Grandmotherly Advice

A few years ago, my twin brother moved to Boston, MA. My mother, father, grandmother and I all drove out with him. My father drove the rental van; my brother drove his beaten up Saturn. I had the pleasure of driving my father’s new maroon-colored Ford Taurus and although it was a slight advantage over the rest of the travelers, it wasn’t the best one. I also had the best passenger. My grandmother. She is a 94-year-old firecracker who was instrumental in my coming out. Believe it or not, she was the first family member I told.

While driving, Grandma could hardly sit still. She was so excited and was a chatterbox from the moment we left the driveway. Once we got out onto the highway, she began pointing out historical sites along the way. Historical in the fact that my great aunt Edith used to camp, right over there, on Cayuga Lake.

I nodded and smiled, letting her talk away. Every once and awhile a Maroon colored car would speed by us, and Grandma would yell, “There they go!” And I’d laugh, shake my head and say, “No, Grandma. We’re in the Maroon car.”

“Oh yeah,” she’d shrug and say it again an hour later.

We listened to music for a while too, classical movie soundtracks that she loved like Braveheart and Rudy. A Volkswagen Beetle passed by us and Grandma told me how she had almost bought one last year. But instead, she had pulled into our driveway in brand new blue Dodge Neon, complete with a spoiler on the back. “I just wanted a new car,” she said simply.

We drove in silence for a bit and moments passed until she began to speak about my uncle Jon. “I think that strand runs in our family,” she said referring to the “gay” gene. I agreed. Though my uncle is married to a woman now, he had come out to my grandmother years before. She told me how he had taken her for a drive and broke down crying. After she had asked him what was wrong, he told her he was gay. Her response was simply this, “Okay. But why are you crying?” My uncle then asked her if she still loved him. And Grandma was shocked because, “How could any mother stop loving a son?”

She said it was the same for me. That I was and will always be Lyndsey to her no matter what sexual preference I may have. “I knew before you even told me,” she confided. I asked her how. She said that when I made a trip to visit her and my mother in Florida a few years ago, I was wearing a red bandana.

“Once you put that on, I said to myself, ‘there goes Lynn!’” And then she raised her fist proudly into the air and bellowed “Good for you!”

At that moment, I was overwhelmed by her ability to give unconditional love so freely. And I understood that the reason she was old in age but still so young and so free at heart was because of her ability to love. How wonderful is it to have someone like that in my life?

We continued to talk about how hard it was for me to carry that secret around, and how hard it must be for every gay and lesbian out there. I told her how I was shaking with fear when I wrote her the letter in which I had come out to her and she patted me lovingly on the arm as if to say that I should have known better. Her response was as caring and as warm to me as it had been to her own son. She even offered to be there when I was ready to tell my parents. As we continued along the highway, I felt a new sense of pride. I know how truly blessed I was to have her in my life.

A little further into the trip, my grandmother switched cars and drove the rest of the way with my brother while his girlfriend rode with me. Later on in the weekend, he would tell me that when they were driving, Grandma kept pointing to a maroon Ford Taurus in front of them and saying, “Boy that car has been with us the whole trip!”

My brother laughed and said, “Gram, that’s cause it’s Lyndsey.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. "I keep forgetting.”

Story ID:	1842
Written by:	Lyndsey Darcangelo (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Story
Writers Conference:	$500 2007 Family Memories Writing Project
Location:	Buffalo NY USA
Year:	2006
Person:	Myself