Thelma Craig Maier Remembered on All Soul's Day

On All Souls Day, Episcopalians remember people who helped us in our spiritual growth. My maternal grandmother Thelma Craig Maier (1902-1991), who died thirty years ago, said nothing to me about spirituality except "God is love." She attended church for awhile near the end, but never went back after the preacher announced that she was the church's oldest member.

Still, she was part of my spiritual growth, and she is still with me, as I wrote in a blogpost about significant dreams:

My grandmother lived in a modest but immaculate home in Madeira, north of Cincinnati. It was a home purchased by her son, my Uncle Jack, in the late 1940s. She moved in when Jack and his wife Blanche moved to the swanky Indian Hills neighborhood.

Not long after my grandmother died, I had a vivid dream from which I awoke with tears streaming down my face. That was unprecedented, and I took notice! In the dream, I searched every room of her home for "the secret to me." Something there, I didn't know what, was the key to my personality and my future. I cried because I could not find it.

On reflection, the "key" was nothing in the house, but the house itself: the sense of myself as loved, worthy, special, that I felt whenever I visited my grandmother's home. Her antiques and her notions of interior decoration (pink shag rug in the kitchen, pink marbled wall paper in the tiny bathroom along with and chandeliered sconces) made the place, for me, the epitome of class.
from Geography of the Self (blogpost of 04/2013)

[My poem Wingtips condenses a much of what I say here in six short stanzas.]

She had no use for the past. "Rome," she said after a visit, "would be all right if they'd clean up all those ruins." She kept up with the times, buying a new Pontiac (remember Pontiacs?) every year, installing central air conditioning before anyone else I knew, and buying a great big color TV, the first one I ever saw.

She laughed when I asked for her earliest memory, saying, "I don't know; I've never thought about my memories." But she did recall riding the train to Kansas with her mother Myrtle Craig to the end of the rail to stand on a hard-packed dirt floor at her grandfather's deathbed.

We were reminiscing on the evening after my cousin Michael's funeral. When Michael came out as gay around 1970, his parents thought he would be a bad influence on his siblings, and he left for San Francisco. First, he stopped by our grandmother's house to tell her. "He sat right where you are now," she said, "and told me he was gay. And I said that didn't matter to me, I always love him." When he contracted AIDs, his parents welcomed him back and provided him hospice care in their home.

I never heard her discuss memories of her husband Lee, who died before I was born. My mom's cousin Pat Clark Mathers recently told me that Thelma grew tired of Lee, but Lee always adored Thelma and admired her feisty spirit. I suppose an example of that spirit was during the War, when she took a man's place on an assembly line. Her male supervisor fired her for insubordination. In the next decade, she became a real estate agent who worked her way up to high-end properties by the 1970s. Both parents doted on their children Jack and Frances.

I recently uncovered this photo of her, one I never saw before. It's posed as artfully as an 18th century portrait of a queen: expression dignified, posture erect, hair sculpted, nails done, enthroned in her favorite chair, every object in view a valuable antique.

But this is the way I remember her best, dressed for dinner out, smiling, on a pink sofa:

Here is Thelma Maier, looking professional in the late 1940s (I think). Thanks to Amy Liss for the photo!

Here she is with her two children, very early in World War II:

While I've devoted no single page to my grandmother before today, I can see her everywhere in this blog. She's mentioned specifically in these postings:

• Memory and Ritual: Solace at the Solstice (09/2015) recalls when Dad took me at age six on a business trip to Cincinnati to spend one unforgettable day with my grandmother
• Conversations with the Dead (12/2011) includes a passage about my grandmother's "receding" into a world of ghosts during her final years.