Lillian Constance Foley 1906-2011

"What are you doing out there?" she said one day to a group of us, her offspring. Lillian, our "Nana" was always prone to asking embarrassing questions of us and this was the case on that particular holiday evening maybe a dozen years ago. She went on to relate to us a story about her youth in the twenties. It was New Years eve, she said, when the boys she was with (she always ran with a big group of boys) closed all of the windows in their Model-T in the big city of Chicago and "the car filled up with all this smoke." I don't think she was referring to cigarettes.

The comments weren't always embarrassing of course. However, along with my father's comments, Nana's running commentary was a major element to the way that I interacted with society. After all some of my earliest memories of her revolved around my mother's deferential attitude towards me. I will never forget how terrible I always felt at the dinner table when she was around and while as an adult I wouldn't necessarily trade anything on the dinner plate now for cottage cheese, I still share my mother's appreciation for its nutritional value.

I remember in the nineties when she was trying to get better value out of her assets, she would make other dry comments. This time to smokers she would say, "have another one," since at the time she had been making quite a lot off of her stock in R.J. Reynolds and/or Phillip Morris (I don't remember which). More recently, I remember how she simply volunteered information. Like when an appraiser came by to view her gigantic butterfly collection. After looking at her assortment of pins and broaches the man had suggested a price for the whole lot. She turned him down saying that he had undervalued it.

I made my comments too. I think I was maybe ten years old when my siblings and I were getting into the car to go shopping with her. In reference to her penchant for thrift stores, I pointed out that everything that Nana buys is "old". I was severely dressed down for that and will always remember how she categorically explained in front of all of us how important she was to our well being. It was because of incidents such as these that I will always have an appreciation for frugality.

In her old age the tables began to turn for her and I. I got an education and her fiery comments cooled. I think that had things been different we should have been friends (although even now I am struck by how ridiculous it is to say that). I have found that the best friendships I have ever known involved us talking at at each other rather than to. Lillian's tendency to simply ad lib non-sequiturs and volunteered information fit this paradigm to a "T". It never ceased to aggravate everyone in my family and those around us but I have taken much away from it.

Questions tend to shed old ideas or personal situations in a new light and inevitably cause a person to doubt themselves. I believe that this type of introspection was a necessary element in my own development. It also allowed me to regard my own life and mentors in a critical matter. Like who was this old woman, born of immigrant parents and what caused her to come out west in the twenties and start a family during the worst depression America has ever faced?

Over the past few years the student has had an unprecedented opportunity to ask questions of the teacher since the butterflies had at that point all been itemized and stored, her award winning orchid collection sold off and she no longer even had the energy for a trip to the hairdresser let alone the YMCA for a game of bingo. It was in that period that I would ask her about the period when she had first arrived in San Francisco. She lived on Haight Street, she said, on Baker with two old ladies--her landlords-- who had taken a liking to her. Pressing her further I asked about how she had met the man she would eventually marry-- my grandfather of whom she had separated so many years ago. "I know what you're trying to do," she said and that was that.

I spent many hours with Nana in her final years or at least tried to since I was living in Southern California at the time. I eventually moved back to San Francisco and began to fill in for my mother father and uncle who's lives had become ever more directed towards Lillian's well being. I am glad that I had that time, I had multiple opportunities to offer her advice from everything concerning whether she should eat to how I thought she should move in with her daughter.

...and she did finally move in to mom's house and lived there for a few days until her death at the age of 104 in the city of St. Francis, Wednesday May the Fifth, 2011.