oh what a dollar bought today.

“Agatha, hand me the clothes…. We’ll send them up to be washed by the clouds and dried by the wind.”

While helping at a friend’s garage sale this morning, I discovered in the $1 box an old videotape of something my family is always on the hunt for: The Electric Grandmother. We scan thrift stores, we check ebay, it’s just sort of a vague constant awareness, this hunt.
So this morning, there was rejoicing in the Van Wynen collective consciousness.

Tonight we watched it, my parents and I. And I can’t really put in words what it did to me. I haven’t cried so much at a movie for years. The Electric Grandmother, folks.
I had no specific memory of the movie that I could call up independently; we looked for it, but I didn’t remember what it was. It was buried deep in my memory, in the part I can’t reach anymore. The furthest, darkest corner of the trunk.

When the first strains of the song came up, and the silhouette of the grandmother rocking behind the translucent colored screen, and the old man’s voice calling “Grandma…”
I gasped. My heart held its breath. “I remember this,” I kept whispering. “I remember.”
The pieces of the heart falling from the sky; the eerie chorus of grandma voices, repeating “Tom, Timothy, Agathaaaaa…”… the grandmother factory, with its floating shadows, eye-color selection kaleidoscope, voice-receiving gramophone….then, “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies, but some morning you’ll wake up and get a surprise…” and there she was—the sarcophagus dropped by the helicopter, so incredibly vivid and creepy and tender in my memory. Every outfit on the children, every look on their faces, was stored somewhere deep in the part of my child’s brain where I stored up information about how people work and what faces mean. It’s all still in me, I just didn’t know it.

Laundry on a kite string, lullabies, that deeply disturbing scene of grandma all plugged in in the basement, the muffin with ‘Holy Toledo, it’s flying!’ on a slip of paper baked inside. The car accident scene—“Not like mommy, please not like mommy…” and then the children suddenly growing up as they ran toward grandma. This is when I started to cry. The storage room full of grandmothers all reminiscing and pondering, decades later—“Sometimes I forget the difference between loving people and paying attention to people. There is a difference, isn’t there?” … and finally, her return to the house and the elderly children. “Grandma, brush my hair!” (At this point, I can’t stop crying.) And so it ends.

My childhood is deep inside me, buried and unreachable; we just kept moving and I have almost no touchstones. My family has grown up and changed, and I with it, and the scenery has changed and on we have gone. This movie tonight…it touched a place inside me that is never, ever touched. I was suddenly six years old, sitting on a wood floor in an apartment in Brazil with my brother, staring up at the electric grandmother. The whole world changed around me and I was a child again—really a child, fully a child. I haven’t felt that since it ended. It was a wonderful time, a happy time—I had forgotten how happy—and it has been a lost time.

Last week I heard my father reading something aloud, and a shiver washed over me—I saw myself sitting on the carpet at his feet as he read the Chronicles of Narnia aloud to my brother and me before bed. The memory lasted a split second, but I wanted to hold onto it. These piercing tastes of my childhood are so rare, so very, very rare. Such a goldfish I am, with a long-term memory like a sieve…the present is good, the past of more than 6 or 7 years ago is vanished…. But no… it’s there, it’s in there somewhere. It just takes an electric grandmother to bring it up, up, up to the surface.

Thank you, Jesus, for my childhood. Thank you so much for my childhood.


How deep, lasting, often subliminal, are the impressions and lessons of childhood. This is why I feel the weight, the importance of time spent with children, whether they will remember me or not. My words and actions, the environment they are in, the things they see and hear and touch, are more vivid and tremendous to them than we can possibly imagine with our adultness. So BIG is the room, so sharp the details. So deep the memory.

Go to a garage sale, see if it changes your life.