Women of Two Centuries

My brothers and I called our father's mother, Grandma Mac. Her real name was Grace Dixon McMahon. Born in August 1879 in San Francisco, CA, she was the daughter of Fremont Dixon of Pennsylvania and Maria de Leon of Mexico. Not much is known about her early life, but after she married my Grandfather Edwin, they settled in Sonora, CA and by 1900, at the age of 21, she already had borne the first two of her eleven children.

Two thousand miles away, around the time that Grace was six, my other Grandmother, Mary Alice, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Beauregard Cornelius Heidt and Mary Helen McInnes. She married my Grandfather James Avery Finger in 1912 at the age of 26 and bore him three children, two sons and a daughter, my mother.

These two women had more than just thousands of miles separating them. In many ways, they couldn't have been more different. My California Grandmother was born into a state still wild by Eastern standards and still reverberating from the shock waves of the Gold Rush. Indeed, her husband's father had come to California in 1858 in hopes of finding gold and was captured by Indians and held captive for two years. My South Carolina Grandmother, on the other hand, grew up in what was considered a genteel society, could trace her roots to at least as far back as the Revolutionary War, married a doctor and had a nanny to help raise her three children.

What these two women did have in common though were lives devoted to god, family, responsibility and community. Grace was Catholic and rearing her children in her faith was of supreme importance to her. Mary Alice was Episcopalian and church attendance every Sunday was a ritual that was never missed. These two women also believed in personal responsibility. Each of my father's siblings had responsibilites in that busy household and from their youngest years learned how to look after and take care of each other. In my mother's family, one learned early to accept responsiblity for one's actions for, as my Grandmother often told my mother, "If you make your bed hard, you will have to lie in it." There was no accepting of excuses in either of those lady's families; each family member had to pull his or her own weight. These were good lessons to be learned on both sides of a continent that would soon be caught in the quagmire of a Great Depression.

As their children grew, these women also devoted much of their time to their communities. During the Depression, Grandmother Mary Alice sometimes accompanied my Grandfather on his housecalls in the poorer neighborhoods and willingly accepted jars of preserves, chickens, whatever the people could afford as payment. Grandma Mac made a point of visiting the sick and needy throughout the Sonora area.

These strong moral women bridged the gap of two centuries, combining the best qualities of their 19th. Century beginnings with those of the new. I hope I have inherited at least part of what was strong and good about them to take with me into the 21st. Century.

(In the above photo, at their one and only meeting about 1955, Mary Alice Finger and Grace McMahon, shared some moments and experiences over coffee.)

I have to smile when I see this photo of me with my parents and older brother Leo. After all, I know what a good sport my Mom was being. You see, my Dad, a stuntman for the movies, would often be away on location. And when I decided to arrive a week early, he was off filming a movie about the Civil War. (It was not his first Civil War movie; he had done stunt work for Clark Gable in the 1939 epic, "Gone With The Wind" - or so our family lore goes.) When the studio found out that my Mom was a Southerner from Charleston, South Carolina, they decided it would be great press for the movie if they showed my Dad rushing home to see his newborn daughter, Alicia Grace, still wearing his Union Army uniform. I don't think it actually helped the movie any, but it did get us in the paper and for years provided me with something to brag about at school.

I don't remember much of the years when my Dad did stunts for the movies because in 1955 (I was only 5 then) he was badly injured in a stagecoach stunt and he never did stunt work again. Having to provide for his family in some way, he turned to what he knew best - Western movies - and began writing screenplays. And so most of the memories I have of my Dad are not of watching him tumble off horses but rather watching his hand fly across pages and pages of yellow legal pads, his finger gripping those #2 pencils so tightly that even when he was 82 and I held his hand in the hospital for the last time, I could still feel the indentation left behind by all those years of pencils.

My Dad was a terrific storyteller but not much of a businessman. Yet I never had the sense that he wasn't doing anything less than the most important work - even if he wasn't grabbing a briefcase and heading off to an office every day like the Dads of most of my friends. My Dad was a writer and to me that was akin to being some kind of god, a creator of words and sentences and stories - a creator of lives. And sometimes those lives were every bit as real to me as my own.

It is no surprise then, at least not to me, that from the first moment that I can remember holding a #2 pencil in my own hand, I wanted to be a writer. But what does surprise me sometimes is how long it took for all those words that I had written over the years to finally weave themselves into a story. What happened in between all those words, I guess, has been my life.

Funny, how time (or the perception of it) changes when you have children. And suddenly your priorities change as well and you're caught up in a whirlwind of all things baby and then toddler and then little girl, and before you know it, you're fundraising chair for the Cedargrove PTA, and your writing, what there is of it, is measured, not in chapters and endings and new chapters, but in stolen sentences between carpools and piano lessons and tennis matches. And the thing of it is, you wouldn't change it for anything and part of you feels guilty for not being the writer you think you should be - and part of you feels guilty for even thinking you should be anything but the mother to those wonderful beautiful children.

But if you're lucky and the gods are smiling (or looking the other way), those children do grow up, and as heart wrenching as it may seem - and believe me, it seems that way - if you've done the job you were supposed to do, they actually become independent. And then your PTA days and carpool days are relegated to the crinkled pages of memory albums - and those stolen sentences of yours can actually become paragraphs and chapters and endings. And hopefully even new beginnings.

Well, at least until those wonderful grandchildren come over.