sideways, and my father, sensing seriousness, sped to the Memorial Hospital, just a few blocks away, where she died.

I can't help thinking she played this last little joke on us, dying when she did, so that every Thanksgiving she shows up, smiling, in my imagination. And that's okay. Somehow, Grandma's death reminds me of what God gave her--joy in a life rife with sorrows through a quiet, even silent faith not earned but given freely.

Gratitude owns no spe­cial date on a believer's calendar, doesn't require turkey or pumpkin pie.

But I like to think Grandma is up there on the right hand where she's got her place at the table, still chuckling about that last fast one she pulled.

Next Thursday, somewhere close to her husband and her daughter and her brother, like the graves out there in the in Hartman Cemetery, she won't somehow be watching, maybe cracking a joke, smiling all the while, still, for me, Thanksgiving queen.