Nikki was one of the few Neshaminy people I stayed in contact with during my college days. She's one of the few I still interact with in person - although that's really a matter of time and tide. It's kind of funny, watching your friends grow up, see how they change a little bit each time you meet them. I have this memory of her, back in eleventh grade (I think), right after her maternal grandfather passed. I remember kneeling by her desk, hugging her and wondering why the fuck she felt compelled to go into school the morning after a thing like that.Troopers. You never really know which ones they are until they get shook.
My paternal grandparents help raise my brother and I. Ester and John. They were hard line Vatican I folks from Philadelphia, taught my brother and I the Latin mass, the rosary, the mysteries, the creeds...whole shabang. My grandmother, Ester, passed a few days after I left kindergarten. She..um...the reason that the elder McGovern's played such a large roll in our lives was because my mom and dad worked weird hours. Mom was the personnel manager at the Neshaminy Mall's Strawbridge & Clothier, so her hours were just all over the clock. And in kindergarten class, (the unfortunately named) Mrs. Skank and her student teacher were going to have a Mother's Day Tea. And my mom couldn't make it, because of work, so we decided that my grandmother would go.
The only picture I have of her - and I have two copies of this - is her and I walking through the classroom, my hand raised up to hold her's, and I'm smiling at the camera and she's smiling down at me. My hair was already going from redish-brown to it's current black state, and she's smiling down, and when I look at it now she's...I can see how frail she was. And I'm not seeing the woman who had screaming matches with my mother over my brother and I going to the museum and seeing evolution or how the stars hang in the heavens. I'm not seeing her laying on the couch too weak to move because her heart's on it's last legs.
All I'm seeing is this one moment that I barely remember.
I usually shut up when people say "They're in a better place". This, I suppose is proof that there is a God, because a minor miracle has occurred: I've shut my mouth. I don't mention that I could never, even as a little kid, tell the difference between heaven and hell without the normal cues (Clouds/Fire), or how most of my life has been spent wanting to wring the Logo's neck - and tend to feel that way still.
But a fun bit of providence...years later, around fifth grade, when my paternal grandfather passed, we got a letter in the mail from that student teacher. Inside was a mass card and a copy of the picture from the Mother's Day Tea. A lady friend once noted that it's the last picture of me "Honestly smiling," and that "All the others just show [me] smirking at a joke" or "trying to get the photographer to shut up". Both are true, I guess.
Flash-forward to now. Nikki's maternal grandmother will be laid to rest on Thursday. I know all those grandkids and all of the family, and...Omnia mutantur nihil interit. De hoc satis.
