I dialed in vain from my home in Barcelona, nearly hypnotized by the busy tone. Call waiting? “It’s rude to the person you are talking with,” Grandma Mac had replied when I suggested this telephonic innovation. If it is important “they” will call back. She was right, of course. “Getting close,” she peppily announced when I finally got through. “Today I am 100 minus two.”
She was born during Theodore Roosevelt’s first term on a farm near Angola, in rural Indiana, where she lives today. She predates Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the discovery of the magnetic North Pole and the invention of tea bags, not to mention plastics and airplanes. She experienced almost entirely a century that arguably brought more change than any in human history. Once, after listening to her tell a story about life as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, I asked which advances in society or technology most impressed her. As a child of parents whom she described as “very progressive and fond of the new things that came along,” she gave an unusual list.
Her family, she remembered excitedly, was first in the area to install a Delco system–a battery-powered home electric plant that had to be recharged “every little while” with a small gasoline motor. She and her sister were studying at the kitchen table one night when the salesman knocked on the porch door. “Girls,” he declared, “with the Delco system you can see as well in each corner of the house as you can sitting right here below your little lamp.” He clinched his sale less by convincing Great-Grandfather than by entrancing my grandmother and her sister. They soon made a habit of studying in corners–just because they could.
The telephone came next on Grandma Mac’s list, which she dialed using the crank on the side of the phone. Then came the radio, an Atwater Kent. This, she said, had a huge effect on her family’s life. They huddled in front of that not-so-small box listening to sermons, news, weather reports and entertainment programs. For the first time, they heard about the world beyond the county line. For my grandma, it was the most important leap in the Information Age. Neither TV nor the Internet compared with the impact of that “talking box.”
The thrill of buying her very own 1924 Model T roadster also made the list. She paid $375 for it, less than half her annual salary of $800. Unlike her father, who sold some pigs to buy his first car, Grandma saved the money and proudly explained that she paid cash for every car she ever owned.
In her late 20s she met and married my grandfather Donald MacFadyen, an engineering student at Tri-State University. They dreamed of growing old together but then, at 42, he died at the hands of a surgeon performing what was supposed to be a routine operation. Widowed with four children under the age of 13, she never remarried, though not for lack of suitors. Her faith was in God, her young family–and the belief that one day she would be reunited with “my Donald.”
And so for 50 years she has been the rock of my family, embodying an old-fashioned philosophy that values the amount of love in a home more than its size. She had enough money to travel and enjoy what she called the “finer things in life,” but she was never seduced by them. Grandma Mac was most comfortable in her little town surrounded by family and friends who gathered frequently. Her tidy home was always (and is still) the place to go for “chitchat,” a “cookie party” or a cold “Coke float” on a hot summer day. In a world of constant change, you could always count on her.
At 98, her cheerfulness and good sense abide. She continues to embrace what she calls the latest “advancements.” She bought a new car at 88, visited me in England when she was 90, volunteered at the “old folks’ home” until she was 92 and began using a computer and the Web at 94. Her physical capacity is not what it used to be, and several days ago my mother called to say that my grandmother had been diagnosed with cancer. The doctors do not recommend aggressive measures. Fortunately, she is not in pain and her spirits are high. As she explained, she has no reason not to be positive. She has lived a full life and is surrounded by those who love her. She is at peace with her faith in the afterlife and, again, the wishful anticipation after nearly 60 years of rejoining her lost husband. She has lots to tell him, but I’m guessing that all the technological advancements that intoxicate us today will not figure high on the list.
