The 1412 Birthday Cards for Grandma

I started coming at noon and again after work. I read until my voice went scratchy. Then Jeff started coming after his route and reading too, in his slow careful voice, getting the names wrong, and Grandma would correct him.

“That’s Schaefer, not Shafer. Her father ran the elevator at Brule.”

She knew them. That was the thing. She knew almost every one.

A name I read out would mean nothing to me, and she would say, “Third grade, 1958. She was afraid of the stove. I let her sit by the window.”

Or, “That’s one of the Hansen boys. The middle one. He couldn’t spell to save his life, but he could add a column of numbers faster than I could.”

Or, “Oh. Her brother drowned in the Platte the summer she was twelve. She didn’t talk for most of that fall. I’m glad she’s all right.”

I started writing the details down in a spiral notebook. Name, year, what Grandma said. By the end it was three notebooks.

Most of the cards were from her old students. People in their seventies and eighties now. Grandparents. Great-grandparents.

A lot of them wrote more than they meant to, I think. They would start with Happy Birthday and then the pen would just keep going.

One woman wrote from Gering: “You let me and my brother sleep at the schoolhouse the night of the blizzard in January 1949. You stayed up all night feeding the stove and telling us stories so we wouldn’t be scared. My dad came on a horse for us on the third day. I was seven. I am eighty-four and I still remember the story about the bear.”

Grandma laughed so hard at that one she had to take her glasses off.

“There wasn’t any bear,” she said. “I made the bear up. There were eleven kids in that schoolhouse for three days and I had to make up something.”

A man wrote from Kearney that she had caught him smoking behind the coal shed when he was thirteen, and had not told his father, and had made him read Ivanhoe instead. “Worst punishment of my life,” he wrote. “I became a high school English teacher for thirty-four years. I blame you.”

A woman wrote that Grandma had driven her to the doctor in Ogallala in a snowstorm when her appendix burst, because her family had no car that year. “I would not be here,” she wrote. “My four children would not be here. My nine grandchildren. You did that with a borrowed Ford.”

Not all of them were students. Some of them were their children, writing for a parent who had died. Some of them were strangers who had heard it on the radio and just wanted to send a card to a woman who was turning one hundred.

There was one from a third-grade class at the grade school in town, twenty-two cards in one big envelope, each one with a crayon drawing. I described every drawing to her. She asked what color the sky was in each one.

Then there was the card from Oregon. It came in the second week. It was a plain card with a pheasant on the front, and the handwriting inside was big and shaky and very careful, the handwriting of someone who had worked hard to write it.

I read it out loud the way I read them all. “Dear Mrs. Lund. You won’t remember me. My name is Harold. My family farmed south of the river in the 1940s and I came to your school in the fall of 1946. I was seven years old and I could not read. The teacher before you had given up on me. My dad said I was slow.”