From the time I was born until I was five years old I had the great fortune of living less than a block away from my grandmother. She had become a grandmother at, what she considered, a young age and disdained the moniker “grandmother”. Being the typically tough and opinionated Pole that she was, she insisted on being called Nonnie. It wasn’t until I was in my early teens that I learned that her first name was actually Anna…everyone called her Nonnie.

We lived around the corner from Nonnie. As soon as I was old enough, I was allowed to ride my tricycle to Nonnie’s house. Of course, my mother and Nonnie coordinated the travel by telephone first. My Mom would take me outside and I would get onto my tricycle. I would pedal furiously until I had passed our neighbor’s house, turn to wave to my Mom and navigate the sidewalk corner. Three houses down the street was my destination, and without fail, as I rounded the corner I could see Nonnie. I would then increase my pedaling speed until I was flying down the sidewalk. Of course, I started my earliest journey when I was three, so flying is a bit of a misnomer in the empirical sense…but to my three-year-old legs I was on my own, not a care in the world, and under my own power I was going faster than I had ever gone before.

As soon as I arrived at Nonnie’s, we would park my trike in the garage and go inside. The next step was to call my Mom to confirm my arrival. It was our ritual several times a week.

Being at Nonnie’s house was such an adventure. My Mom was pretty strict about what I was allowed to do, and what I was allowed to play with. Television was still relatively new in the early 1960’s, so I seldom watched anything besides a smattering of cartoons on Saturday mornings. Mom loved L.P. Records, so she played a lot of those, and I learned to sing along. Our food was wholesome, but not necessarily exciting. To this day, Mom doesn’t really like to cook. It was a chore she had to do for our family, and despite her best efforts, her results were the product of a chore. Mom followed recipes religiously. On the other hand, Nonnie loved to cook. She may have owned measuring cups and spoons, but I certainly don’t remember any from my childhood. She created everything from scratch in her kitchen, and estimated the quantity of any ingredient. To a young boy, this was an amazing way to cook. Everything that was devised in that kitchen needed to be tasted many times along the journey from raw ingredients to finished product. I became an expert at tasting, taking the job very seriously. I learned to distinguish whether a meatloaf needed more salt or more onion powder. I discovered the uses for aromatic spices to enhance flavors, and I learned to make food with my hands. Nonnie didn’t own a mixer, so anything that was fashioned in her kitchen was mixed or kneaded by hand. And my youthful hands were often the mechanism for the mixing and kneading.

At home, I wasn’t allowed to get into much of a mess. Cleanliness was next to Godliness and all that. My Mom was fastidious about my clothing, and any mess was immediately cleaned up, clothes changed, and put into the washer. I was seldom muddy, and working in the kitchen was practically forbidden. The few times that I was able to work in the kitchen with my Mom, I might as well have had a hazmat suit on! Food prep was messy, and I wasn’t supposed to be messy.

On the other hand, Nonnie believed that food prep was a way to express love for your family. If that meant being a bit messy, sprinkled in flour, and splashed with a bit of gravy…so be it! Forays into her kitchen were pure joy to me. A chance to be messy…to be creative…to do things that my Mom would never let me do. Oh the freedom that I felt. I learned to cook from Nonnie, not at her knee while she did all the work, but at her elbow, sharing in all the tasks. I was allowed to experiment with measurements. I learned to cook to taste, and I discovered that a recipe was a guideline…not the end-all, be-all of cookery. It was exciting!

Nonnie indulged me in other ways. My Mom was a white bread with grape jelly person. She liked her bread with a bit of grape jelly. My recollections are a tiny amount of grape jelly spread over too much bread. Soft, mushy, processed bread with a change in coloring more than a change in flavor from the tiny bit of grape jelly. It was her way, but definitely not Nonnie’s. She was Polish through and through. When her parents had immigrated to Chicago directly from Poland, they brought along their preferences for dark breads: Pumpernickel, Rye, Whole Wheat, Multi-grain, and Oat. These were hearty, coarse breads that were truly exotic to a young boy who was raised on Wonder Bread. Nonnie’s favorite was light rye. Not only was that her favorite, she liked to toast her rye bread and then slather it with butter. Real, creamy, whole-dairy butter. The trick was to put the butter on the bread immediately after it came out of the oven, or later out of the toaster. Then my job was to tilt the bread so that the pats of butter (yes, multiple pats) covered the entire slice of bread, soaking the butter into every inch. As the butter melted, I would tilt and turn the slice, spreading that real butter from corner to corner and edge to edge. Nonnie always got the first piece, and enjoyed her bread as I manipulated the second piece so that it was covered in butter. As I write this, my mouth is salivating, remembering that coarse bread imbued with the delicious taste of butter. If memory holds, I remember buttered rye bread and scrambled eggs as some of the best breakfasts I ever had. Rye bread and butter also made up some of the most memorable snacks we shared…at any time of the day or night.

In the early years, before I could read, Nonnie used to show me the pictures in the issues of Life, Look, and Time magazines. She would read some of the stories to me. She was especially interested in the space program, and I’m certain that my fascination with the entire Apollo program came from her. As I grew older, and began to read, she had me read the articles to her. I remember reading stories about far-away places, and exotic careers. Our mutual fascination with outer space led us to one of the best indoor campouts I ever had.

In the summer of 1969, the entire Apollo 11 moon mission was televised. At all of six years old, Nonnie and I planned to sleep on the couches in the living room with the TV on as long as there was coverage. We watched Walter Cronkite explain the various steps in the process from take-off to orbit to landing. We watched every televised minute, even eating our meals in the living room, in front of her black-and-white television. It was such an adventure to be there with Nonnie, watching the actual lift-off of the rockets, the simulations of the flight, and then the moving pictures of Neil Armstrong as he took that one small step. Those memories were brought back, in stark relief, a few weeks ago when my younger son, Hectic 16, had the opportunity to hear Neil Armstrong talk at the Congress of Future Scientists in Boston. Despite the dearth of a space program today, I did feel the torch had been passed to him as he recounted the words and images that Neil Armstrong evoked. I was vividly reminded of eating Space Food sticks, drinking Tang, and sitting on the aged furniture in Nonnie’s living room while watching and hearing about the moon mission.

Nonnie had a love of reading, both for learning and for pleasure. She dropped out of school early to take care of the household when her mother died. Despite that lack of formal education, she knew so many things…especially things that fascinated a young boy. She had a huge collection of western novels by Zane Grey, and as soon as I was old enough she introduced me to them. Whenever I would finish a novel, she would quiz me about its contents. If I didn’t recount the tale accurately, she would implore me to read it again, more carefully. As I grew older I became more and more analytical in my reading, remembering details that most would have glossed over. Eventually I was a sufficiently analytical reader that she introduced me to her set of World Book encyclopedias.

Her encyclopedia had been published not long after World War II had ended. As such, it had all the normal alphabetic volumes, plus two special volumes for World War I and World War II. Around the time that she introduced me to the World Book, I had become fascinated with wars, especially the strategies that famous generals had utilized. As part of my informal education, Nonnie told me I had to read an entire alphabetic volume (such as the “A” volume) before reading from the World War volumes. By that time, we had moved out to the far-flung suburbs of Chicago and I no longer lived around the corner from her. So my visits were less frequent. She graciously allowed me to take home a volume each time I left, so I was able to spend lots of time in the World War volumes. I believe I consumed the entire encyclopedia in about a year’s time. To this day I can spout facts from all sorts of areas because of that reading regimen. As a teenager, I spent some of my first earnings on a subscription to Time-Life’s World War II series. As the books arrived each month, I recognized many of the photos from the World Book, and even recognized some of the written passages as surprisingly close to those in the encyclopedia. To me, it was intertwined history, fueled by the kindling of Nonnie.

During my late elementary and early high-school years, Nonnie began to have health problems that forced her to move from her home in Park Ridge, IL. into a series of extended care facilities and nursing homes. Despite the fact that we lived an hour away, my Mom took us to see Nonnie several times a week. During the drive I would read, and when we arrived, Nonnie would always ask what I’d read about. During those years, we always visited as a family, so each of us had just a few minutes with relatively undivided attention. Despite her health issues, Nonnie’s mind remained sharp as a tack. She would quiz me on the latest developments in the space program and many other areas of scientific advancement. My sister was more literary than I, so Nonnie would quiz her about her classes and the books they read. There were few details from the novels that Nonnie didn’t know.

When I went off to college at Notre Dame, I missed Nonnie immensely. She didn’t have ready access to a telephone, so I didn’t get to talk to her very much. At first, I wrote her often, but she was unable to hold a pen very effectively, so the communications were mostly one-way. On a couple of occasions my parents coordinated a call between us, but it just wasn’t the same as in-person visits. On my first trip home from Indiana, for Fall Break my freshman year, we stopped at Nonnie’s nursing facility before continuing to our home. Mom and Dad went out shopping while I sat and visited with Nonnie…just the two of us. I had just become fascinated with computers, and she wanted a demonstration. During that week, I drove back to see her with my brand new Apple //e lugging the dual floppy drives and black on green monitor. I remember the amazement in her eyes as I showed her a program that I had written. She kept asking me about how I’d written the program, and for all intents and purposes I gave her an introductory course in AppleSoft Basic programming that afternoon.

Over the next couple of years, as I progressed in school, Nonnie’s health declined. Physically she became dependent on a cane, then a walker, sometimes a wheelchair…but her mind remained sharp and focused. The few times that her mind wasn’t sharp we all knew were due to the vast number of strokes that she had. She liked her doctors, but she wasn’t a big fan of following orders. To her last days, she continued to salt her ham, eat whole-dairy products, and loved her ice cream. I would regularly sneak in a strawberry milkshake for her, often hiding it in the pocket of my coat. We never got caught, and I know those strawberry milkshakes fueled many conversations about technology. Technology that was moving along so rapidly, but tech that fascinated that old lady from Chicago.

The last time I saw her alive was the day that I left for Texas. I had graduated and accepted a job with Texas Instruments in Dallas. Despite being a bit out of the way, and with my car loaded to the hilt, I drove to her nursing home to visit with her. I didn’t know it was the last time, but apparently she did. I was going to be coming home in October for a family gathering, so we were looking at just a few months separation. We talked about my new job as a database programmer and systems analyst at Texas Instruments. She asked extremely probing and relevant questions, and seemed enthralled with the career that I’d chosen.

As I rose to leave, she said “I love you, and I’ll miss you.” I replied in kind, then with the matter-of-fact air that she had, she said “I’ll see you in Heaven”. I didn’t really pick up on it at the time. I remember reminding her that I would be back in four months, and she replied “I’ll be gone by then”. We hugged and said our goodbyes. To me they were temporary sentiments until we would meet again, but I’m firmly convinced that she was saying her final farewell.

Over the next week I drove to Kansas, visited my now-wife’s family, and then continued on to Dallas. Late in the evening the day before I was to start work at Texas Instruments, I called home to report my safe arrival and to share my hopes and fears for the next day…only to learn that Nonnie had died. Unsure of how to inform my supervisor or the T.I. human resources people, my parents and I decided that I would go to work the next day and miss the funeral.

I was pretty out of it for my entire orientation that first day at T.I. When I reported to my boss, she immediately knew something was wrong and asked me what was up. I recounted the fact that my grandmother had died the previous weekend. She admonished me for not going to the funeral, but was extremely supportive. She appreciated my dedication to work, but pointed out there “there will always be work, family isn’t always going to be there”. That’s something that I remember to this day.

There are few things in life that I wish I had to do-over. Despite the fact that Nonnie had said her final farewell…I hadn’t. For years I’ve wrestled with my sadness over not attending her funeral. It was 30 years ago this past June that Nonnie passed away. I think I’ve finally come to the realization that she’s been watching me for all those years. The other day, as I was writing I could almost hear her asking me questions about the book I was writing about. I stumbled over a fact, and her voice clearly came to me “read it again, and get the facts straight”. It was a bit eery, but more than anything it was comforting.

I miss Nonnie terribly, but it’s nice to know that I’ve got somebody watching over me. It also reminds me that I need to do my best…I have a legacy to live up to.

Now I’m off to the kitchen to toast some Rye Bread and teach Hectic Grandson how to cover the slices in pats of butter…