***

“Sorry, I’m late, I came straight from work.” I bend down for a peck on my cheek.

“No, no, I have time. What did you say your work was?”

Work. She knows work, my aging great-grandmother, she was in the factories at just 15, as part of the women’s war effort to produce uniforms for the British army. In exchange for a ration, for meager pay. But my work? Hmm.

“I’m a teacher,” I tell her.

“What do you teach?”

I look at her, around the room. Other women, men, folded into chairs, someone snoring, tichel pulled over her eyes, a man shuffling by in slippers. Work? These people are long post work, they’re post retirement, the golden years beginning to corrode.

But in the dancing question in my grandmother’s eyes, there are flecks of gold. She’s excited about anything, just conversing about jobs, connecting.

“Two subjects,” I say without thinking.

“What are they?”

“English,” and oh, why two? Why not just an English teacher? English she knows, this wordsmith, poetess. But computers?

It’s so far out of her remit. In her room she has a phone with over-sized numbers. It’s there for emergencies or for days when she remembers her daughters’ phone numbers. We use it sometimes to call a taxi home, just for the novelty.

She’s ravaged by Alzheimer’s, straddling worlds, the young girl-teenager-woman she used to be, stories of having to separate from parents, a million miles away on a train. Standing up to the Nazis to try and save her father. Terrified and frozen and just 12 years old, but her father, her father. Stories like that and others.

The vulnerability of today, an old lady’s world, and history going back 60 years are the strands in her mind, thick and thin. That’s what her days are braided of.

We talk about what was, what is. She talks. And there’s much she understands about my life too. But I don’t like to thrust a new world in her face.

“That’s lovely about English, what was the other thing you teach?”

Computers is Mars to her.

She’s looking at me expectantly so I hand her that foreign planet. “Computers.”

“I’ve seen one. What does it do?”

She’s never sat in front of a screen. Handled a mouse. Gone on the web. What does it do?

I know I’m going to stumble over explanations, and she’ll shake her head, saying uh huh, hm, trying to follow along.

“Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

“It is, sheifeleh, now what were you saying about the computer machine?”

“It’s like a calculator, a sophisticated calculator,” I say.

“Oh, that sounds interesting,” she says. “Do you think it’s something I could learn?”

She’s almost 90, her mind fickle as the wind, but oh, she wants to learn.

She cannot, and she’ll likely forget about it as soon as I go. But I envy her. For having the space in her heart to think she could, for living moment to shining moment, confusion and memory lapses paling in the spectre of new possibility. Her vitality, her interest, alive and bubbling.

***

Overtime again. Girls pull on coats, grab bags, bang the door. And I’m waiting with that one last girl, hunched over a screen.

“See, you’ve got to use this formula.”

“Why? What does it do?” she asks, and I just want to throw the towel in —

— but what she’s asking… my great-grandmother did too. What if I were sitting with her now? What if she could learn this? The thought is ludicrous, but I am that bit gentler, slower, as if, as if.

And — grandmother’s merit? — she gets it. She tries again and the answers, all 50, are correct. A smile breaks out over the girl’s face, blooms full, and I have to pretend I don’t see that she’s trying not to smile too wide.

“Great,” I say, nonchalantly. Like it’s normal that she got it, just like that, after four weeks of trying. “See what it does? Now how about you try this?” And I turn away and smile, broadly like her, into my handbag.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 707)