The Sound of Home

I missed another family gathering, this time my little sister’s one year wedding anniversary, and housewarming party, at their new organic farm in Pennsylvania. To ease my guilt and make amends, I make a phone call. Immediately, a lump crawls into the back of my throat. If home had a sound, it’s what I hear next.

Grandma squeals my name when she realizes it’s me on the line. Grandpa gives a warm “helloooo” from what sounds like a short distance.

It’s no understatement: without these idyllic grandparents there would have been a void, the size of sugar and spice and all things nice, in the lives of at least three Roberts children. Time spent with them was a reprieve from our early admittance into the Adult World of Divorce.

These days, my siblings and I are fascinated with their personal histories, but the Greatest Generation is a tight-lipped one. To get story gold, we apply two rules of thumb: don’t miss an opportunity and start with a very specific inquiry.

On this occasion, I ask about a ring Grandpa made for Grandma.

“I don’t know how he made it or where in the world he got the idea,” says Grandma. “It’s amazing what your mind can come up with.”

Grandpa explains: he made the ring while deployed overseas during the Second World War. He used only a hammer and a knife. It took him one week to turn a George Washington quarter into a ring for a wife he’d not seen in months. (Before 1965 the coin was made of 90% silver and 10% copper).

I mistakenly remembered the ring as Grandma’s wedding band. They correct me, but no matter, this got us onto another story from the archives: their wedding.

Grandpa, an Army man, was stationed in Wisconsin; Grandma, a nurse in training, was in Maryland. The two had been engaged for a couple years. A ceremony was staved off so Grandma could finish school. She would have been forced out if she were married. Married women didn’t belong in school.

In January of 1944, during a furlough, Grandpa traveled to Fort Mead to visit his fiancé.

It was there, just outside the Fort, they were married.

“Nobody was there, except two people we didn’t know,” says Grandma. “They stood up for us,” Grandpa pipes in. They have me on speaker phone. Grandpa is at the stove sautéing zucchini from his garden. Grandma is, no doubt, perched inches from the phone’s mic. I can hear them both perfectly.

On the night of their wedding the newlyweds rented a room at a boarding house where they would spend only one night. Under the bathroom sink, there was a small space heater. Grandma’s bathrobe was too close; it caught fire.

I imagine Grandma: young, happy, tousle-haired, scared, in love and wrapped in a bathrobe with a burn hole.

She’ll go on to have seven children and later, dozens of grandchildren. This young bride will grow to be a vigilant protector. She’ll take every precaution with these children. Not one of us will escape her waterproofing method of bread bags over our socks.

But in this moment, nothing is certain for these two. The following day Grandpa returned to Wisconsin, Grandma to Fort Mead Army Camp. A portrait of the times: a husband and wife readying for war. Three months after their winter wedding, Grandma was deployed to Europe. Grandpa went shortly after.

It would be more than a year later, in April of 1945, before they would see each other again, this time in Paris. I know my grandmother to be notoriously sentimental; her grey-blue eyes can turn to glossy pools in an instant. I ask if this reunion was a weepy one. “I was too happy to cry,” she says.

But, of course, the tone was somber. “The president had just died." Grandma is talking about the American president: Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Everything was closed. All entertainment, the whole time: CLOSED! There was nothing to do but sight see. So we sight seed. We saw all of Paris and the Cathedral of Notre Dame,” Grandma recounts.

I can’t wrap my mind around the juxtaposition of this love story and the short-lived one belonging to my parents. In one generation, the narrative see-saws from a near-tragic romantic epic to, essentially, what amounts to John Cougar Mellencamp lyrics.

I have a lot of questions, I keep interrupting. Grandma says “I know it’s hard to understand. We'll tell you more when you come home.”

I want to tell them, as long as they are talking to me, I am home.
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