TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO my grandmother drew a pastel image of a golden brown dog set against a blue background. I was only six years old at the time, and the gift was simply another gift that grandparents were supposed to give a grandchild. It was just another instance of “MuhMaw,” as we pronounced it in our small Cajun town of Jeanerette, loving me, just like she loved me when she bought me that one puzzle I just had to have even though I had a hundred ninety-nine other ones in the closet. Like when she made me those special hamburgers when I absolutely wouldn’t touch the meal with onions.
Fast-forward six years. I was twelve years old now, newly entrenched in the world of adolescence and cool mode. Just a few years earlier, pastels and puzzles were good enough, and onions were the worst of monsters imaginable, when MuhMaw was one of the few superwomen that mattered. Yes, I was now twelve. And very cool. And very foolish.
When my grandmother got sick I stopped visiting her. I saw her occasionally, of course, but there was always a better reason to leave and other more interesting things to do. I look back and think it strange that I was sick with the flu watching on TV LSU lose yet another football game, believe it or not, unable to be on my MuhMaw’s bedside when she died on November 9, 1991, just a little over twenty years ago to this day.
I am a grown man now and still one of LSU’s biggest fans who, on a lighter side, recently witnessed a totally different LSU football team play one of the most physical games I’ve ever seen against Alabama in victory. I am also a grown man now looking back at a twelve-year-old pup who missed out on the last noble hours of one of his biggest fans.
But none of what I feel now mattered at the time. The thrilling years at Hanson from seventh grade to graduation passed without much thought of my cold exit from my grandmother’s life. There was certainly no discernable regret, only a vague feeling somewhere deep down inside that I’d done something wrong. But I wasn’t ready to face it, not when things were so good at Hanson.
The time came for me to go off to college, and I stood in my closet one day, moving around old shoeboxes and collected souvenirs, nitpicking what I would bring to McNeese and what I would leave behind. It was difficult, for sure, because I wanted to take everything with me. I didn’t want to leave behind the satisfying life I had built. Sometime well after my rummaging began, I came across an old but all-too-familiar drawing my grandmother had created years and years earlier. I looked at it and felt my body compelled to move to the bed to sit. It had to. Suddenly, those deep down feelings of shame I’d known were there all along had surfaced in an instant. Nostalgia and guilt were one. I was overcome with an emotional paralysis that had clearly been waiting patiently to assail me for some time.
The matting around the picture had been creased at one of the corners, a visible reminder of the flaw in my refusal to honor the last months of my grandmother’s life. I cried, then, I think, because I remember the feeling. It was sadness and a strange sense of joy all wrapped up in one, and yet I hadn’t a clue as to what I was joyous about. I felt creased, far from the smooth, pure little boy that worshipped his grandmother and caretaker so many years before.
This was more than just the cold feet any teenager gets on the eve of leaving home. Something was speaking to me in the painting and I just kept looking at it, a little brown dog that my MuhMaw had been so happy to draw for me. I fiddled with the crease in the corner, trying to straighten it, trying to wipe out the imperfection around the art, maybe trying extra hard, as if I could wipe out and straighten out the terrible crooked lines I’d created years earlier in not visiting her. It was useless. No rub of the thumb could wipe out the flaw. No counterfold could eliminate the fold itself. I decided just to remove the matting altogether. Maybe that would rub out my shame.
When I separated the picture and turned it over, though, there was something totally unexpected waiting for me there.
Like a dry dog bone, it had stayed buried beneath a crumpled matting and six shoeboxes and all kinds of other stuff that had been so important to me, and it had been there for twelve years. While I was passing it every day to get dressed and get ready for another day of good times at Hanson, it waited. It waited for a little wet-behind-the-ears puppy to come home to dig it up.
Here I was crying, thinking about my wonderful life, my great years in high school and at home, my uncertain future and all its challenges, all the while seeing through the teary haze fourteen words that played over and over again like that sad love song you just keep listening to because somehow-someway the sadness becomes your friend.
In 1984, when I was just six years old, my MuhMaw had been doing her usual drawing, but she was watching me as she did it. And before me, in fourteen magical words, was the proof. I think I remember the day she drew it. I want to remember it. So I do. I might even remember a certain smile on her face when I looked up at her. Maybe that never happened. But I’ll convince my memory that it did. Because I know how loving she was.
The epitome of selfless love had been right there all along inside my grandmother. Her willingness to give, and love, and give and love some more was one of the constants I could trust in my childhood. Even though I chose to ignore the golden shine of her sickness and death, I hope that she knows that when I think of her I don’t dwell on the time I witnessed her, in her crazed state of mind while on chemotherapy, attacking my grandfather with a knife. No, the MuhMaw I see is a queen, a proud woman watching me play with puzzles and draw really bad stick men while she was creating the masterpiece of a golden brown dog. It is an artist comfortable in knowing that one day I would be like a little doggie digging up an old bone. One day I would read the message she wrote for me and left for time and fate to take over.
She trusted that the time would be right. And on the eve of my leaving home for the first time in my life, the time came.
I was eighteen now. I wasn’t playing with puzzles anymore. I wasn’t drawing bad stick men. But no matter what I had done, I knew, I knew right then and there on the bed that night, that she’d been watching me and smiling the whole time. She’d been watching me every time I picked off the onions of a McDonald’s hamburger, saying, “Cher bae bae.” She’d been watching me, whispering to herself and to heaven the words of the same message she’d written to me on the back of that pastel drawing:
“My dear, dear Jeff, I’m looking at you now. How deeply I love you.”
You have given me memories and love in the shape of golden brown puppies and you’ve tucked them away in my heart forever. You have looked at me and loved me and wanted the best for me, even before I knew what the best inside me was. You have forgiven my flaws when so many others wouldn’t and filled me with faith, a faith that is patient, buried within us, waiting for the perfect time to emerge. Just like a buried bone.
I am looking at you now, MuhMaw, Mrs. Gladys Goulas Telotta, not as you once did when I was six, but as a grown man who wants to give back just a brushstroke of the love you gave me. Yes, indeed, I am looking at you now.
And how deeply I love you.
