a word on Maxine

Maxine was my grandmother. she passed away not a week before i left for Argentina to live there for a year.

a few weeks ago i was over at my aunt's house rummaging through some old stuff of hers with my mom. there was this picture of my grandma with this one man, and i asked who it was.

"oh, that's so-and-so. your grandma was in love with him." or something like that. maybe i'm reading too much into the story, which follows like this: SAS (so-and-so) was one of grandma Max's boyfriends. her high school sweetheart. apparently the love of her life, or her first love, or something like that. so naturally i asked why she married my grandfather. "oh, he was the first one to propose to her." and i think there was something about him having proposed half an hour before SAS was going to.

so she married my grandfather. they had their litter of children (five) and then split, i think after Grandma Max had an affair with SAS. I guess they saw each other at a high school reunion and they rekindled their old flame. what ensued was an affair and the demise of my grandma mccann's marriage and divorce.

i'm not sure how long Maxine and SAS were together. they eventually split up themselves because when i was young, Max had her harley days. she rode around on hogs with Wendell - who would become one of her other husbands. i'm actually not sure how many she'd had.

when she died, i actually kind of learned a lot from her. not necessarily from her, but from the consequences of her death; and now even more, with this new little tidbit.

1.) you shouldn't hold grudges. my mother had been on non-speaking terms with Max and one of my aunts up until the day my grandma died; one of the last memories i have of my grandmother is her on our front steps one christmas morning, with presents in her arms and my mom telling her to take them back "because they were bought with J's money from C's estate." (it was Max's favoritist principals with my cousin J, and the mysterious disappearance of his inheritance, that led to this grudge). it's actually a heartbreaking memory.

2.) don't go with the first guy who asks if there's someone else in the background. i know, there have been countless examples in literature, if literature can have anything to say about life (Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, Lizzie in pride and prejudice, maybe even fermina daza in el amor en los tiempos del colera, even Jane Eyre!), so i didn't need this tidbit with my grandma's love life to help me form this opinion. it just hammered the nail further into the wall. if that metaphor works. and that topic is more complex and reserved for another post.

yes, i was sad about grandma McCann passing away, but i was even more saddened by the state of my mother's relationship with her when she died. and with Juan dying too, it's all too much evidence that hate is so strong and grudges (of the non-talking variety especially) are poisonous (i couldn't really think of a better word than "bad" to describe grudges. maybe i will elaborate on "poisonous" in a later post as well).