This painting is called “Notes from Ernie.” It probably seems incredibly cryptic to anyone who doesn’t know the story behind it. Ernie was a family friend of ours. She was my grandma’s roommate in college. I’ve caught myself so many times referring to her as a relative, even though she actually wasn’t related. She may as well have been. Ernie was both a surrogate grandma to me and one of the best friends I’ve ever had.
There are so few people who are truly, deeply, sincerely good, the kind of good that radiates from within. Ernie was truly, deeply good. She never said a word that wasn’t kind, helpful, or concerned. She was an incredibly good listener, and she always made you feel as if what you were saying was the most important thing she could possibly be listening to at that moment, even if you rambled or were talking about the weather or something similarly dull. She would focus all of her attention, energy, and love on you even over the phone.
The pot in the painting above is a gift she sent once. The card and the Braille note under it were also things that she sent. Ernie was blind. But she never wanted people to recognize it or offer her sympathy for it. Once when I was young, I corrected myself when I asked her if she’d “seen” a particular show on TV, and asked her if she’d “heard” it. She told me not to do that. And I didn’t again. It drove her nuts when people were extra careful around her or overly sensitive to the fact that she was blind. Some people would even talk louder around her, as if she couldn’t hear either. Ernie’s blindness wasn’t a disability to her. It was just something that was, a fact.
My mom loves to tell this story. There was one time, when my mom was three years old, that Ernie was visiting at their house. She’d unwrapped something and was looking for a place to throw the wrapper. She asked my mom where the trashcan was. My mom pointed at it and said, “There!” “Where?” Ernie asked. “There!” my mom said again, pointing. Ernie was tickled at this. “Where?” she asked again. “Right there!” my mom yelled, upset and flabbergasted that Ernie couldn’t see the trashcan. That was what Ernie liked, a childish assumption that she could see, even though she couldn’t. She liked that from everyone, young and old.
Ernie type-wrote all of the cards she sent, like the one in the painting, which was quite an undertaking considering how many she sent to us. We kept up by phone, letter, and the occasional visit. She had a reader, Jessica, who would go through her mail with her and read what people had written. (Jessica was wonderful. She made the best lemon pound cake in the world.) I’d always been amazed at how fast Ernie could punch out Braille, and I’d looked so many times at her magazines in Braille, which were thicker and bigger than a Webster’s Dictionary. One day when we were at her apartment, I asked her to show me how she did Braille. She got out a little plastic grid, called a slate, and a metal-tipped punch called a stylus. She went back to her bedroom and got a card explaining Braille that she’d gotten when she’d worked at the Library of Congress. She showed me how you had to punch your message in backwards into the wrong side of the card so the dots would be in the correct direction on the other side. Then she punched something short out with a snap-snap-snap, and handed it to me along with the explanation card. I sat on the floor and decoded it slowly. “It says…I….love….you!” I said. Ernie smiled. “Now you write something,” she said. She waited patiently for me to punch something out, and showed me how to use the capital sign and punctuation. Finally, I handed her what I’d written. She ran her deft fingers along it. “Cattepies walk on leaves,” she read. “Cattepies?” She grinned. Turns out I’d left out a couple of letters. We wrote messages back and forth the rest of the night, and my brother learned to write Braille too. Later, Ernie sent us each our own personal slate and stylus. We started a Braille correspondence, which touched Ernie a lot. She loved it too because when she got our mail, she could tear it open and read it right away, instead of having to wait for Jessica. I’d send her notes and poems I’d written for her, all punched out in Braille.
I’ve experienced a lot of loss and death for someone so young, and Ernie’s death a couple of years ago was probably the most devastating of any I’ve ever been through. I think of her so often and miss her terribly. I always will.
