Laura Karlin

I have trouble relating to people with grannies who knit and bake and send inappropriate Christmas sweaters. Gan was a wonderful grandmother to me, but, as with everything in her life, in her own way.

When I was 2, Mum and Dad left me with her one evening. I, sensing weakness, refused to have a bath. Finally, she said, ‘Laura, if you have a bath, I’ll let you play with Granny’s Toys.’ So I jumped up, ran a bath, hopped in, got ready for bed, and was then allowed to spend the rest of the evening on her bed, going through her jewelry box, playing with more expensive toys than I think most of us get to play with as grownups.

She told me that story every time she saw me, and in the last month, I must have heard it at least ten times.

In the same way, though she visited us in Los Angeles many times, I can’t say she was big on the homework helping. But once, when I was pacing the house, muttering to myself, her ears perked up and she spent the evening helping me to memorize Shakespeare’s 116th Sonnet. I learned later that it had a special meaning between her and Eli. I would like to read it now.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.