Bambea

Yesterday my grandmother would have been 86, or perhaps 84, depending on what year she told you she was born. She also used several different spellings for her family name. To other adults she was probably mysterious in a lot of ways---I'm sure her neighbours in the bucolic L.A. suburbs of 1950s-1960s El Monte thought so. But from a kid's perspective (that's me and her above in the early 60s) she was the amazing, dramatic, and wildly spontaneous Bambea (from "Gram Bea" I guess).

Bambea was certainly unconventional. "Noisy, colorful and disorganized, but well meaning," my mom wrote when she sent me this picture. I have no end of crazy and beautiful stories about Bambea (...fire red hair and whip cream fights, artists' sketches all over the actual walls inside her house, her pool filled with poor kids from Watts every summer, a trip up the coast for the Summer of Love, fantastic food creations, a yard overflowing with poppies, poinsettias, and pomegranates....). Imagine Endora from Bewitched meets Phyllis Diller meets Eva Peron. That gets close to my memory of her. Though she died in 1977---way too young---Bambea had a very big impact in my life, mostly by nurturing my curiosity and giving me a sense of wonder about the world. What a wonderful gift for a grandmother to give.