Nana
Posted on Sun, Jul 11, 2010
My Nana recently passed away and I feel compelled to pay some sort of tribute to her. I don’t quite know why or how it happened, but she was a huge influence on my life. This despite the fact that we never lived in the same town (in fact, we were never closer than a 2-hour drive, and for much of my life it was closer to an 8-hour drive).
In my family, we always heard stories about Aunt Lottie and Aunt Hattie (who lived and died before I was even born). Each of these ladies possessed a great gift: one had music and the other had art. Nana always proclaimed that each of her grandchildren seemed to have one of those 2 gifts. For me, it was music.
There was always a very conscious approval of my pursuit of music. I do believe that music was a gift I inherited at birth, but I also think my continued pursuit of it had a lot to do with Nana. She frequently made arrangements for me to play piano in her local church on Sundays when I was visiting. She travelled to many of my recitals. And my senior year in high school, when I played a piano concerto with our high school symphony, she made the trip (in this case, a 3-hour flight!) just to see my performance.
Nana used to travel a lot to foreign countries. Each place she went, she brought back stories and a special gift representing that country. Nana always said that Latin was by far the most important language anyone could study because so many other languages had their origins in Latin. So when it came to time for me to pick a language in school, I chose Latin (and stuck with it, even though the teacher was not one of the more popular ones).
She loved gardening and flowers. The funny thing is, I resisted the gardening bug all through my childhood. But wouldn’t you know, after I had my first child, I found myself drawn to gardening and it’s now one of my favorite pursuits. Nana was a teacher–another instinct I fought all my childhood. And now I teach, too.
So I guess the question I’m left with is, how did she wield such a positive influence on me?
I think she did it by actively caring and involving herself in my life. She knew my friends’ names and asked about them often. It was a special treat for me to bring friends to Nana’s house and stay for a weekend. They were always so impressed with everything–I think because it was just different. Nana lived on a farm overlooking the Shehandoah River in a house that was built over a century ago (by relatives of ours).
That’s another point–she gave us such a sense of history about our family. It was a big deal that we still had the original land deed from King George for this property. And growing up, I was always surrounded by stories of our family–past and present. So even as a child, I was exposed to lots of “grown-up” conversation about the importance of family, history, language, and, yes, music. It made me want to grow up so I could become a full-fledged part of those conversations.
I watch my mom exert this sort of influence over my children now, and I take great satisfaction in knowing they are developing a close relationship (again, in spite of not living anywhere near each other). Who is the Nana in your life and what made them so important to you?