JUNE 25, 2023 – I never heard anyone call Gaga anything but “Gaga,” except for Mother, who called her “Mother.” The name came from my oldest sister, Kristina, or “Nina,” as we called her, because Nina called herself “Nina,” since she herself couldn’t pronounce “Kristina.” She couldn’t pronounce “grandmother” either, or any derivative thereof, so she called our grandmother, Orrell Baldwin Holman, “Gaga,” which was the only logical choice, after having named our paternal grandmother, “Hilda,” just plain “Ga.”
Gaga had not attended college, and she was not an intellectual, but her mental alertness defied old age. When she was in her late 90s, I had numerous business trips to New York, and on nearly each of those occasions, I would hop on a bus at Port Authority in Manhattan and ride over to Rutherford to visit her.
Each time, I’d be sure to play a game of Scrabble, for which her mind and temperament were well suited. We were competitive, and whenever I spelled a word that she questioned, she called it a “Yeti,” which was one of the first such “non-word” words (according to Gaga) that I had used against her. Whenever she struggled with a bad bunch of tiles and limited opportunities on the board, she’d say, “Well, sometimes you just can’t win for losing.” She’d gladly keep score, but with a touch of humor, she’d always offer to yield the honors to me. “Do you want me to keep score, or do you want to win?” she’d ask.
I remember two of those Scrabble games in particular, which we played on a card table set up in her day room, one of the large bedrooms on the second floor of the house. During one game, Gaga was taking a long time to look over the board, complaining all the while in her New Jersey accent about what a “hahrrable” board it was. I decided to take the opportunity to run downstairs to get a glass of water. When I soon returned, Gaga chuckled and said, “You weren’t even gone long to for me to cheat.”
On another occasion, Gaga was taking quite some time scouring the board for an opportunity “to make lots of money,” as she put it. As boredom set in, I pulled the old Scrabble box to my end of the table to investigate what was in it. Next to a couple of tile couches and atop a set of directions on yellowed paper, I found a short, narrow, dark brown ruler, which must have found its way into the box many years before. It had the imprint of Berkshire Life Insurance Company on the ruler side, and on the flip side was an actuarial scale for life expectancies. Gaga was 98 at the time—an age that was quite literally off the scale, or at least, off that scale.
“What have you got there?” she asked.
I thought, An actuarial scale, and oh by the way, Gaga, according to this, you’re supposed to be long dead! It would have been something she herself would say, given her endearing penchant for being brutally frank without being abrasive. But somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to say any such thing, so I turned it over and just said, “A ruler.”
“Let me see,” she said.
I handed it to her, hoping she wouldn’t notice the crude little chart that ended with, “If you are . . . 80, you can live to . . . 85.” She gave the ruler side a glance and then, inevitably, flipped it over. In a moment, she had it figured out, turned down the corners of her mouth and grunted matter-of-factly, as if to say, What do you know? Looks as if I beat these odds.
“I guess I’d better finish my turn,” she said, shifting her focus back to the game. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
