Margie: on being fifteen

I have been feeling the presence of my grandmother. She died in 1991, and today is not her birthday nor any special day of remembrance, but I have missed her sharply all day. I told Margie about her, shedding a few tears of gratitude for her sense of humor, her happiness in retirement, the way she would do a little shuffling soft shoe dance as she dusted her Hummels and watered the African violets in her two-bedroom house on a hill in Hendersonville, North Carolina. I lived with her for the first five years of my life and was Returned to her when I was fifteen. Her widow’s pension was so tiny that I had to work, first as a waitress and later as a sales clerk at J.C. Penney's to help out. I remember her grocery lists, how she would whittle them down because there was never enough money to buy all the food she wanted to buy for us, but she gave me everything she had and I loved her fiercely, love her still. 

Margie listened attentively, nodding, and her mind was sharp and quick today, remembering not only her childhood but her teens as well, so she said to me, “Fifteen. You were fifteen when you went back to her. That's a very important age. I remember when I was fifteen. We were poor too, but I never had to work. My father would have been horrified at the thought. He just wanted me to do my homework.”

I was surprised because usually Margie doesn’t remember her life after she was ten or twelve. I asked her to tell me about her high school years.

“We moved from the Bronx to Washington Heights. It was a big step. It was because of my mother, of course, always wanting to be middle class on my father’s income as a taxi driver. My father went into debt so his wife could pretend she had made it into the middle class." Margie lifted an imaginary teacup with her pinkie finger extended. "Washington Heights! We lived in another walk-up apartment, but my mother was so proud.” 

She paused, and I asked the name of her high school. She couldn’t remember it, but she said the most important thing was that she discovered Biosophy when she was fifteen, and that changed her life.

“There is something about being fifteen,” she mused. “Something…what is the word?”

I tried naive? idealistic? 

“No,” Margie shook her head, “that’s not it. It’s another i-word.” 

Impressionable?

“Yeah, that’s it. Impressionable. You’ve left your childhood but you’re not yet an adult. You’re becoming someone, shaping yourself. Yeah. So you were with your grandmother, figuring out who you were going to be. And I was in Washington Heights. How lucky we both were.”