My grandmother Sylvia passed away on Sunday at the age of 95. She lived a very full life and passed on surrounded by family and friends. The Tennessean has written up a very nice obituary. With that in mind, I thought this might be a good time to re-post an essay I originally wrote as a college admissions essay about her in 2003, as an attempt to capture a little of how I feel about her:
I admit it. I have always been somewhat of a geek. I like math and computer science. Instead of asking my parents for a car, I asked them for the new Physics For Game Developers how-to book. Never could see why someone would enjoy anything as abstract as art. You know, ceramics, sculpture, painting, and all that stilted decoration.
Let me tell you about my grandmother. She is active and vital at 86 years of age. She continues her internationally known ceramic work, has traveled to every continent including Antarctica, served with the Red Cross in World War II, and continually surprises everyone who underestimates her feisty self. She knew the intricacies of art but had never taken algebra. I simply did not understand this woman.
During the summer after 11th grade, I embarked on a vacation, finally arriving at my grandmother’s hometown: Nashville, Tennessee. One night, my grandmother drew me over to a shelf holding artwork both by her and others. Sighing mentally, I prepared myself for the lecture.
As she explained what scumbags Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon had been, she showed me the ceramic cinerary urns she’d made, one for each man topped with a sculpted caricature. Inside each sculpture, she’d stuffed news accounts of the subject’s downfall. I found myself listening intently as, moving to another object on the shelf, she explained that the tiny, ancient clay sculpture had been given to her by a tour guide in Yemen. It struck me that, incredibly, the figure had existed since the Queen of Sheba visited David! Then she showed me another piece: the figure of a dove, a symbol of the Latvian resistance to Soviet domination in the early 1920s. This art, I realized, was more than simple pieces of clay or bone. It is our history and it is our human legacy. And my grandmother spoke of art with the respect that I only used for speaking about solving a complex integral or wrangling with an uncooperative data structure.
Next, she took me to see the bead collection hanging on display in her bedroom. Unlike most art, the pieces were created for people to wear. I was truly fascinated by this living human history. There were pieces from Iran, the Fertile Crescent of the ancient world; pieces from the Egypt of the pharaohs; pieces from all of her travels. As she related her story of how she attempted to bargain with a dealer in Egypt, attracted by the appearance of the necklace but discounting his claim that it was “very very very old,” she said, “I’m sure you’re bored. This’ll be the last story.”
Suddenly realizing how much I cared, I answered, “No, Grandma, tell me more.”
My grandmother shone in an entirely new light that day. I loved her before. I love her with more understanding now. She is a world apart from the rest of us, bearing so many perspectives and so much history in her small frame, teaching me of the intimate connections between art, history, and humanity. When she passes on, the world will be that much smaller and we’ll have lost the most creative person I’ve ever known. In her passion for art, she had shown me a glimpse of a greater world.