This past week, a local writer passed away-Bill Holm. He had a gift for recognizing the prosaic as transcendent. One of the topics he wrote about was "failure."  He tried his luck making a go of life in more exotic locales, but he ended up settling in his childhood hometown-Minneota, Minnesota. As if an example of another failure, even the name of his town looks like a typo.

He wrote a couple of wonderful books which I own. Unfortunately, due to my failing, I can locate only one of them today in my messy, disorganized home library among its hundreds of books. He wrote one called The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth. The title of this book sums up its entire thesis. Those of us from humble small towns-and not some toney SoHo loft-have a keen sense of inferiority.  We are not only "out of it"... we don't know what "it" is.

Bill Holm made the point that Minneota [mini-OH-dah] is just as cool a place to live as SoHo. The Holm book I could locate on this Sunday afternoon is called Prairie Days. He describes the richness of small town Minnesota. However, he "puts it out there" and names the problem that has a name-failure. Being absolutely nobody. Although he uses a specific Minneota pioneer family as an example, he writes about all of the loser Eleanor Rigbys on earth... Where do they all come from?  Many from rural Minnesota... as I do.

One person who will go down in history as a nobody was my grandmother. Scratch that. She won't go down in history at all.  She was born in 1903, spent almost her entire life in a small northern Minnesota town, and died about 15 years ago. She married a farmer in that small town, and raised two daughters (one of whom was my mother, in a ramshackle farmhouse.  It did not have central heat and they never owned a phone. There was no bathtub, and when I was little, she would heat water on her cast iron wood stove, very similar to this one http://oldfolkstreasuretrove.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/woodcookstove.jpg and bathe me in a galvanized washtub. Her washing machine had an electric agitator, but the "spin cycle" was a wringer that looked exactly like this. http://blogs.families.com/media/133380495-M.jpg. She had no clothes dryer-just clotheslines stretched across a back porch.

Now here's the hard part to say, but it's true-she wasn't very bright. And she would fit Bill Holm's assessment of the world's definition of "failure"--an absolute nobody. She had an eighth grade education, and I'm sure she didn't set the world on fire there. She never learned to drive. She was a good seamstress, and she made terrific cookies though. She used Depression era kitchen utensils that looked exactly like this. http://i2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/423/338/51/16b6_1.JPG

The frustration for me was that there was just no engaging her in any meaningful conversation beyond minutiae. I'm sure she never saw a major newspaper. Her vocabulary was stunted. Beginning when I was about 11 or 12, I could think rings around her. My grandfather, although kind, was miserly. He gave Grandma a paltry allowance to run the household, which I didn't question then, but now, as a feminist, makes me apoplectic.  He would drive her to town once a week so that she could do her shopping. Those trips, and going to church, were pretty much her only contact with the outside world.

When I went off to college, I studied psychology. She never did understand that I wasn't in a nursing program.  In Grandma's mind, there were three occupations for women: nursing, teaching and secretarial work. She figured out that I wasn't pursing the last two so, in her mind, "nursing" was my major.  I finally gave up trying to clarify it for her. When she asked how my "nursing program" was going, I just said "Fine."  Along the way, I recognized Grandma's nature described when I heard the term "poverty of ideas." I loved her dearly, but I couldn't connect with her once I hit adolescence.

But what I'd do to have her back and spend days and days with her as a child again!

From where I am now, I wouldn't be impatient and bored with her inability to wax poetic on the meaning of life. I'd be enamored with her simplicity. Grandma would wait for my family to visit every Sunday. We didn't come every Sunday, of course, but now I know she must have longed to see us every week. When we drove into the farmyard, her face would often be there in the front room window, looking for us. Fresh cookies were always waiting. When it came time to leave, she would motion for us kids to come over to her, and she would take out her little coin purse. She would give each of my siblings and me 25 cents which, even in 1970s dollars, wasn't much. What I know now was that 25 cents would be coming out of her meager allowance--a whole dollar for four kids.

Bill Holm helped me to see that Grandma was anything but a nobody. When my mother died, and I was going through Mom's things, I came across a small paperback songbook called Rubies of Rapture and Redemption that was worn and yellowed with age. I was about to toss it out, and then a small piece of paper fell out of it.  It was my mom's handwriting, and here's what it says,

"I remember my mother ordering this book about 1940. When she was alone, she would sing. Grandma Selma truly loved God. [ ] Grandma treasured this book. Someone please take it and treasure it too. Mom Jean"

I started to cry. I had no idea; I had never heard Grandma sing a note. I know she couldn't read music. And guess what the price was? Yup-25 cents.

The note penetrated my heart in a couple of ways; my mother and I had a thorny relationship. Mom's note implies that, in recognizing this humble act of a simple woman, my mother may have had some depth and warmth that I couldn't see. Mostly, I cannot look at this book without getting choked up-and feeling profoundly ashamed. Visualize a smarty pants college student, impatient with her grandmother's unsophisticated "poverty of ideas."  [Wince]  While smarty pants was studying at a major university, contemplating Jungian thought, Grandma was stealing away into a corner for a few minutes, between her many farmwife duties, to sing hymns of praise to her creator.

Compared to Grandma, I am the failure. When I think that privileged people spend good money for spiritual retreats in minimalist hermitages, I am dumbfounded that Grandma's house was the idyllic ascetic experience-and I never knew what I had.

I have Grandma's old kitchen utensils.... as well as the original wringer from her vintage washer, which is on display in my laundry room. I have precious memories and, now, the true definition of success. And I have her dilapidated hymnal, which I will treasure always. Grandma-I found your notes in the margin near only one hymn, Blessed Assurance. [smile] That's one of my favorite hymns too. Photos of her hymnal, and my mother's note, are below.

  Grandma's 25 cent mail order hymnal       My mother's  "treasure this" note that fell out of the book, as I was about to throw it away.    

Epilogue: Just a couple of other amazing ironies... Bill Holm was a friend of Garrison Keillor, who as we all know brings our "dull" Lake Wobegon existence to a world audience that apparently finds it interesting each week on NPR's A Prairie Home Companion. And Bob Dylan is from northern Minnesota, like Grandma and I are. He had an influence on and a friendship with the Beatles who, yes, gave us Eleanor Rigby.