Just Resting Her Eyes: Elizabeth “Betty” DeGroat (1920-2011) - Guest Post

This is one in a series of weekly posts from Accidental Mentors subscribers about one of their accidental mentors. Today's guest writer is Wendy DeGroat.

Wendy DeGroat is the author of Beautiful Machinery and an unpublished documentary poetry manuscript. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Commonplace, the museum of americana, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Wendy is a teacher-librarian and mindfulness instructor who also publishes about work-related topics. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she serves as a facilitator for Living the Richmond Pledge workshops which empower participants to take an active role in ending racism. After decades in public education, she’s contemplating what the chapter after school bells holds for her. She started Furrow and Fire to write her way through figuring it out.

“I wasn’t asleep. I was just resting my eyes,” Gram insisted, lifting her chin to meet my gaze before shifting the face-down issue of Good Housekeeping from her lap to the coffee table.

She pushed herself up from her chair and bustled to the kitchen. I followed, shaking my head, a smile tugging at the corners of my lips. She’d already set sweet pickles, spicy brown mustard, and a deli packet on the counter by the time I walked the eight or nine steps to join her. As the smoky tang of Lebanon bologna scented the air, I grabbed plates and glasses from the cupboard.

This was a familiar scene when I’d stay with Gram and Pop in Florida, a state they first visited with my Dad and Aunt Mae in the late forties after Gram’s mother Lottie began working winters at The Osceola Inn. They retired to Florida from New Jersey around the time I started junior high.

Gram and me in my parents’ yard when I was home from college for Thanksgiving.

In both states, Gram was the embodiment of industry.

She managed the cafeteria at High Point Regional High School when I was a kid, overseeing a crew that included a jovial woman I called the milkshake lady, her station a place I’d gravitate to amid the jumble of students. Gram’s office sat behind the serving lines, across from a walk-in freezer I’d scamper in and out of while she updated ledgers, called vendors, and planned menus.

The walls, tile floors, appliances, and serving lines formed intersecting canyons, carrying the rise and fall of her voice and those of the other hair-netted women across the staff side of the cafeteria, laughter and the clatter of stainless-steel trays echoing amid the steam and stirs.

She had a side hustle too: cakes, elaborate wedding cakes with fountains, toppers, and tiny figurines on staircases between the tiers. Once I could hold a brush steady, I helped paint them to match the wedding party, and on the drive to the reception hall, we’d gather ferns to arrange around the bottom layers.

Gram’s last wedding cake, which she baked for my brother and his wife.

Her kitchen was bigger then. On the nights of wedding weeks, swirls of cocoa, vanilla, and White Shoulders perfume wafted through the house as Gram moved steadily down a table laden with cakes, leveling off each top. Then, while Pop and I poured milk over bowls of chocolate cake shavings, she piped rows of violets and roses onto wax paper.

I didn’t realize it, but Gram was showing me the ways that work could matter. Work was where you could build a community, where you could make money to pay the bills, where you could express your creative flair, where you could do something that could make a difference to someone else.

She took pride in her work. The cafeteria manager post was one she accepted in her mid-forties, a role that demanded every skill she’d acquired in her previous jobs at Woolworth’s and my grade school - plus more. It was her staff photo from the yearbook that ran with Gram’s obituary. On display boards for the memorial service, we included her recipe for red velvet cake, and beside photos with family and friends, pictures of wedding cakes she’d made for her grandchildren.

She also knew how to play.

Gram valued time with family and “the girls” she loved being one of - the women at High Point and those she befriended in her Florida neighborhood. Time with the girls, her sisters, or my Mom (usually with me and my brother in tow) often involved savoring food someone else had fixed, like hard rolls with butter at Johnny’s Smoke Shop, or steak, rare, at Zaberers near Atlantic City.

Mom, me, James, and Gram dressed up for dinner at Zaberers.

Along with dining out, she enjoyed sunsets at the shore, cocktails, card games, and crafts. I can picture her sipping a Tom Collins with Mom while James and I splashed in the brook-fed pool, stacking pennies for Rummy Royal, and layering intricate cuts of paper into scenes she later enclosed in frames.

At work or play, she rarely sat still. An hour was pushing it. She might read an article or watch an episode of Hee Haw, but she once told me (a librarian, mind you), her chin held high, that she’d never read a book from cover to cover.

I was a quicker study at the lessons about work than play. So much so that a few years ago when my wife and I developed a list of core intentions to guide our lives, we included “cultivate delight” – mainly as a reminder to me.

I sometimes wonder what Gram meant for me to learn. We didn’t discuss her values or beliefs. I don’t think I ever asked. In the forty-two years our lives overlapped, I don’t remember hearing her pray, and the only times I saw her in church were for weddings and funerals. Her work was its own kind of faith.

The erosion of Gram’s ability to work or play felt swift but occurred over decades. I first noticed something was changing when her old stand mixer made its way to my pantry. As more years passed, she stopped telling me about outings with the girls because there were no longer girlfriends in her life to lunch or laugh with. During this dwindling time, I learned another lesson.

As her health declined, Gram refused to admit the slightest need – not for sturdier shoes, prescriptions, hearing aids, recovery time after surgery, or someone to help around the house. Each need marred the stalwart image of herself in her mind’s eye – and she’d have none of it.

Yes, aging and dementia would have overcome her eventually. But I wonder how many more sunsets she could have watched, how many more times she could have heard a friend’s laughter, how much longer she could have kept doing if she’d accepted her changing body and accepted help. 

I don’t excel at admitting my needs or accepting help either. This is the hardest lesson. And asking for help? I swear I can see Gram shaking her head sometimes, but I’m working on it.

Her birthday’s in January. To mark what would have been her 104^th, I plan to dust off her mixer, bake a red velvet cake, call my family, and invite some girlfriends over to play dominoes and toast my hard-working, hard-playing, proud, loving grandmother.