My soul lives in this small, incense-filled Vedanta prayer room. In the center of Manhattan, this room is hushed; washed in a deep, velvety red except for some amber somewhere. It was lush with depth, like being inside a cushioned chamber. Even fifty years later, I am comforted by the sanctity of having been enclosed and protected in that room.
It was my grandmother, Ruthie, who took me and my sister there from time to time. I don’t remember how, but me and E. would sometimes find ourselves with Ruthie, in a hotel room in Manhattan, for the weekend.
I loved the City. One time Ruthie said she was going out to buy apples, and while she was gone I sat by the window ledge and watched with amazement as the cars, cabs, and city buses below filled me with peace. It was perhaps the first time in my life I had felt peace. To this day, the sound of traffic, and especially buses stopping and starting, is my background music for meditation.
Anyway, a few minutes later this magical grandmother was back in our hotel room, with God’s most delicious apples, which we all savored. New York City, I knew then, was the best place in the world to get fresh apples. Ruthie made the city magical.
The Vedanta temple - yes, she took us often. Although it didn’t look like a holy building from the outside, the minute we stepped in, inhaled the sandalwood, and felt the peace in the hearts of the others that were there, we were in a different world. Transformed.
Ruthie knew the Swami personally. Once she introduced me and E. to him after the session was over, and after that we always said hi to him whenever we went. I was awed because he remembered me and E. from one time to the next. He smiled at us and called us by name. It made me feel special. One of the few times in my life I felt special just because I was alive, not because I said or did anything. And oh he just adored Ruthie.
What a Gift.
The last time I saw Ruthie, she was sitting at the kitchen table of her house on the coast of Maine. She was 104. She looked deeply into my troubled eyes and I felt such love. I knew then that she had loved me her entire life.
At the time I thought I had chronic fatigue syndrome, and I was constantly filled with despair. Her gaze penetrated all of that and we looked into each others’ souls. I kissed her goodbye, and my sister drove me back to our motel. I knew I’d never see her again. She knew it too.
In her will, she asked that people send donations to an arts foundation in Pemaquid, Maine, that she had been a part of.
As a child, I didn’t understand her. I was a shy, desperate child of the suburbs, and when she came to visit I was mystified by her long disappearances - walks that she would take alone, that would last for hours. She walked every day. She always met people on her walks and got to know them, and she’d keep these people as friends, some for life.
She painted. As a child I had no idea what talent was. As an adult now, I understand that she was an extraordinary talent, an exquisite creator of oil paintings and water colors.
A Sudden Sense of Self
Shortly after her death, I was in my usual state of hopeless mental disrepair, and living alone in a condo in Texas. A package arrived from my cousin - it was a large box of some of Ruthie’s belongings.
As I went through the box, each item gave me more information about
Ruthie. Her costume jewelry, rare books, and iconoclastic knick-knacks were alive with her energy. Picture books from the turn of the century that she had read aloud to my mother and that my mother read aloud to me… mementos, scarves Ruthie wore, a pack of little cards with pictures of flowers on them, a travel toothbrush kit from 1920. A scarf pin with her name engraved on it. A tiny wooden box with a carved dog inside.
And then I took from the box something that would change me forever - a silk, bohemian/Asian-style bathrobe that Ruthie had worn throughout her life. Gossamer, with peach and blue swirls.
As I took this fairy-winged fabric from the box, I knew who I was. I was Ruthie’s granddaughter. I was a genuine, real person; my needs, desires, skills, beliefs, and yearnings were real. I was authentic. I was the granddaughter of an artist, a woman ahead of her time, a left-bank beauty in a French beret, a Greenwich Village intellectual.
Ruthie was the daughter of "WZ." W.Z. was, if my
family mythology is correct, an esteemed professor at Harvard or perhaps it was Princeton. In economics, or perhaps it was physics. His wife, Ida, was a licensed physician. I don’t know if she saw patients, because she was a woman and it was in non-woman times - but she modeled feminine independence and free-will. I never knew Ida, but Ruthie modeled it too.
Ruthie was an artist. She liked people, and she had hundreds of friends, including the Swami. She was outgoing and quirky. I don’t know that my mother’s experience with Ruthie was as positive, but Ruthie was there for her when she was in trouble as an adult with an abusive husband. Ruthie truly cared. She loved my mother so very much.
I didn’t know Ruthie well. She would appear and disappear in my life in non-linear intervals. But I love her, and I’m so grateful to have been her granddaughter. Perhaps I’ll see her on the other side, and I can tell her how grateful I am.

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