Opie

On January 3, 2015, my grandmother passed away at the age of 98. This is the remembrance I delivered at her memorial service.

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Delina May Heiss Wise. Most knew her - many of you knew her - as Delina. But in our family she was "Opie." I was only two years old when I gave her that name, and it stuck.

In my earliest recollection, Opie was a being of mysterious and magical power, as grandparents are, at their best. Her car looked like the Batmobile of the Sixties, only in champagne. Her house was (to me) gloomy, wreathed in shadow, and the bathroom smelled of perfumey soaps. She dispensed weird chalky candies. She could sneeze like nobody's business.

In short, Opie was different. Special. An outlier in the small realm of my brief experience. At that age, I didn't know the half of it.

Opie was born in a different world. One in which a girl might learn to drive herself to school at the age of 12. Or maybe that was just her way, to be ahead of her time. Her bright mind must have been evident even then, as she graduated from Drexel University and did further studies at Duke and Millersville, when women's educational and work options were much more narrowly defined. She became a teacher, and was accomplished in painting, needlework, and sewing. In marrying Richard Wise, she became a mother, choosing to take responsibility for my mother when she was six years old.

Opie was private, quiet, independent. For years after the death of her husband, she maintained their large property on her own. Sometimes I helped with the leaves. One time I hunted birds with bow and arrows. She was okay with that.

Opie collected owls. Later I learned that previously she had collected pigs. This struck me as incongruous, for whatever virtues a pig might possess, surely such a creature was not fit to serve as this woman's familiar. No, the owl was her totem animal. Druidic, elemental, wild. Untamed. Opie was spirited, even if that wasn't immediately obvious. At times she might seem aloof, or bored. It was plain that she took little interest in small-minded talk or gossip. If she disagreed, she remained silent. She was honest, and this is part of wisdom.

And yet: she was so not above pinching a bite of food from your plate at a family cookout. She would do it and laugh with defiant glee.

In her last years, her taste buds failed her, and her natural penchant for sweet things only grew stronger. She liked anything chocolate, and apparently chocolate ice cream featured heavily in the nursing home's dessert rotation. Not entirely a bad thing.

Other things went away, as well. Her memory, her sense of time and place, of the individuals who played significant roles across her long span of years. Bit by bit, as her condition progressed, she shed the layers that seem to add up to what we call personality. But she was still Opie.

Opie was the last of my family's elders. Our elders. The advance guard leading the rest of us in a journey through time, through the stages of life.

When I think of Opie now, I remember her strong hands, with prominent knuckles, arthritic fingers bearing chunky wooden rings. Her stoic wisdom. Her trickster energy. I remember Sundays after church, when she would come up the walk to our house for lunch and be met by our schnauzer, who was beside himself, in utter rapture, greeting the most important person in the world. He knew what Opie was all about. He, like us, had fallen under her spell.

Hoist the Colors, Indeed: Out to the Ballgame

Last weekend Jenifer and I found ourselves the lucky bearers of tickets to a Lancaster Barnstormers baseball game. 'Round here the attractions are the Reading Phillies and the Wilmington Blue Rocks, but we weren't going to pass up a chance to spend some quality time with my parents.

It's always strange returning home because I know the place better as someone who spent more time running the streets than driving them, and as an adult I rarely know where to go, what to do, where the food is. But thanks to the miracle of mailing lists, we know about and locate the funky Senorita Burrita in the up-and-coming midtown. We grab some great California Mission-style burritos and then, bellies full, in some cases really full, we hike through the stifling haze to the stadium.

Late in the game Jenifer is overheated and hungry and so I am sent to retrieve some ice cream. I scan the menu board and quickly determine that a cone is right out, considering the heat and melting point of ice cream, not to mention my extreme aversion to that messy condition Luke Danes of Stars Hollow aptly termed "jam hands."

Ah, a dish of ice cream. I have a long-standing dislike for the terminology, but the method sounds promising. There's something overly fussy about a "dish" of ice cream, and I didn't especially want to order one now and violate a dearly held conviction of my teenage years, when one of my (well-meaning) neighbors would occasionally invite me in for a dish of ice cream after I finished mowing his yard. A bowl I might have accepted, but not a dish, and in fact I didn't because I was a distance runner in those days and distance runners are crazy.

So I order this dish and in mere moments am confronted with a heaping pile of mint chocolate chip that is bursting beyond its paperboard confines; only then do I discover that a half-pint goes for 25 cents less. I've made my choice, I'm committed, but surely a half-pint is larger than a dish, I tell myself, the former having the ethos of geometry behind it, the latter signifying the forlorn remnants of an estate sale.

I pay the teenage purveyors of ice cream, judge them malevolently for assuredly having no dearly held conviction on the terminology of containers, and return to the fray. It's at this point that I realize we've reached the Act II turning point in the game, for now the Sounds & Furies are blasting in full effect: the lights are flashing, the mad organ player is pounding, Cylo the fuzzy red cow is emitting his grand moo (which is followed by a fat, enveloping bass tone that may well have been copped from the THX sound test), and no less august an American master than Yosemite Sam himself is barking at the opposing team's pitcher to "Quit stallin'!" All the stops are pulled out, folks, and the sun is setting, the carousel beyond left field is a-whirling, and by God if there isn't something close to magic in the air. It's corny, it's cheap, but there's a buzz in the crowd that isn't entirely fueled by seven-dollar beers, a fervor and a fever that's threatening to leak out and spread into the city streets like the MacGuffin in a latter-day Batman movie. Something is Happening and therefore we must Make Some Noise, or maybe it's the other way around, and I teeter between succumbing to the Chiba City hysterics of s(t)imulation and cresting a wave of myth and memory of sunlight days when I, too, played this game and dug my feet into the red dirt and tapped my bat on the dusty and scratched solidity of home plate. This must be something like America, and it's alright.

And this is to say nothing of the movie clips playing throughout the evening on the not-quite-Jumbotrons at the edge of the outfield. We are told that when the going gets tough, the tough get going and I sense the crime in never having seen Animal House; and later I recall with fondness how much I loved The Dream Team upon its release (and realize that it may well not hold up to a present-day screening). But the one that gets me is Elizabeth Swann's Saint Crispin's Day speech from the climax of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. It's a "popcorn movie," and a flawed one, but nonetheless this clip hits me where I want to be hit, and I wonder whether I'm the pregnant one, and then I can't help but laugh (at myself, too) when the pirates' hoisting of the colors cuts to the one-man cheerleading team waving the Barnstormers' standard, brandishing a plastic cutlass, and finally cannonballing into a swimming pool.

I know that I'm not alone in being affected by this stream of amusements, and I realize, maybe not consciously, that this commonality of feeling is something I haven't felt in this country in a long time. I've felt it in Europe, but it is different there and more differentiated here. Movies, baseball, ice cream—heck, even Ol' Blue Eyes crooning as fireworks bloom beyond center field—we know these tropes, and even if the common man in the stands holds dearly a conviction on this terminology and judges me malevolently for choosing it, they signal and announce our capacity to fulfill those moments, however brief, when we rise to do our best work in the service and defense of others and ourselves. They will know what we can do! And in this moment I know that this game, this stadium, all this blessed folderol, for this community, is good.