My Bumba

It's a personal essay about a fun familial relationship.

            My grandmother has been called Bumba for as long as I can remember.  The family anecdote went that she loved the old Ritchie Valenz song “La Bamba” and would sing it to my cousins Matthew and Roger, her first grandbabies. Once Matthew started talking, he associated her with the song. But Matthew was also a toddler and not very practiced in speaking Spanish. Thus “La Bamba” became our Bumba. Of course, I had not yet been born at this point of our family history, but the story has been told time and time again, and these details have remained consistent through the decades.

            My relationship with Bumba, however, has never been as consistent. Bumba has been an ever-present force in our family. In her capacity as a force to be reckoned with, she has developed great skill at making me uncomfortable and sometimes filling me with an urge to run away.

As a single parent, my mom had invited her mother, my Bumba, into the delivery room when I was born. I think that I may have started resenting Bumba on some level because of this moment. I know it sounds malicious; however, I truly believe that in my newborn psyche I could sense that a woman who tried to snatch a newborn from a delivery nurse was going to cause only mayhem.

            But these are not really my stories to tell. They are simply parts of the great family mythology that I have been born into by the simple act of being born into my family. The stories I now tell are all mine to tell because they happened in my life and I am the first one bold or foolish enough to try to render them into written word.

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            I have never had a true first memory of Bumba because she was ubiquitous in my life as a child. I remember countless episodes of her neuroses playing out in ways that both amused and shocked those around her. I remember that Bumba loved Jeopardy and would watch it at all hours on satellite TV while yelling out an even balance of right and absurdly wrong answers. I remember that my grandfather would yell the answers too, but his were more often right than hers.

When they were wrong, though, I learned a wholly new vocabulary.  But I was always told not to repeat the good tasting words, as Papa called them, which they yelled. If I repeated these good tasting words, then they’d have to wash out my mouth with a bar of Fels-Naptha laundry soap.  I tasted that soap more than once for being just like my grandfather and yelling “motherless w***e” when I stubbed my toe.  Fels-Naptha was an institution to Bumba and could be used for everything and anything from teaching a lesson about profanity to clearing up acne. For me, the smell of that soap still turns my stomach and brings up a plethora of unpleasant memories along with my last meal.

I remember all of these things. But I have been told time and time again that the memory of a child is something that glimmers in clarity for only a moment before slipping back into the dim illumination of the fondness held for an era past. This idea holds true it would seem. All these memories I have are in a jumble and I’ve tried to connect them in the way that makes the most sense, although this essay is about family, so it would be highly suspect if it were to make much sense at all.

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One particular recollection of Bumba sticks out in my mind whenever I consider the sorry state of my relationship with my grandmother.  It was a fonder memory for me, of a time when my naiveté allowed me to unconditionally love Bumba and see her quirks as harmless.

“One of these days, Yoda Bell, your mother’s going to piss you off royally. Don’t repeat that or I’ll help her use the Fells-Naptha on your mouth. But she’s going to piss you off and the Bewley side will show its ugly head and then you’ll need to run away.” Bumba told me one day while I sat in her cramped kitchen waiting for a peanut butter sandwich. I had a wide variety of childhood nicknames. Yoda Bell was mild.

            “Where should I go when I run away?” I asked with wide eyes and innocent wonderment that I would be so lucky to receive guidance from Bumba. It was my opinion then that Bumba was like the great and powerful Oz, knowing all and possessing great power.

            “You can stay with us.”

            “Will Papa take me to Gomo’s everyday for a Nerd Flurry?”

            “Probably.”

            I remember regaling my mom with the story later and saying that I was running away to Bumba’s because Papa was going to buy me Nerd Flurries. The look of horror on her face was priceless and has remained etched in my mind better than a Polaroid ever could be.

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If Bumba were like the great and powerful Oz, her house was like the Land of Oz itself for my cousins and me.  Our days were spent exploring while our mothers did God knows what in Bumba’s parlor. Whenever we tried to come into the house it was seen as suspicious that we would have to use the bathroom so often. To our elder relatives, it seemed more likely that we were eavesdropping. Often, we were because the gossip seemed so interesting. I wish that I had realized then that adult talk was not such a fascinating thing to overhear or take part in. I also wish I had realized then that adult life was not so remarkably enjoyable either and that I should have held on to my childhood illusions as long as possible. 

After passing into my teenage years, I lost all interest in playing or exploring the eleven acres of country landscape that my family has made their own over the years. Like Dorothy discovered that Oz was just a scared man behind a curtain, I discovered that Bumba was just an old woman trying to live vicariously through everyone else.  I was one of her favorites to question and scrutinize to this end. I didn’t realize then that my Bumba was just lonely and bored.  Her questions seemed too pointed for that, her compliments too mocking.

“How’s school? Any cute boys there?” Bumba would inquire from her throne of a broken recliner that smelled too much of spilled coffee and hand cream.

“No! Ew! Bumba!” I would exclaim in disgust.

“Your hair looks nice. Did your mother help you fix it?”

“No. I just rolled out of bed.”

“You look like you’ve lost weight. Where’s all the baby fat gone? You’re not our little Dani anymore; you’re becoming a woman. Scotty, doesn’t she look like a little woman? She’s got the beginning of those Bewley curves.”

“Bumba, please let’s just not talk about it.”

“I like that you got contacts. It makes your eyes stand out. Why I have always thought that your eyes were your best feature. So blue! You and Mike were the only Scott grandchildren to have blue eyes. I always wished that I had blue eyes. What do the boys think of those eyes of yours, Dingle Bell?”

Eventually, I stopped answering her questions or really acknowledging her compliments because they seemed so sideways to a girl going through puberty among male cousins and playmates.  I envied my male cousins their peaceful existence away from Bumba’s critical gaze.  The Bumba who I had loved so much as a child was trying to get closer to me and it was simply pushing me away.

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 The most remarkable transition from childhood, aside from the growing resentment that I felt for Bumba, was the change in expectations.  I was not just allowed to partake in adult discussion with my elder relatives, I was expected to. After my mom married my stepfather and gave birth to my half-sister, we moved from the trailer park to a double wide modular home located next door to my grandparents. The closeness in proximity to Bumba did nothing to abate the growing frustration with her that I felt.  

My family actually lives behind my grandmother. Walking at a forty-five degree angle from our front door puts them at the rear door of their house. Walking straight out puts them at the picnic table under the maple where they congregate on summer evenings. Walking away from the picnic table when the adult conversations are going on would put me in hot water, so to speak, because it certainly means that I am being “surly” or “disagreeable” again because in effect, I would be walking away from where Queen Bumba holds court.

There are some times when I was nothing but surly or disagreeable to Bumba. I recall on one occasion, somewhere in my mid teens, I said something awful to my mom. What ensued was a classic bizarre moment of our family history. It was so strange it is reminiscent of the sheer absurdity of the time that quiet and reserved Aunt Lisa expectorated on one of her sisters in the midst of Thanksgiving dinner.

“I hate you! I really do because you clearly don’t give a damn about me. I wish you weren’t my mother. I’d be so much happier if you weren’t!” I screamed at my mother after she told me that I couldn’t go to a middle school dance because I needed to watch my little sister.

I walked away after my venomous comment but Bumba thought that I should have apologized before huffing off. She chased after me, and I should interject here that Bumba was a very spry old woman when she wanted to be. She caught up with me five strides from our front porch and grabbed my arm, using one of her tricks to hold and punish.  She did not hold the whole circumference of an offender’s limb; rather, she dug her arthritic claws into the tender flesh of the forearm.

Something within me was not going to be treated like an offending child anymore. As she tried to drag me back to apologize, I dug my heels in and twisted as if to escape her grasp. In effect I was trying to escape all the discomfort that she had caused me over the years. It was a terrible fray; the neighbors could see the unraveling of family ties into an all out wrestling match on the lawn. She made to pull my arm over my head, but I suddenly lunged forward. I was on the ground, and in a moment, Bumba was on the ground, too. She moved as if to swat at my bottom, but I was certainly not going to be spanked! After another moment or two of tussling, it was over. I had gotten off the ground and skulked away.  The events of that afternoon have come up jokingly because of the way that my diabetic Bumba later claimed her blood sugar had dropped dramatically.

If there were some invisible bond between grandmother and grandchild, that moment had hacked away at it, almost severing it because of its already weakened condition following years of fraying from my entrance to adolescence.  After that day, I avoided Bumba. I would visit my Papa in mornings before Bumba would climb out of bed and claim to have urgent plans whenever there was a chance that I would be cornered like a rabbit and she would tree me with her questions like a bloodhound on the trail of some scent that would lead her to understanding my life.

This pattern of distance and avoidance has only been broken by me on special occasions. About three months after my parents demanded that I invite my grandmother to my high school graduation, I loaded what seemed like my entire life into the back of my mom’s mini van. My dad walked up and explained that I should go say goodbye to my Papa and Bumba before I left. “Because who knows how long your grandparents will be around,” Dad said so frankly.

I didn’t take him seriously because Bumba would outlive us all, especially after I promised that I would neither get married nor have children until she was long dead. It was my view that she would want to live forever just to see if I would be able to stick with my vow.  I did not want my future loved ones to have to deal with Bumba’s shenanigans. It may sound preposterous, but both of my older cousins were married by the age of twenty-four. Thus my act of protest was all the more pointed.

In the den of my grandparent’s old and cluttered house, I felt distinctly uncomfortable as I sat in the broken recliner by the picture windows. It smelled of a combination of old coffee, wet rugs, and old dog in the small room. The faux wood paneling was nicotine stained from the thousands of Doral’s smoked by Aunt Becky, an overgrown teenager of forty-something who has lived with my grandparents on and off her whole life. Everything screamed neglect, and I was suddenly filled with resentment about the way that Bumba kept her house, which filled me with shame for her and contempt.

I sat in that chair for about half an hour, plaintively avoided providing actual answers to any of her questions about my life. It was my opinion by this point that Bumba had no right to know any intimate details because then she’d win some contest. The way that Bumba knew all the family gossip was one of the attributes of our matriarch that I resented then.  As a child, I had thought it incredible that Bumba was so well informed.  Since that day, my parents have demanded that I behave civilly towards my grandmother on holidays and each autumn when I prepare to depart for Slippery Rock University again. The system shows how lamentable things have become, but it worked, and that was all that mattered.

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The summer before my sophomore year of college, Bumba’s health was deteriorating. She had never been in the best of health, as far as I can recall. She was aging in a less than graceful manner. When my mother first told me that Bumba was ill, I remember that I dismissed that Bumba would suffer from anything more dramatic than hypochondria. But Bumba continued to worsen.

By the time that my mother called me again and explained that Bumba was no longer eating and that she was going to be taken in an ambulance to the hospital, I was still certain that it was all a con to evoke a reaction from our family. Throughout my life, I can recall Bumba being in and out of the hospital. I joked that she was trying to outdo Papa. When Papa had a heart attack, she had to have one, too. When Papa fell and broke his hip, Bumba discovered she was born without hips.  It seemed simply as though Bumba was never happy unless she was more miserable than anyone else.

I realize that it seems a bit apathetic now, but at the time, it seemed like just another one of Bumba’s attention ploys that she was so talented at creating. In fact, part of me even considered that it would not be the most terrible thing in the world if Bumba were to pass away.

The next day, my mom was filled with despair over the thought of losing her mother. To me, Bumba had always been something to be ashamed of, or annoyed by, or generally vexed with. But to my mom, Bumba had an eternal position as the giver of life, the bumbling but ever loving matriarch. I wanted to comfort my mom, but I felt like a traitor in saying anything after I had courted the treacherous thoughts against Bumba’s life.

I would like to think that the only way that someone could think that way about another human being was through blind ignorance. As a young woman who has never had anyone close to her die, my concept of death is akin to that of a child. For me, the permanence of loss of a loved one is nonexistent. When a friend of my parents passes away or an obscure relative dies quietly, I seldom consider it again. At this point in my life, I am the person terrified of death because I realize it has not touched me yet, and some day soon it will. I offer this as a possible reason for my thoughts because despite all the bad times that passed between us, I still love my Bumba.

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Bumba recovered from her most serious health concerns and was well enough to continue the tradition of one last evening of shooting the breeze, as we like to say, before I left for Slippery Rock. This time, I forced myself to remain seated and sociable until we had run out of things to talk about. It was difficult, but so is Bumba. Trying to undo the years of uneasiness seems like an uphill battle against my own temperament and time. It terrifies me to think that I cannot try hard enough to make things better until it seems she has one foot in the grave.

It has taken me almost two decades to figure Bumba out and I know that I still barely understand her at that. When I think of Bumba, I think of the good and the bad. I think of the smells of coconut shampoo and the Baby Magic lotion that she had so liberally applied to all of her grandchildren at some point. I think of the fact that her cooking has never been gourmet, and seldom ordinary, earning her potroast the nickname of “toxic waste.” I think of the delicately crinkled skin of her face and hands. I think of the way that she rubs circles around her mouth when she’s anxious. I think of the way that she often makes me laugh even without intending too.

I think of how I must be growing up because now I can laugh about the fact that my Bumba mows her front lawn in her underwear and has a phone in her bathroom. I muse about the fact that Bumba seems to be losing her ability to make me feel insecure because a quiet confidence is overtaking me. Maybe she’s to thank for that.  I lived through her overbearing curiosity and seem to have come out of my teenage years, the most difficult years for us, just a little stronger than I may have been without her.  

Or perhaps she’s as troublesome as ever. Perhaps the only reason that Bumba’s not driving me crazy is that I now live over an hour’s drive away from her in lieu of a minute’s walk. Perhaps it’s also helpful that I neglected to give my chatty Bumba my phone number, or e-mail address, or even my campus address.

           Perhaps my parents have even commented of late that Bumba is a crazy old bat and they’re considering moving away too. I hope they realize like I did that Bumba is something we just have to strive learn to live with because she’s certainly going to outlive us all, even if only in memory.