Thoughts

If you have Cinemax, check put the new series " The Knick" with Clive Owen. It's about a hospital in NYC in the year 1900. It was created and directed by Steven Soderberg. It's fantastic. There a so many interesting characters. The soundtrack is really interesting too. It's very dark, Clive Owen is cocaine addicted and is a top surgeon at this hospital. They are just starting to get electricity. They do the operations in a theater with people watching.

It is of special interest to me as my grandmother ( my mothers mother) was in nursing school in Manhattan at that time. She graduated in 1902. I have her graduation ring. I also have some photographs of the hospital and operations with her in them. I have always found it really amazing that my Grandmother , a tiny freckled red haired woman from a small town in upstate New York went to nursing school in manhattan. Her parents were from the "old country"... I can't imagine them allowing a young girl to go off to New York City .
I was never very close to her. She was an emotional cold fish. I got stuck with her when my parents would go away. I never liked going to her house. It was very dark and filled with stuff. I could never sleep there, I never felt comfortable. The room I slept in had creepy neglected plants in it and smelled like musty earth. I think that by the time I came on the scene, she was already starting to go a little batty. This is a reason that I found her younger life, like living in NYC, hard to believe, but I have the pictures.
I taught her how to drive. She got a little white corvair with sky blue plastic interior. She could barely see above the dash board. She didn't know how to drive. Frankie, Johnny and I used to call her " The little old lady from Passadena"... She drove so slow, she was a driving hazard. Really, she had no business being behind the wheel of any car, but she needed to get around.  She got a ticket for driving too slow and from then, she drove less and less.

Another interesting thing about her, she married my grandfather who was a lot older than her, maybe 15 years. He had been married before and his wife had died of some thing like leukemia . I have pictures of her too. She was a very large woman, well dressed. They looked like they had a wonderful 
life...more happy it seemed to me than with my grandmother. My grandfather was very dapper... A great dresser in his time. He was crushed by the stock market collapse and took to drinking. 
My mother told me that she remembered him coming home late at night drunk, being tossed up on the front lawn. The crash changed everything for him.
He was a button salesman and travelled all over the world. My grandmother swore that he worked for the OSS which was the precursor to the CIA, but I have not been able to find any proof of this. I wrote to the CIA and they sent me a letter saying that they have no record of him. We did find a manifest of a ship that sailed from England to the US with him on it. The dates corresponded to to some kind of coup at the time....but, I can't remember now what it was. It was some kind of clandestine agreement...anyway, my romantic brain imagined him partaking in hostile negotiations. He would be all dressed up hat and all, fancy tie, beautiful shoes, and he would be making history.