Maria. Mary. Mary Gaura Tomala. “Grandma.” A loving, tolerant woman who welcomed us into her home without us even having to knock on the door. It was ALWAYS, “Just come in.” She was a simple woman, born here but mostly raised with relatives in Slovakia, until she returned when she was in her early 20s. I don’t know why she came back, but she did. To spend time with Grandma was to be enveloped in love, joy, and peace.
She had a hard life. Apparently, she had a difficult time with depression, possibly a breakdown, in the late 1930s. By then, she had delivered 4 children in 5 years, including during the Great Depression. My mother was her youngest. My aunt, the nun — Sister Luke — was her oldest daughter. Two sons were in between. The older son had the TV business, and the younger son was my uncle, the missionary priest in Puerto Rico, who came home for a month every summer.
But those early years had to be stressful for her. Then add in my grandfather’s work hours being cut, little money, and years of Sunday afternoon fights when my grandfather would come home drunk from the club, and I am amazed she was as happy as she was when I knew her in my childhood.
Her early life was equally turbulent and traumatic. When she was a child, her mother abandoned the family to run off with another man. Left with a daughter and son to care for, Grandma’s father took them back to Slovakia to live with relatives. It was a place called Nizne Ruzbachy – and my apologies to the people there that I cannot add the accents above the Z’s and the E. It’s interesting to look at pictures of that area on Google Maps. It is a hilly, rural area with farms, very similar in climate and geography to where we lived in Connecticut.
Years later, her mother tried to reconnect, but my grandmother absolutely refused. Grandma never forgave her. I wonder sometimes if Grandma’s deep hurt over that didn’t affect her overall sense of who she was and her own value. That whole sense of, “if my own mother left, who else would be there for me?” It would certainly make sese that Grandma might have felt much pain and shame over that abandonment. Then, add in having a husband who was an alcoholic and it would make her pull into herself.
In thinking about my grandmother as a person, not just as “Grandma,” I can’t recall her ever having any close friends, with one exception.
That would have been a woman named Kate who lived in a nearby town. Kate was from that same area of Slovakia and had been married to Grandma’s brother. He died in the mid-1940s of cancer, and Kate eventually remarried and moved from Torrington.
Kate was a wonderful, happy woman, always bustling around. On some Sundays we would take Grandma to visit her and Kate would be laughing, and handing out ice cream and hugs in equal amounts. With Kate, Grandma would open up and they would talk for hours in Slovak. They really enjoyed each other. I imagine Grandma could talk openly with her, too, without fear of judgement, since Kate had been married to Grandma’s brother and knew the whole story.
Beyond Kate, though, I don’t recall Grandma having any other close emotional ties. No one came to visit Grandma at home, except family. And Grandma didn’t go out to visit friends. If she went anywhere, she went by herself.
And even though my grandfather’s sister lived upstairs, the two of them were like oil and water. As a kid, when you see older people together, you just assume that they are friends. But that was not the case. I’ll speak more about my great-aunt when I talk about my grandfather.
My earliest memories of Grandma date back to when I was about 4 years old. She would have been in her late 50s to early 60s then. I remember a woman coming home from work, or one time, running with a broom to chase a river rat away from us. We’d been playing outside, and the rat came through our backyard. I was more amazed that Grandma could run than in the presence of the rat.
Whenever we went upstairs, she was always happy to see us and let us have the run of her apartment. We could crawl around under her tables playing imaginary games. Rummage through her closets, bureaus, and cabinets just to explore. She didn’t care.
She always had a bowl full of nuts on the table, and we learned early how to wield a nutcracker and about the wide variety of nuts that existed. Of course, walnuts. But she had brazil nuts, almonds, and most of all – filberts, or hazelnuts as they are more commonly called in Europe. She always had LOTS of hazelnuts. I always thought of them as acorns because that’s what they looked like. And we ate so many of them that for Christmas, Grandma always wrapped up a bag of hazelnuts as our present. That was it – just hazelnuts – and that was all that mattered to me.
Often when we came in, she’d be making soup. And she’d always set a bowl at the table for us. Aside from her “Krupi” barley soup, my other favorite was her vegetable soup, which was like nobody else’s.
She used a big soup bone, and then this little basket of soup vegetables she got at the store. It had carrots, potatoes, celery, turnips, and kohlrabi – a root vegetable that looked like a tan carrot and which we only ever had from her. I loved it. She’d ladle the soup out then hand us the ketchup…because of course you always add ketchup to soup. At least we did with Grandma.
The ladle itself, she probably had a hand in making. She worked for years in a factory that made a wide range of metal implements — things like upholstery hardware, castings, hooks and eyes, pins, nails, chains, and handles — Turner & Seymour. It was about a mile and a half away, at the south end of town. Every day, rain, shine, or snow, she walked to and from work. Never had a car. Well, my grandfather had one for a short while, but she made him get rid of it. I never knew why. Earlier, before she married, she had worked at a similar factory in nearby Collinsville.
Here is her soup ladle from all those meals with Grandma. I have it now. It’s older than I am…which is saying a lot.
Other things I loved about her? Going to church with her on Sunday morning, EARLY. The old Slovak priest would do a 6:15 A.M. Mass all in Slovak, for the older parishioners. I didn’t understand a thing, but then I didn’t understand a thing during the usual weekday Masses in Latin either. For either of those, I’d sit there with the Missal or the Slovak prayer book, trying to match up the Latin or Slovak sides with the English words on the other.
I loved that she had a gas stove in her dining room that made dinging sounds when it was hot. That was their only source of heat for their apartment. During the winter, little flames flickered in its small front window, and I’d just sit there and lose myself in them.
She never minded just having that for heat, and she was afraid of the furnace in the cellar that was used for our apartment’s heat. If we ran around too much inside, she would always tell us to stop by saying, “Oy yoi! Don’t run! The furnace gonna blow up!” And if we went on her front porch, she would hold onto the back of our shorts tightly and tell us not to get close to the railing or “Your mother’s gonna hollered on me!”
She said that a lot, and we used to wonder if Mom beat her or something. When Grandma occasionally babysat us on the rare nights my parents went out with friends, we couldn’t even stay up late because she would turn off all the lights and go to sleep herself. If we begged to stay up a little longer, it was, again, “Oy yoi! Your mother’s gonna hollered on me!” We never gave her a hard time, just in case Mom really did “holler on her.”
We loved her Slovak accent and her “broken-English” way of speaking, as she called it. But we always understood her, and learned a few phrases. There was the one she used if we were talking too much: “Te mash velke peske!” which meant “You have a big mouth.” And if we weren’t using good table manners, she would tell us we were acting like a svina, which meant “pig.”
Most of all, Grandma loved to play games with us – simple card games like Slapjack, or a game called Pokeno, which was like Bingo, only with game cards that had pictures of playing cards. And other times we’d play roulette using a small Navy bean to drop into the spinning wheel.
Then, there was her love of the race track. She loved to go to “The Big A” — Aqueduct Race Track in New York — whenever she could take the bus there. Or sometimes my father would actually take her there. He knew she liked it. Again, one of those nice things he did. For whatever reason.
More often, she would head to Green Mountain, Vermont, every Sunday. She’d go to that 6:15 A.M. Mass, then walk downtown to catch the bus to the race track. My grandfather would grumble sometimes, but she would just point to the pot of soup on the stove and tell him his dinner was there. And after years of putting up with his weekly visits to the club, I think she felt this was her turn for some fun.
She would always ask us to give her numbers to bet on. If that numbered horse came in, she would give us a dollar or two, or a toy. By a young age, I was very familiar with things like the Daily Double, Trifectas, and Perfectas!
Grandma also went to the weekly Bingo games at St. Maron’s church across town. And at Thanksgiving, our church did a big turkey Bingo event that we would go to with her. It was amazing to see how she could watch over an entire 6-foot table full of her Bingo cards and still also double-check ours for the numbers we missed.
You could always count on snacks, too, if you went upstairs. She had a drawer in Grandpa’s bedroom bureau, filled with fruit-flavored gum packages, and the fruit-flavored lifesavers. We all fought for the cherry ones, and she made sure to rotate who got those so no one could complain that they never got that flavor.
And to this day, I get a warm sense of joy when I see little ice cream cups and, in particular, the little paper-wrapped wooden paddles to eat the ice cream with. Grandma always had a stack of those cups and spoons in her freezer. And she always came home from the store with 2 3-packs of cream-filled cupcakes, one cupcake for each of her six grandchildren. She made sure to always hold some in reserve for when my cousins — “the Kids” — came to visit.
Life shifted for her in March of 1965 — when her oldest daughter, Sister Luke, was killed in a car accident at the age of only 38. I was just 9 or 10, but I noticed that more often after that time, when we went upstairs, Grandma would just be sitting at her dining room table, very quietly just writing numbers on a blank piece of paper. More like doodling, than anything of purpose. I know she was heartbroken. And even despite the dream she had of Sister Luke telling her not to worry, that she, Sister Luke, was at peace, I cannot imagine the pain she must have felt. As a mom, myself, I don’t want to ever have to face losing my child.
I will simply close by noting that while all of the above things may seem simple, or not important, they were VITAL. EVERYTHING about being with Grandma was a Moment of Respite, and for me, a lifesaver of its own.
Soul Mosaic 
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