God's waiting room

My grandmother died Thursday, in the wee hours of the morning. She was born in December 1911, which would have made her 95. She had severe dementia and had lived in a nursing home for nearly 10 years, the last few in a haze of sedatives. In these times of cancers and heart attacks it’s nearly unheard of, but she died of old age.

She lived virtually her entire life in a small patch of Euphemia Township, leaving her parents’ farm for her husband’s farm down the road, moving to a neighbouring county only when she was placed in the nursing home. She was an only child, well educated for her time and place: she finished high school. She met my grandfather when she was a child attending the one-room schoolhouse; he used to joke that he literally dunked her pigtails in his ink well.

They married late. The photo shows my grandfather standing tall and thin, with a hooded eyelids and a crop of thick, dark hair. (He was exactly the same when died, except he had a crop of thick grey hair.) My grandmother stands beside him, slim and petite, her jet black hair hidden under a hat, a wide smile showing off her perfect teeth. By the time I got to know my grandmother, she was a large woman with grey curls, but she still had those perfect teeth.

Her life revolved around food, mostly the preparation of it. She was an incredible gardener and kept a huge patch of vegetables where we later built a house. There were always peas to shell and French beans to trim and cut. There were turnips and beets, peppers and radishes, lettuce and cabbage and cauliflower. There was corn, which she sheared from the cobs to accommodate my grandfather’s dentures. What couldn’t be eaten fresh or immediately frozen was canned and lined up in her cellar, a rank little cupboard under the stairs. In my mind’s eye, she was always standing near the stove, sometimes gingerly placing Mason jars in a huge black pot, other times pulling from the oven a greasy chicken coated in pepper.

Their farm was Norman Rockwell-esque, with a “gingerbrick” house and a few acres of beans or wheat or corn bordered by a wooded creek that drew deer in the fall and froze to form a skating pond in the winter. In the summer months, in the days before Dad and the orchard came together with a chainsaw and a box of matches, we picked pears and apples for pie, hand-cranking the apple peeler in the yard and throwing the scraps to the big-headed cows that waited by the fence. We diced and squished tomatoes for sauces and juice, sluicing it through a cheesecloth to remove the seeds. Raspberries, strawberries and black currants were turned into jam. Peaches and cherries were pitted and canned.

Back when we kept hens, I can remember sitting with her at a work table set up under a tree in her yard, fishing the guts out of freshly slaughtered chickens, the semi-feral barn cats circling nearby. She had warned me to be careful, because if I punctured one of the organs – the liver, maybe? – it would poison the meat. She always cooked the gizzards, so there was no room for error.

I seem to remember her having a reputation amongst our farming community for being a good cook, although these days a lot of the foods she prepared would be considered too fatty or simple to be impressive. She was a master at the hearty comfort foods that were the mainstay of celebrations, whether Thanksgiving or Easter. She had a huge freezer in the kitchen and another upstairs in the spare bedroom. In one, she kept pies and sticky raisin buns and banana chocolate chip muffins. In the other, she kept frozen meat and vegetables and a package of wagon wheels, a snack food that I’m not even sure they make anymore, that squeezes marshmallow between two chocolate-coated arrowroot biscuits. I have no idea what possessed her to put them in the freezer, but it was the ideal place to keep them: we could sneak up and eat them anytime. I’m not sure how she realized they had all been eaten, but there was always a fresh box.

Some of the sparkle went out of her when she was declared diabetic. She was supposed to control it by diet and for the first few months, the pounds melted away as she measured out quantities of sugar and potatoes, always with a bit of a disappointed sigh.

Grandma’s farmhouse was a mash of clutter and oddities, from the wooden windmill on the TV to the ugly, weirdly painted ceramic bulldog in the spare bedroom. Grandma always referred to the bedrooms as “Shirley’s room” and the “South bedroom” and I swear I was in my late teens before I figured out which was which, such is my sense of direction. Before we moved across the road, we spent nights in Shirley’s room during our visits, and Grandma, ever conscious of the cold, made every effort to cook us alive by tucking us in with two heavy wool blankets and an electric blanket on its highest setting over top of it all just for good measure.

Both Grandma and Grandpa were avid card players and after their boarder taught us the fine art of Euchre, they would take us across the road to the school on Friday nights for community card games. We were never particularly skilled – we helped build the collection of knickknacks by winning the “low score” prizes – but we behaved well. When too few students and too many school board costs closed the school, spelling the end of games night, Grandma burned up the party phone line getting the gossip from her girlfriends, who lived in town and attended a different church but knew most of the same people.

She and my grandfather were married for nearly 50 years and when he died, the routines she had built up began to unravel. She read the paper every day, watched the six o’clock news and always tuned in to hear the obituaries on the noon radio news, but she was never very interested in politics or grain prices or whatever was making headlines. She became a bit forgetful and sentimental in a wonderful way: when we would come to visit, she would feed us pie and tell us stories about Dad, how he failed his driver’s license, how he paid his way through college, the car he was driving when he started dating my mother, how he broke his collarbone twice falling out of the hay loft, how even as a boy he longed to own horses, but Grandma was too afraid of them to permit it. She would often mix up our names, calling me “Sandra-Janet-Lynne-Karen” and on a particularly rattled day, she might throw in Shirley, Doug, Robert or John. Sometimes Tippy, the little dog she’d had for years.

In the days before she entered the home, she became increasingly paranoid and frightened. She fell asleep most nights in front of the TV and was up pottering around in the dark at 4 a.m. She lost her license. Mom started going by extra early to collect her for outings, as she developed a habit of hiding her purse and forgetting where she put it, yet could not be persuaded to leave home without it. I suspected she didn’t know me, but didn’t want to let on.

Dementia turned her into a different person. When she wasn’t heavily sedated, my church-going Grandmother apparently swore like a trucker, wandered and developed an intense hatred for one of the other residents. She lost her teeth and eventually her speech. The last time I saw her – before I moved to Africa nearly three years ago – her sentences trailed off into muffled murmurs. She tried to tell us about a trip to Detroit to pick up a tractor; on the ride home Mom told us that had never happened. They had no idea where these stories were coming from.

So when the nurse called Monday to say Grandma was in distress and seemed to be slipping away, she were summing up the previous decade. She had been slipping away from us for a long time, living in a body that refused to give up, ruled by a mind that had gone long ago.

It is a relief to know she is finally at peace, as my mother says. It’s comforting to know she was not forgotten in God's waiting room after all.

My spirit is on sick leave

An email I (gratefully) received from a reader last week:

"I am doing undergraduate research at Michigan State University about
selective media coverage that portrays African countries in a negative way.
I can't remember exactly how I stumbled upon your reporting, but I was
attracted to your positive portrayal of Ghana, as well as other African
countries, without negating some of the obvious hardships embedded in the
cultures. I hope to explore and document Africa in this way in the near
future, but for now, I'm stuck in Michigan doing undergrad research.

"Anyways, I was hoping that you could offer a bit of feedback on why the
American press is so disproportionally hungry for negative stories about
Africa, and generally reluctant to report positive stories. I'd also like
to know if this has anything to do with your decision to work in Africa."

Today I helped a little girl in a school uniform cross the street. I said hello to all the vendors on my usual route to Michelle's house, where lately I've taken up residence at her kitchen table so I can scam her wireless. I had a banana smoothie for breakfast. I woke up to brilliant sunny weather.

I was also called racist.

I've written about how much I worry about how my writing is perceived (under a posting called "Sunshine Journalism") and so you can imagine that I had to sit down when my friend Justin called to warn me that the Statesman -- the paper I worked with during my last stint with Journalists for Human Rights -- had reprinted an article I did for Newsday under the banner headline: "A RACIST JOURNALIST ON GHANA: The Statesman came across on the worldwide web this example of racism disguised as journalism by a Karen Palmer for Newsday, NY, USA."

The Newsday article is about a delegation from Major League Baseball, in town to lend support to Ghana's nascent Little League teams. You can find it here: http://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/mets/ny-spghana045080195feb04,0,343817.story?coll=ny-mets-print

For six weeks I worked in the Statesman's newsroom; each week I delivered a seminar on journalistic basics, complete with work books and games and ways to keep the staid stuff kind of interesting. I gave up the job when my freelance commitments meant I couldn't give the time I thought the job deserved. I left in a hurry, but it had nothing to do with the Statesman. I thought I had the editor's respect and support. Clearly, I was wrong.

When I spoke to him this morning, he told me he actually hadn't read the piece all the way through, but he trusted the sports editor when he said it was racist garbage and told him he could deal with the story as he saw fit. He said both he and the news editor agreed it might have been "a bit harsh" to run that headline. When I asked him to kindly point out the racist elements so that I might learn from this experience and avoid similar accusations in the future, he told me he took exception to my description of Ghana as an "impoverished West African nation" and felt I was biased in my reporting of the fact that there was no popcorn or peanuts for sale at the game, but women selling eggs and pepper and men selling vanilla ice cream and fresh coconuts.

But Gabby, I said, that is what happened.

No it's not, he said.

Yes it is, and frankly, how can you tell me what happened when you weren't there?

Oh, we had a reporter there, we just chose not to run his story.

I told him I was devastated by this, that I take seriously my responsibility to portray Africa generally and Ghana specifically with fairness and accuracy, that I couldn't believe it was a newspaper that I had worked for that would label me a racist. He told me I was being too emotional.

He told me he had instructed the sports editor to write a column explaining his actions and that I could write a piece to go with it explaining mine. I told him I would not be writing for the Statesman and was only interested in seeing an apology published in the column. He told me he would not be apologizing and I can't tell him what to do. But you can tell me I have to write an article for you Gabby? Does that seem fair?

He told me he could imagine how I was feeling. I should consider him a friend, not a foe.

My friends don't call me racist.

As the Statesman's own editorial says today: "apologising after the damage has been done is not good enough; rather, the media must stop the stories before they start. ... There are official checks in place, supposedly to counter the kind of sloppy journalism which too often seems to dominate our newsstands. ... There are unofficial checks too, which we must become more disciplined about enforcing if the media is to retain a scrap of credibility."

I know the Statesman's sports editor. We've spoken about how he's from a small town outside Suhum, whose name was changed when the British arrived and they found it too hard to pronounce. I know he's been writing a political column for more than 15 years for various newspapers, always using code names and code words for people and episodes from Ghana's history. I know all this because I got to know him. But he never got to know me. I suspect he had no idea that "a Karen Palmer for Newsday" was the same woman who came into his office twice a week to help with editing and story structure and journalism skills. I'm just another obruni, not worth his time, hardly worth his notice.

So, I walked a little girl across the street today and was rewarded with a smile. I walked through my neighbourhood and felt like it was my neighbourhood. I got to eat what Africa provides and Canada will never have. I got sunshine in February.

When I leave this country, I will try hard to remember these things. What I'll be unable to forget is that today I was called a racist.

I hope that the editors at the Statesman come across this entry and that they see it as heartbreak disguised as anger.

Pest Control

In recent weeks, we’ve been finding evidence of mice: turds left on the food shelf, the countertop, on the stairs leading to the storeroom. I even saw our unwanted guest, streaking from the garbage to the safety of under the sink when I came into the kitchen.

We found a mouse trap, but it was either broken or too much for our little brains. We swept up the poop, moved the appliances to sweep up broken bits of rice or bread and wiped down every surface, packed up anything edible that might seduce a mouse and cleaned out the storeroom, tossing anything that might make a good nest.

Then late last week, ants invaded. We always have ants, lines of them marching around the bathtub, around the faucet and circling the drain of the sink in the kitchen. Any bits of food left on the counter will, within minutes, be surrounded by a frenzied group of ants trying to engineer its removal. Even smashed bugs will bring them out for a feeding frenzy, like the insect equivalent of vultures. We’ve been blasting them with sweet-smelling ant killer, only to find their brethren picking around their bodies a few minutes later.

This time, they were in all the usual places and climbing in furious columns up and down the kettle cord. Nothing new, we figured. We’re always finding ant bodies floating in our boiled water. They’re probably chewing up crumbs from the toaster, which sits beside the kettle.

Then we came home to a strange smell in the kitchen. Again, nothing shocking. Ghana’s power has gone wonky. Last week we had 48 hours without power and it appears that we’re headed for a similar week this week. (Infuriating. Absolutely infuriating.) So everything in the fridge and freezer went off, including the fridge itself, for the third time in four months. We tossed all vegetables and meat, all dairy products and any leftovers.

But something stunk. I made a joke about our little mouse having died underneath the fridge. We packed up the garbage and went to bed.

But it was worse in the morning, floating in stinky waves, the concentration of it nearest the door. We were stumped. The garbage was empty, the fridge was empty, the kitchen was clean. So in the afternoon, while Emily was boiling water, I got sick of looking at these ants heading for the kettle and decided to clean out the toaster. I turned it upside down and shook out it. Out tumbled one or two crumbs and three or four mouse turds and I made a comment to Emily about how our little friend had been eating our crumbs.

I shook and shook, uprighted the toaster and peered inside. A big piece of burned toast was wedged in one of the slats, which explained the ants. And then, a stomach-turning thought. You know how you can look at a picture that’s supposed to be the silhouette of both an old hag and a young beauty, but you can’t see it until – suddenly – your perception shifts and the outline changes altogether? Slowly, slowly turned over the toaster. Looked in. And sure enough, the outline of a tail.

I dropped the toaster. “Oh. My. God. The mouse is in the toaster. He’s *in* the toaster!”

The little beast had obviously gotten hungry enough to climb into the toaster in search of a few scraps, then had either gotten wedged in there or been electrocuted. There was nothing to be done but thank the powers that be that he didn’t fall out when I was furiously shaking it and to remember back to the last time we’d made toast. (I brought baguettes back from Cote D’Ivoire, so it had been a while.)

The ants are carnivores: they were furiously tearing the dead mouse to bits.

I’m off to buy a new toaster.