According to the U.S. Government, today would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday.
But Dorothy Clark was older than her (official) years. She always told us her birth year was 1917. It was when she was ready to retire and went to apply for Social Security benefits that the three years were subtracted.
We did a lot of things together when I was young, like going to Lexington Market, where vendors would recognize her. Or, closer to home, we would walk to the Park Lane shopping center to get groceries, or to buy the late edition 10-Star (late edition) News-American newspaper from the old man at the Read’s corner drugstore, or to browse through Dacks five and dime or Blank’s fabric store... So it was natural that I was with her when someone told her they could not confirm her birthdate.
She had always told the story of how she lost some important documents, like the one with my mother’s baby footprints. She was at a train station when someone stole her bag. However, the fact that her own birth certificate was among the missing items was never important to her until that day in the late 1970s at the Social Security office. My grandmother never learned to drive, and she did not have any official I.D. card at the time. We were told they would have to search for the official record of her birth.
My grandmother was born Dorothy May Griffin in Fulton, Maryland. Her mother moved her and her sister Edna many times, between farms there in Howard County and farms somewhere on the Eastern Shore. Dorothy only had a third grade education because she had to stay home to work on those farms. She regretted it, but it wasn’t her fault. Her mother must have also told 1930 U.S. Census workers she was younger than she really was, because that was from where the 1920 birthdate was acquired. Not unlike many archives from the era, the actual Fulton birth records were lost in a fire sometime after the 1920s. So the Census data was the only proof that my grandmother was even born at all.
I don’t remember visiting her hometown of Fulton, but I do remember visiting a church homecoming on the Eastern Shore where my grandmother and great-grandmother knew people. There, either on that visit or another, we also went to visit my great-grandmother’s childhood friend Henny, who was excited about the indoor bathroom she finally had built, along with a new pull-down ladder that could take her up to her attic. Visiting that part of the Eastern Shore was like stepping back in time in many ways. I remember being in the car as we drove past shacks that could have been old slave cabins.
Back in Howard County, I do remember visiting my grandmother’s Aunt Ella. She was a light-skinned woman, who looks very Native American to me now in photos. She lived near what my grandmother called "Columbia City", better known to most people as just Columbia, the planned community developed by the Rouse Company in the 1960s. Aunt Ella’s home looked nothing like the new homes you see in Columbia. (And no one could have predicted that years later that I would one day be a guest at the home of one of the leaders of the Rouse Company. He and his wife had a sprawling home that was even much more unlike Aunt Ella’s modest house.)
It was in or near Howard County that Dorothy met and married my grandfather Clarence. Later, in Baltimore, she gave birth to my mother. She later divorced my grandfather and eventually met my other grandfather, James. Along the way, she worked in housekeeping for many years. She worked at the now-defunct Baltimore Spice Company, the original producers of Old Bay Seasoning. She, herself was a great cook. She eventually ended her career as a part-time housekeeper for a prominent Jewish family in Northwest Baltimore, but her jobs only involved cleaning and ironing, not cooking. That was something she was able to reserve for our family. Christmas cookies, applesauce cake, cinnamon raisin rolls, crabapple jelly, candied watermelon rind, peach preserves... almost everything, including fried chicken. To this day, no other fried chicken tastes quite like Grandma’s fried chicken.
My grandmother loved to tell stories from her past... She remembered playing as a child on the farm, rolling a barrel hoop with a white boy… She remembered her mother cutting too much of her hair off as punishment for something and it never growing back the way she wanted… She remembered having many kittens, and carrying them in a basket… She remembered seeing what must have been some kind of plane land near the farm at night. All she could see was a bright light. She wondered later if it was a UFO… She remembered having a miscarriage, and she also remembered having a still-born girl, whom she often referred to as my mother’s sister… She also remembered having an operation and being above the operating table when her heart momentarily stopped…
It was natural that I accompanied Dorothy to apply for her Social Security retirement benefits; I had already been a part of her career. When I was too young to be left at home while my mother went to work full-time, I spent time with my grandmother, going with her to her part-time job, helping her with her work. At home, in a not-so-northwest part of Northwest Baltimore, she and my grandfather James had moved the family from an apartment in West Baltimore and a part of Mulberry Street that was eventually replaced by the infamous Highway to Nowhere. That neighborhood was, before this unfinished Interstate 170 project was dug into it, a stable middle-class African-American community. I have vague memories of being in that home, but would only realize years later how close it was to the Edgar Allan Poe House… Maybe it was destined that I would become a writer too, and to be able to share my memories of my grandmother and her life.
After years of working, decades later, and taking care of me, even walking me to school in my early years at Edgecombe Circle Elementary School, Dorothy lived out her retirement years, at that house in Northwest Baltimore, not far from Pimlico Race Track. James had moved on by then. Her sister Edna had died. Then her mother died. but she never complained about it all. One of my greatest gifts to her was my cat Allie. When I briefly moved to Arizona, I decided to leave Allie with my grandmother. They had always enjoyed visiting with each other, and I knew an aging, 12-year-old Allie would enjoy being in my grandmother’s arms more than in a cat carrier, drugged and packed away under my airplane seat like luggage for nearly five hours. Even when I moved back to Baltimore, Allie stayed with her. Just a few years later Allie died on one of her bed pillows.
My grandmother's ability to tell or even remember her stories seemed to fade very fast during her last years. Maybe she had repeatedly told those stories of her childhood and her illnesses because somehow she knew she would, someday, not be able to. She used to like sewing and crocheting, painting, wallpapering and other handiwork, as well as cooking, and putting together picture puzzles, finding words in a word search puzzle, listening to talk radio, watching CBS soap operas, collecting coins, collecting newspaper and magazine articles… All of that faded too. She never touched the last word search book or picture puzzle I bought for her, and when I found a clip of her favorite soap opera, "The Edge of Night", on YouTube, she didn’t remember it. In the early 2000s, when I was working in DC, the family took her to the Smithsonian, where she even touched a moon rock at the National Air and Space Museum, but she didn’t remember that either, even after I showed her photos.
She passed away, in her own bed, early in 2015. They say dementia may be hereditary, and she and I were so much alike, but I hope my own memories of her and her life will never fade.
