Acknowledgements

It seems to be a time of tragedy in this life of ours. Over the weekend, one of our own in our school community tragically took her life. A fourth grade teacher, beloved by many, mourned by all. It's horrifically coincidental that our Septimus of Mrs. Dalloway also ended his life. And yet further, that the author of the book, Virginia Woolf, also took her life. All of this has put me in a deep place of contemplation and thought and heavy-heartedness. And again, last night I found out that the dear, dear founder of the camp that I have attended my whole life passed away. The shock that hit me was unbelievable.

I was talking with Ms. Tally about the theme of depression and suicidal thoughts throughout the novel, and I realized that part of the reason it is so hard to detect is because the flourished language and the archaic diction. If the words were translated into present-day English, maybe it would be easier to comprehend and see the common thread. Yet I feel like so much is missed because people do not understand. The first clue to Mrs. Dalloway's tremendous heartache is when she is walking to go get the flowers, thinking, 'Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there she survived?...What was she trying to recover?' (6).  It seems so horrible to me that she makes the idea of death and her demise so trivial and matter-of-fact.

It also struck me greatly how insecure Mrs. Dalloway is. She thinks to herself, '...half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew...for no one was ever for a second taken in.  Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even differently!' (7). It reminded me of how in the Beauty Myth we read that women think that if their appearance was different, their problems would be magically solved. Clarissa goes on to think, 'She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes.  She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large...Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird's' (7). Mrs. Dalloway finds her security in what others think of her, hence the frivolous parties she hosts. She tries to fill the void that she has (possibly due to the lack of relationship that she has with Richard) with outside approval and material things, yet she still feels the hurt. 'It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quire secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which...made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self love! this hatred!' (9). It is almost as if she feels ashamed of this sadness that she cannot shake, of the depression that she feels. And that is what is most sad, that she should feel burdened by her own unhappiness, and that she feels that she is unworthy to feel so.

Three Grandmothers: Deborah and Eleanor

The second of my grandmothers is Eleanor Starr. Gramma Starr. She is my namesake, I am Mackenzie Starr. Her father was an Anglican priest, and as a child she moved to 17 different states. Out of all my grandmothers, she is the one that they write about in stories. The round, soft one with whispy grey curls. The one who has warm cookies ready whenever you pay her a visit. The one who collects porcelain tea sets and had weekly tea parties with you as a child. The one who lives in a house with a white picket fence and a hand-planted garden. Everybody loves Gramma Starr. Everyone. At Christmastime, she bakes hundreds of Christmas cookies and packages them up into beautiful little parcels. She gives one to everyone in town. The bag boys at the supermarket, the assistants at the post office, the guy in the ferry control tower (she lives on an island off of Washington). During Thanksgiving, when we are all together she has us play the thankfulness game. We each receive a cup holding brown, yellow, red, and orange m&m's. Each time we eat one, we have to say something we're thankful for. I receive monthly letters from her, each with a Bible verse on it; each with a life lesson for me to gain. She says, "If I do one of these each month for you, by the time you're my age you could write your own Bible!" Out of all my grandmothers, she is the most cliché. And although we normally use the word "cliché" with a negative spin, it works for Gramma Starr. It's who she is.


The last of my grandmothers is Deborah. That's what I call her, Deborah. After Gramma Starr and my grandpa got divorced, my grandpa married Deborah. They got married when I was four, so virtually she she has been my grandmother for my entire life. I call her Deborah, well, because the rest of my family calls her Deborah. And until recently, the formality of it did have an effect on our relationship. She is from the deep South; she grew up surrounded by peach trees and horse farms, and everyday she would help her dad with the tractor. She adores horses. Absolutely adores them. Growing up, she had several of them. I asked her whether she rode English or Western style, and she laughed. "Sweet pea, I rode bareback! No saddle, no bridle! It's the only real way to ride a horse." That's what Deborah is, wild. She will gladly point out your wrongs in that thick Southern twang, and her wit is sharper than a knife. She's one of those people who has done everything. And I mean everything. She has worked as a crop-dusting pilot, an accountant, a horse trainer, a "house mother" at a home for troubled girls, a counselor, a banker, a sales person. She has even crashed a plane, and clearly she survived.
Before this year, my relationship with Deborah was nearly non-existent. We were always very friendly and could have a good laugh, but there was no depth or meaning to our relationship. And then she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It was devastatingly true, you don't know what you got 'til it's gone. A fear that I didn't know my own grandmother gripped me and shook me to my senses. My next visit with Deborah, I poured myself into loving on her and spending quality time with her. We watched movies, baked cookies, read together. But mostly we talked about horses. It's a common love for us; both of us have been riding for our entire lives. We watched horse movies, looked at horse pictures, we even went out riding a few times. This Spring I begged my mom to send me out to South Carolina to spend my Spring Break with Deborah and my grandpa. This time I could see the effects of her sickness a little bit more. She would get flustered with driving directions, would sometimes put her oatmeal in the microwave three or four times, forgetting that she had done it before. I decided that I wanted to conduct my grandmother interview with Deborah. I wanted to preserve every last memory that I had of her. That Spring Break was one of the best of my entire life. Sometimes, Deborah would tell me to get in her truck and we would just drive. We would drive for miles on the highway, not knowing where we were going, stopping to get Dairy Queen on the way. This grandmother assignment could not have come at a better time for me, because without it, I do not think I would have taken advantage of getting to know this wonderful woman who has been my "background grandmother" for my entire life. I could not be more thankful.

Three Grandmothers: Mykha

I have three grandmothers. Both my parents' parents got divorced, and my mother's parents both remarried. I am extremely close to both my biological grandmother and my step-grandmother on my mom's side. My father's father remarried (I have met the man and his wife only twice), but his mother did not. I wanted to dedicate this blog post to writing about these three remarkable women.

Mykha - My dad's mom is Mykha. She is a 4'5" Vietnamese woman, but what she lacks in height is MORE than made up for in spunk. She wears wedges (at least three inches tall) everyday, and whenever she goes out she wears a fur coat and hat. She has a Vietnamese restaurant outside of Chicago, called Mykha's, and it is her entire life. The five love languages are quality time, acts of service, physical touch, words of affirmation, and gift-giving, but Mykha has invented a whole new one - food. I grew up spending my days in that restaurant; my parents managed it for Mykha while she managed the food. My mom says when I was a baby Mykha refused to talk to her for a week because she found out about my mom giving me baby-food bought from Whole Foods. One morning Mykha showed up at our house unannounced with a cooler that was more than twice her size filled with fresh mango and sweet sticky rice. "My công (grandchild) will not eat that American crap! No good! You tell me you need food I bring! My công deserve better!" She has lived in America for more than 30 years and still has no idea how to conjugate verbs. She was born in Da Lat, Vietnam, during the last of the French occupation. Her father had died when she was a toddler, leaving her mother and her five siblings on their own. When Mykha was ten, the French general in their village was killed, but no one knew by whom. As a punishment, the French army chose five people at random and shot them. That day Mykha was pulled out of her math class by the Principal who brought her to the local police station; her mother had been one of the five, and she needed to legally identify the body. She and her five siblings went to live with her great-aunt, who owned a restaurant, and that's how Mykha learned how to cook. Cooking is how my grandma tells you she loves you (literally, her English still isn't great). If she loves you, she makes you a feast. If she doesn't like you, she makes you a little less food. Since her 4'5" frame poses several problems, her entire kitchen is custom made; she isn't tall enough for standard stove and countertop sizes. On her answering machine at her restaurant, after the very professional greeting and stating of the restaurant hours by one of her waiters, you can hear a scuffling, a couple of Vietnamese words, and then Mykha comes on the phone and says, "and remember, Mykha love you." I am not joking.

This, my dear friends, is Mykha.