The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, July 26th. It is the second of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Coldplay, Ernest Holmes, and Moments When We Can Do Anything
Yesterday was my grandma’s birthday. She was a strong woman—a farmer’s wife, mother of five, born and raised and died up in the northwest corner of Iowa. She was a loving woman—fierce and defensive and generous with her family, with many a gift for many a grandkid each Christmas at the homestead. She was a fiery woman—a good deal Irish, which I suppose is where the family temper comes from, and the family rowdiness, and perhaps some kind of family sorrow—that “dour and brooding ghost” Steinbeck said rides on Irish shoulders.
Grandma was proud of her own. Once, she was asked in a gathering of Catholic women if her soon-to-be daughter-in-law was Catholic. The response was short and immediate—something along the lines of, “Nope. She’s an engineer.” Of course, Grandma didn’t believe Catholicism and engineering to be mutually exclusive. Grandma was just proud of my mom.
Grandma was proud in the self sense. Once, early in their stay at the nursing home, the topic came up of how popular Grandpa was with the staff, with some subtext surrounding the topic due to Grandma’s somewhat rocky relationship with the same caregivers. Grandma’s response was again short, and again immediate—something along the lines of, “Goody two-shoes.” No one could complain about Grandpa’s kindness. But Grandma didn’t like looking like the bad guy.
Grandma had a big heart, and big plates of cookies, and a big collection of mounted and framed finished puzzles on the walls. Grandpa and she—Lenny and Luella—were warm, and I like to think of them still in the way I’d often first see them upon rolling up to the farmhouse in what felt, to little-kid me, like the middle of the night: seated around the table in the lit windows, playing cards with an aunt or a cousin or two, waiting up for us to arrive.
***
Yesterday was also the Feast Day of St. James. I’m not Catholic (not an engineer either, though not for lack of an attempt at the latter). I don’t really know the significance of one’s birthday saint. I don’t know if Grandma had any emotional tie to St. James, or if she knew about their shared day at all. I didn’t know they shared a day. Not when I brought Grandma that St. James rosary the June I was eighteen.
It was the last weekend of the month—I remember this because I called my friend Grace to say happy birthday on my way out of town. I was working public works that summer, and I was scheduled for a special overnight shift on Sunday to keep the pump gassed and the storm sewer flowing if the creek’s floodwaters didn’t roll back, so I left Friday after work and planned to get back Saturday night.
The drive from Crystal Lake to Ashton, or to Sibley, or to anywhere in Osceola County is about eight hours, counting a couple stops, so to get back Saturday night after leaving Friday afternoon meant only spending a little bit of time there with Grandma. This was ok with me. To be honest, I didn’t really know what I’d do when I got there. I didn’t feel like I knew things around there well enough to take her for a drive, like Dad and my uncle did with Grandpa the summer prior when my baseball tournament in Iowa City got rained out. I didn’t know what all to talk about, besides telling her I loved her and telling her about the first year of college and telling her about St. James.
***
Between finals and the public works job starting, I’d spent two or three weeks in Spain with my college choir. We’d done a few days in Madrid, and I think we spent our last night in Salamanca, but between those we either drove or did a hybrid of driving and walking along the Camino de Santiago—the Way of St. James, traditionally about a five hundred mile pilgrimage from the French side in the Pyrenees to Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain—the little thumb sitting on top of Portugal there against the Atlantic. According to tradition, St. James’s tomb lies beneath the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, and the pilgrimage (if you’re unfamiliar, as I was) is a big one, drawing hundreds of thousands of travelers annually. It started back in medieval times—the Knights Templar guarded the route. It receded for a while. It’s grown again, and it’s strong, and it’s become much more than a pilgrimage about only St. James.
For me, though, it was in a large way about St. James. I didn’t know anything about him, going in—my confirmation verse came from the letter written by a different St. James, but that was the closest I’d gotten to knowing anything about any James. I had, however, lost both my grandpas that first year away at school, and one of them—my maternal grandfather, not the husband of this grandma I was going to see—was named James.
Grandpa Jim and my maternal grandma (Marlene) traveled the world. Before Parkinson’s curtailed Grandpa Jim’s adventures, they made it to Antarctica, and while I don’t think Grandma Marlene’s made it to one hundred countries, Grandpa did. So, there was something very Grandpa Jim about the being in a far-off corner of the world, even in a western European nation, and this was especially so for the seven days the choir spent walking the Galician countryside on the Way of St. James ourselves, sixty of us or so dropped off each morning and picked up at the end of the day, making our way through churches and towns and fields, walking, praying, walking, singing, walking. I spent a lot of thought on my grandfathers during those walks—their deaths, while not surprises, had defined my freshman year, and given so many prompts to pray, I prayed for both every day, and felt their glance at times.
I wanted to give each of my grandmothers a gift when I got home, and while my mom had explained that the gift for Grandma Marlene could always just be a pair of silver earrings with some tie to the trip, I wasn’t as sure what to get for my paternal grandma. Since she was Catholic, and the pilgrimage was centrally a Catholic pilgrimage, I settled on a rosary, and the day we walked into the cathedral doors in Santiago, I found one at a booth nearby with beads shaped like scallop shells.
***
If I remember the legends correctly, they say St. James went to Iberia to evangelize after Jesus died. Gospel readers might remember James as one of the three who got to see the transfiguration, and as the son of Zebedee who with his brother John asked Jesus for a good seat in the Kingdom, and as the one who again with his brother John wanted to incinerate a Samaritan village for not welcoming the Christ, presumably one of the performances that landed the pair the “Sons of Thunder” moniker. If the legends are true (and historians doubt that they are), his particular tongue at Pentecost must have been Spanish or whatever language was being spoken on the peninsula those days, because Iberia’s where he went, and after he was martyred back in Jerusalem (the legends hold that his temper got him in trouble with whichever iteration of Herod was currently on the throne), his disciples sent his body back to Iberia for burial.
At some point in this voyage, the boat carrying St. James’s bones passed a wedding on a cliff featuring a groom on horseback. The horse, spooked by the boat, jumped into the sea, but after a few minutes rose again, groom on its back, both alive—and covered in scallop shells. Around the ninth century, when it came to be believed that James’s bones were resting in what’s now Santiago de Compostela and the pilgrimage began, the scallop shell became the journey’s symbol.
***
At the suggestion of my parents, I wrote up all I’d heard about St. James and scallop shells and printed it out in a large font so Grandma could easily read it—an explanation of sorts of this particular rosary, and an account of the week or two my choir and I’d spent driving and walking along the Way. The thought, I believe, was that she could keep reading it when I’d gone home.
I could have just mailed her the gift, or waited until Christmas, but I’d been wanting to drive out and see her. I don’t entirely know why this was. Sure, I loved her, but I could have spoken to her thirty times on the phone in the time it took to drive there and back, and the driving option left me with only an hour or so in her presence. My best guess is that I wanted to be the kind of person who’d drive all weekend to spend an hour or so with his grandma, and I wanted her to know I cared enough to give up half a summer weekend in college to see her. My dad was great about driving out there, making a trip what felt like every month, so there was an example there too about how much it can mean to just show up. Regardless of why, I went, rosary and notes in tow.
It was the first time I’d driven like this, and though I knew the route conceptually—Route 14 to Janesville, I-90 to Worthington, Route 60 to Sibley which is small enough that you can find the right place if you’ve seen it before and you drive around long enough—I brought one of those Garmin’s that were so ubiquitous in the 2000’s, before the world weaned itself onto smartphones. I didn’t know how fast was too fast, and after stopping for dinner near the Wisconsin Dells (not at Buffalo Phil’s, but maybe in the same parking lot) and getting through La Crosse, I let it rip a bit in southeastern Minnesota, inconsistently, in a way that probably made the Subaru with the bikes on the back some kind of annoyed to keep having to pass the kid in the Ford Taurus who’d just passed them.
There was construction around Austin, and I know I was getting rather tired, because the incessant yet conventional blinking of the left turn signal of the semi-truck in front of me in the one-lane-left-lane road inexplicably infuriated me, persuading me to call it a night in Albert Lea. It wasn’t the weekend of the Sturgis rally, but there must have been something going on involving motorcycles and I-90, because all the hotels on the list my dad had printed were full except one. I think it was an AmericInn, and the air conditioning was broken, so I got a discount, but breakfast wasn’t complimentary and they didn’t serve tea, so after a short night of sleep I managed a few sips of unfamiliar black coffee before embarrassing myself at multiple gas stations by not realizing the nozzle-holder’s a lever you have to pull up in that part of the country.
I made it to Sibley in the late morning, and Grandma seemed happy I was there. She was tired by those days, and I didn’t stay long, but I gave her the rosary, and I told her about school, and I told her about Spain and St. James. I continued on down to Ashton after I left her, stopping by the cemetery to say hi to Grandpa, and stopping by the homestead to put a handful of dirt in a plastic bag so I could always say hi to the ancestors. Back up in Worthington I ate lunch at the Perkins where Grandma and Grandpa used to eat after Mass on Sundays, with the waitress who, if I’m remembering this legend right, invited them to her wedding.
Then, back across Minnesota. Back through La Crosse. Back through Madison. Home.
***
I still have the rosary I gave Grandma that day. It’s sitting on a bookshelf here while I write, on top of a cribbage board a great-grandpa on my mom’s side made and a little tangled with a rosary my soon-to-be mother-in-law made as a kid back in Catholic school. I was returned the rosary on the next trip to the homestead—hardly half a year later, to bury Grandma.
I still have the name ‘James’ too, in a way. It bounces around in my head. I notice it when I see it. Something about that summer. Something about Grandpa Jim, and St. James, and Grandma.
It’s funny how much names can come to mean. They’re just words: Collections of noises our mouths make. Letters on a page. And yet. And yet they come to encompass a person. And a person’s a lot to encompass. Add a few more people to the equation and a name grows quite large. A grandpa. A grandma. A trip to Spain. A trip to Iowa. All the prayers said on both. A saint. His resting place.
I guess that’s part of why the name stuck with me so tenaciously following that summer. A name’s a big thing. And five summers after it, walking into a daily mass on Grandma’s birthday (I still want to be that kind of person who shows up), I guess that’s why it hit me so hard to hear the priest say it was the feast day of St. James, and to realize I’d given my grandma a rosary that might’ve meant as much to her as it did to me.
***
I’ve never much wanted to name a child after myself. I don’t fault those who do it. It just doesn’t fit for me. Maybe it’s because it’d put some pressure on me to live up to the kid.
I’d love to name a child after someone else, though. I’d love to name a child James. I’d love to tell that kid all the things that name means to me, and to add him to the list—to place him at its very core. I’d love to give him that name, to let him carry it on for his eighty or ninety or a hundred years, another carrier in the link from the saints to his great grandpa through a bunch of tiny towns in Spain to the rest of the world. Names float like that. They persist. They continue along the current of time, long outlasting each person who bore them.
I might not get to name a kid James. I might not have a son, or one of my brothers use the name first if it’s a name they like too. That’s ok. There are a lot of names out there, each borne along its unique path. There’s John. There’s Joseph. There’s Leonard.
But I do hope the name lives on in the family, one way or another. I hope we produce another James. Because that’s the thing with all this historic stuff—the names, and the homestead dirt, and the stories with our grandparents. We, humanity, don’t just want to receive the stories.
We want to keep them going.
Next week’s essay: On August, and On Everything After
