By Kitty Baker

Trolley cars delighted my beloved grandmother in those distant days before massive automobile traffic jams.

One winter, she packed a suitcase and arrived at Reading Terminal, wearing a long black coat and a hat secured to her mound of gray hair with an enormous hatpin. She smothered me with moist kisses and whispered conspiratorially, “Tomorrow, we’ll get on a trolley. We will run away, just us. We’ll play hooky.”

She and I had a secret agreement that together, we could get away with adventures not entirely approved of by
her daughter-in-law (my mother). Grandmom broke social rules in a time when children were more disciplined and less pampered. She filled my mental storybook with pages of escapades that haven’t lost vibrancy over 80 years.

During one visit, when I was 5, we walked by a Philadelphia fire station where firemen lounged outside with hands in their pants pockets. I lifted my dress, and mimicking the men, walked with hands in my underpants. At the dinner table, she recounted how the men called, “Missus, you sure have a funny little one there.” My dad laughed, but Mom didn’t even smile.

One time, she turned a Route 57 trolley into a four-masted schooner. As it moved along Old York Road toward Willow Grove Park, she was the captain telling me at the pretend steering wheel, “Keep her steady, mate. We’re going ‘round the Horn. Roughest seas in the world ahead.” We traveled to China and Japan. We sailed the world on trolleys.

The summer before I married, Grandmom bought four yards of dove-gray silk and asked me to make her a dress on the treadle Singer sewing machine. We patched red and white calico pieces in the wedding-ring design for my quilt, which she hand-stitched the following winter. She wore the silk dress to church one time, then wrapped it in blue tissue paper, telling my father she wanted to be buried in it.

At 99, she grew bored and lost interest in living; no onions to plant, no quilts to sew, no bread to bake. On a sunny day in May, a young pastor intoned, “We’ve gathered today to bid farewell to our dear departed sister.”
He may have comforted some mourners, but not me. He should have been concentrating on my grandmother’s energy, her sacrifices for the family, in a time long gone.

I rose and reminisced about visiting her in Schuylkill County during my  wonder-filled childhood summers;   about walking with her along the dirt road to a cool pine forest; finding box turtles; having bellyaches from eating too many Concord grapes from her arbor; reading by a kerosene lamp at night. I talked about the happy rainy days in her attic with fluid concerts pattering on the metal roof, while I read at a window next to the leather-bound trunk, which held my dad’s old school books and rusty ice skates. Recounting a few of my fondest memories, I talked less to the other mourners and more to my grandmom in the casket, with a red calla lily at the hem of her gray silk dress.

When I sat down, I thought I heard her say, “Goodbye, my funny little one.”