Grandma, Onion Sandwiches, and Billie Holiday

Thanks to my late grandmother, I am addicted to music. I have to have music playing in the car whether I am traveling to the local grocer or on a 500-mile journey. I have music playing in my home office and my campus office while I work. I even use music in some courses I teach to make a?point, set the mood for the class period, or as an example of some concept. This love of music hit me from a very early age.

I am an only child and when I was quite young my maternal grandmother knew there would be no more after me. She loved me to the point that, when she babysat and my mother came to pick me up, Grandma tried to dissuade my mother from actually taking me home. It was what happened during those hours I was in her care that molded my love for music.

Grandma was divorced and lived alone in the house she owned next door to ours. She would have me over whether my mother was leaving the house or not. Our routine was pretty much the same each day I was there. We would put on a number of 78rpm vinyl records of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and many others. At lunch time, we had a staple from her past (I still have not met anyone else who ever ate these).

While listening to these fabulous songs and the extraordinarily talented musicians and side players who created ?and recorded them, we sat at her kitchen table and ate sandwiches that consisted of white bread, mayonnaise, and thick slices of onion. As a boy, I thought the onion sandwich was something everyone ate. It wasn’t until I mentioned it to others, as I grew, that I started hearing “OOOO, that’s GROSS” and realizing that no one else in my world ate such a combination.

When my Grandmother became ill with irreparable kidney damage and was dying at just 49 years of age, she gave me all those recordings before she went into the hospital for the final time. The musical genres in my life have changed over the years, although I have developed a much broader taste in music than most of my contemporaries and my own children. I still cherish those memories of the jazz and big band songs we listened to and danced.

I’m sad that I do not still have those old 78’s in my possession (as a boy, I didn’t realize the value of them) but the love of music that she instilled in me has lived on for decades and I DO still possess that. When I hear some of those old songs, I recall positive flashbulb memories of sitting at that kitchen table with the (monaural) record player playing jazz and big band artists and my taste buds recall those onion sandwiches and my wonderful grandmother.

I never did learn to dance any better than I did when I was 5, 6, and 7 years of age, but the love of music Grandma instilled in me never left my soul. One never knows how far their influence on a child might go and for how many years that influence might endure.