Telling the Story

Ruth Weiss in her apartment at West 81st Street

Once Upon A Time

            All my life I’ve been looking for something. I think most people are the same way: we all search to find meaning for our lives in different ways. Isn’t that what most of the great and memorable stories are about.

Dorothy didn’t set out on the Yellow Brick Road to find her way home. My Fair Lady was never really about how well Eliza Doolittle could pronounce her vowels. When Alice stepped Through The Looking Glass, it wasn’t with the sole intention of finding that white rabbit. Instead, all of these stories speak to that inherent desire we all feel to find our place in the world, to grasp the reason we ended up on this earth in the first place.

Somehow the telling of stories is the way in which most people pass on their dreams to be heard, understood, and ultimately to find justification for their pursuits. I remember when my mother brought me Ferdinand The Bull, the original pacifist, after I refused to fight a kid in nursery school. Ferdinand’s story let me know in simple words and pictures that it was okay to smell the flowers. Before I was old enough to understand that Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel was a parable for the changes brought about by the industrial revolution, I could see that all Mike wanted for his trusty steam shovel was for her to feel needed, wanted, useful…and loved.

As I grew older, I turned to the television for my continuing narrative education. I stayed up late and watched All In The Family and Rhoda, Barney Miller and The Jeffersons, Happy Days and MASH. I learned about war and prejudice and racism and anti-semitism and rape and all sorts of other lessons that I was too young to be taught. Here was a medium based on storytelling on a grander scale. Each half hour morality play had a beginning, middle, and an end, and a regular audience in the millions.

I’ll never forget when Rhoda got divorced from her husband and unlike so many of my friends I understood it because my parents were divorced. I was seven when I saw those episodes.

I’ll never forget when that man broke into Edith and Archie’s house on Edith’s fiftieth birthday and tried to force Edith to have sex. I was eight when I saw that.

I’ll never forget when George Jefferson gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a white supremacist and saved his life. When he heard the news, the man told the medics “you should have let me die.” I was nine.

In fifth grade, a class assignment on family trees encouraged me to turn inward once again to try and learn the stories of my own family. It was at this time that I started spending more time with my grandmother.

Goodma, as I called her, lived at 25 West 81^st Street, which conveniently sat halfway between school and my apartment building. Her home became a regular stopping point on my short walks home. There I could find cookies, a cold soda and a wonderful story every time. She was a consummate storyteller and while the tales she told often wandered between fact and fiction, there was an honesty and simplicity to them which was fascinating. She hated it when I called her living history because it made her feel old.

I called her Goodma because as she explained when my older sister was born, it was her intention to be like a mother to us both…but always Good- hence the rather iconoclastic moniker. As sad as she was about my parents’ divorce in 1975, it meant that my mother, sister and I would move to New York City and live only a short walk from her own home. This was manna from heaven for a grandmother who lived for the hugs, the kisses, and the adoration that we provided.

Being part of her life was being part of a greater universe. People were always drawn to Goodma because you knew when you saw her that an adventure was going to happen. She used to walk up and down the streets of the Upper West Side as if she was the Grand Marshal of her own parade. She would seek out not only attention but also adventure. And my sister and I would run home to share the newest story of our crazy grandmother.

We knew that our grandmother had an active social life outside of her time with us. She was a golfer and spent many days at her country club playing 18 holes. She worked for a time for a job placement agency called Catalyst and found great delight in finding other people fulfilling jobs. She was always showing off new outrageous outfits that she had convinced her friend Koos Van Den Akker to give her at no charge. “Let me wear it down the street- I’ll be the best advertising you’ve ever had.”

Goodma went to concerts and on vacations. She went hang gliding in her 70s and on safari in Africa for her 80^th birthday. A few years later,she traveled to Japan to see an art exhibit and took a weekend in Martha’s Vineyard with a new boyfriend who, 8 years her junior, couldn’t keep up with her. She knew a lot of famous people and somehow always implicated herself in their lives. She was never shy and she never seemed afraid of anything.

When I was eleven years old, Goodma began the annual ritual of taking my sister and me on week-long discovery trips around the country. We traveled to Colonial Williamsburg and the Amish Country in western Pennsylvania. We explored Walt Disney World in Florida and later the California coastline. We even took the trip to New Orleans in 1984 to be a part of the World’s Fair. On each of these trips, Goodma either shared new stories with us or together we created new ones.

Back in New York City, the adventures continued. She would take us to museums and cultural events, as well as the occasional kid’s show at the Felt Forum or a drive up to one of her favorite sculpture gardens in upstate New York.

One of her greatest sadnesses was her son’s absence in our lives. When my parents divorced and my mother moved us across the country, he chose to stay out of the fray. Goodma tried to take up the slack. She attempted to teach us about the birds and the bees: “We don’t want to look at the book with the naked people, Goodma.” She also tried to explain what she knew of money to the both of us: “Don’t spend it.” She even helped me practice for my driver’s test.

She was always there for us. And in spite of her amazing gift for stories, she was also a remarkably good listener. When you were with her, it seemed like you were the only person in the world. Though we heard many of her stories throughout the years, there were countless untold stories that we never heard. For this reason, she began taking a writing class in 1983 with the hopes that she would be able to recollect some of her adventures. And this she did- with style, wit, imagination, exaggeration, and a great deal of honesty.

Upon graduating from college, I moved to Los Angeles to work in the television industry. The power and possibility of the medium had hooked me at an early age and if I was going to tell stories for a living, this was to be my medium. When I first moved out to Los Angeles, a friend encouraged me to continue to keep a journal, to write regularly about my progress in the real world. The great artists and storytellers, he explained, were not that much better than many others. Their immortality came not from the work they created but rather from the writing and explanation of moods that they recorded alongside their masterpieces. Van Gogh was not half as interesting if you didn’t know about his lost ear. Monet was a much less involving character if you didn’t remember that he was spiraling downward into depression most of the time. Write, my friend said, and the world will understand your search.

It was with this in mind that I began to read my grandmother’s journals and short stories. My grandmother passed away more than fifteen years ago and in all of the arguments about who got which set of silver and what would happen with the apartment, and when would the lawyers be done with it all, the stories she had written about her childhood and about her life, and about being a grandmother fell by the wayside. My sister and I picked them up, hoping to understand how she had become the woman we had known. In the same way that my childhood shaped my search, her childhood deftly illuminates where she came from and helps me to understand where she was headed and what she was looking for…