The woman who once terrified me
In 1926, she took her teenagers around the world. Literally.
To be honest, we were all a little scared of my great-grandmother. Everyone called her Gram Pat, although Pat wasn’t her actual name. Curiously, it was the first name of her second husband. Regardless, it fit her and she was the uncontested matriarch of our family until she passed at age 95.
My father, a commanding Naval officer himself, would conduct full-scale military preparation before we spent any time with my great-grandmother. While standing at attention in our floor-length pink princess dresses, he would drill me and my sister on table manners; no elbows on the table, don’t chew with your mouth open, finish everything on your plate, and always, please and thank you. Even he was intimidated by his grandmother’s expectations about how children should dress and behave. It didn’t matter if we were only 3 and 5.
It wasn’t until I grew up and became our family’s de-facto historian that my thoughts about her became less intimidating and more inspiring.
I’ve always loved history. And while yes, the stories of kings and queens, or the court of Versailles are interesting, it’s the stories of ordinary people I’m especially drawn to. There’s something comforting about knowing that men and women who lived hundreds of years ago wrestled with similar struggles as me.
And somewhere along the way, because of this love of stories from the past, I have become the keeper of my family’s history—on both sides—especially the photographs and the books.
I don’t think it was until I had children of my own that I took the time to read the book Gram Pat had written about her father. A treasure to be sure. And while I loved discovering that she had compiled this history of his life, including pictures, dates, locations, and her stories of him, to be honest, I wanted more. About her.
The closest we get to her in the book is probably the dedication:
To the memory of my father, Simon Benson, who knew the value of hard work and discipline, but many other important things too—he knew all the stars and from them could make a good guess at the weather. For him the wind in the trees was always a song, and he knew sixteen colors of green in the forest. He liked to teach and I was an eager pupil.
I love knowing that those are the sentiments she chose to include in the dedication.
Over the years, I’ve slowly been making my way through all of our family albums. I select the most important photographs, scan them, and then…let the rest go. Last year, I went through 125 albums.
Not long ago, I was over at my aunt’s picking up more photo albums and she pulled out some oversized green leather ones to show me.
“These are the albums from mom’s trip around the world,” she explained. “I don’t want to get rid of them. But I don’t know what to do with them.”
I had vague memories of my granny talking about this “trip around the world” but to be honest, I hadn’t fully appreciated exactly what that meant until I began the project of scanning in the photos from it.
In 1926, my great-grandmother, divorced once, remarried, and recently widowed, took her two teenage children—my granny, age 13 and her older brother, age 16—on a trip around the world…literally.
As I studied the photographs and deciphered her faded cursive notes, I realized they had visited Angkor Wat in Cambodia, along with ports in Bali, China, India, Egypt, and Greece.
And suddenly the woman who once terrified us in our pink princess dresses started to feel very different to me.
I thought about her hauling those teenagers around in hot and humid countries, wearing not Nike Air running shoes with arch support and moisture-wicking athletic wear, but lace-up boots under heavy dresses. I thought about the amount of teenage complaining she must have endured. “We’re bored!” And considering that her own mother had died of tuberculosis when she was only 10 years old, I’m sure the thought of disease was a constant companion for her.
I remember asking my mom once for her advice on raising teenagers and she had simply said, “Just get ‘em through it and keep ‘em alive.”
Gram Pat took that to a whole different level. The courage this trip must have taken.
While I can’t know for sure, I’m guessing my great-grandmother took this journey on as a way to instill in her children an appreciation for different places and cultures around the world as well as to see the world at large herself.
What she probably hadn’t considered was that a hundred years later, her great-granddaughter would sit at a dining room table carefully scanning the photographs from that trip one by one.
That this great-granddaughter, not yet born when she boarded those steamships, would one day look at her albums and feel inspired by her courage.
While no one needs 125 (and counting) photo albums, I love thinking that leaving these little bits behind are like Easter eggs for someone in the future to find.
So I guess that’s why I write down these stories. Because we never know how what we’re doing today may inspire someone we’ll never know.
Which makes me think maybe the little pieces of all of our lives matter more than we realize.
Cheers,
Carrie
Gram Pat and the Teenagers, 1926, Cambodia