She’s The Bee’s Knees
Every year, my grandma writes me Chanukah cards. They’re handwritten, filled with love and usually also filled with gelt: chocolate coins and a bit of money. This Chanukah, her card was just what I needed after stepping off a rollercoaster of a semester.
Coming home from school, I felt exhausted. When my dad handed me a card with my name and address squiggled in wobbly cursive instantly recognizable as my grandma’s, love and optimism supplanted the anxiety I’d been feeling.
A card that might have only taken five minutes to write did all that. Her handwritten words made me feel like I mattered.
A card from anyone can brighten my day. But my grandma’s are special. She knows the right words to say to make me (or anyone) smile. My grandma treats language like an art palette, carefully selecting words to color her sentences. As a writer, my grandma is my biggest inspiration.
Growing up, I would have sleepovers at her house over the weekends. After finishing off a bowl of Special K cereal with a glass of milk (a cereal I detested everywhere but grandma’s), I’d push my plate out of the way and set Scrabble on the kitchen table.
While my grandma came up with magnificent seven letter words, I dreamt up short, risible letter combinations which required dictionary consultation to verify.
"See, grandma?” I’d shout. “Asp is 'a small southern European viper with an upturned snout.' It counts!"
Even with her leniency in the rules, grandma would always win. At 10, I didn’t shape up too well against a linguaphile in Scrabble.
It’s not just in board games where my grandma’s prowess over language shines. If we’re talking politics, her words bite– she voraciously shared her opinions as we watched the campaign trail on TV. If her printer is broken (which, for some unfortunate reason, it always is), her words bite even harder. In conversation, she’ll often pause and ask me if I know a certain word: “bee’s knees,” “hydrangea,” and Yiddish words she can’t possibly expect me to be familiar with.
She has a big lexicon, and uses it with a big heart. Before moving across the country three years ago to live closer to her children, she gifted me her unabridged Webster’s dictionary.
My grandma, a college graduate and retired public school teacher, inspires me to write thoughtfully and speak with adroitness and elegance.
While I’m still working on it, I’m proud to have created opportunities for others to harness their love of words and put pen to paper to share joy as my grandma always has on special occasions for me.
The Love For Our Elders team mailed nearly 100,000 letters of love to elders in 2020. I hope you’ll join us this year on February 26th in celebrating Letter to an Elder Day, set on my grandma’s birthday. You can join us at loveforourelders.org/letters.
Jacob Cramer
is the founder and executive director of Love For Our Elders. Originally from Cleveland, he is a junior studying psychology at Yale University. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @jacobcraa