My Grandmother Stuck Googly Eyes on Anything She Could. After Months of Covid-19 Public Health Measures, I Now Understand Why.
For the last three decades of her life, my Grandmother lived alone in a rural town with a population of around 500 residents. She was popular among her neighbours and had plenty of friends and visitors. She also put googly eyes on nearly everything. After 2020, I think I get it.
My grandmother was a normal person. She had a lot of friends. She was entirely lucid into her later years. She had regular visitors and a healthy social life, but still she stuck googly eyes on everything.
My grandmother loved gardening. She loved her old trees lining the driveway. She loved slip casting ceramics. She loved melting glass. Well into her nineties she worked with her large kiln, experimenting and melting down anything she could find regardless of what it was made of (even plastic…would not recommend). The melted glass (or plastic) pieces that came out of her kiln got names like “Cats Fighting” or “Boy Riding Skateboard with 13 Scarves.” They were very abstract pieces and they were on point. She was brilliantly creative in a way that never sought recognition. It was pure.
She was eccentric yes, but never in a way that left her on the fringes of society. In her little town, her house was dubbed ‘Grand Central Station.’ She was a mover and/or shaker, or so it seemed to me as a child.
The older I get the more I realize that, of all my relatives, I take after my Grandmother the most. Like me, she was always making something, doing something. She kept a vegetable garden. She had a basement ceramic studio. She followed and wielded the town gossip. She was really quite silly but hated silliness. She had many friends and opened her home to them nearly ever day.
But what was going on with the googly eyes!?
Ok, the googly eyes weren’t on everything, but they were on a highly disproportionate number of things when compared to other similarly situated adults of her generation. They were on a lot of things.
The best thing about her googly eyes was when she needed really big ones she made them herself out of golf balls. She sawed the golf balls in half, then drove a large nail through the halved golf balls for the pupils, then nailed the pairs of handmade golf ball googly eyes into the trees around her property.
Why did she do this?! Why did I never ask her why she did this!?
In 2015, I caught myself putting googly eyes on a house plant. I was living alone, I had some googly eyes, and that was just where they needed to go – it was no big deal, really. My parents visited months later and my mom was the first to notice. She made the connection to my Grandmother on the spot.
Look, genes are strong! Genes to put googly eyes on things particularly so!
I have lived alone for years and I have to say, I love it. Before the pandemic, I had a perfect balance between time with friends, time alone with my writing, hosting mega waffle brunches (which I liked to call Basswood Breakfast Club) at my little house (which I liked to call The Ranch, despite being in the middle of a city). I never really felt lonely.
But now in 2020, there is an entirely different set of emotional rules for living alone and I was caught entirely unprepared.
Like my grandmother, I grow my food in spring and summer. I can feed myself through fall and most of winter, so March 2020 was when I did my last grocery shop in a big commercial store. I did a lot of things right on that last shopping trip: flour, yeast, two flats of eggs, condensed milks, what have you. But I regret not stocking up on googly eyes.
Why?
Because I miss faces.
I miss being in the presence of another set of human eyes.
I now fully understand the urge to stick the googly eyes on household objects. I now fully understand that my Grandmother was lonely, but all in all had pretty healthy ways to cope with having lost her husband to cancer and having been alone for 30 some years.
2020 has made me see this more clearly. It is a damn lonely time, as much as we like to pretend it’s not.
When this is done, I am going to stare so deeply and lovingly into all my friends’ eyes, put a hand on each cheek and give their heads a little shake just to see their pupils wiggle a bit.
It will be glorious.
