published Sunday, Feb. 7, 1993, in The Herald, Sharon, Pa.

`A life of lessons: Reviewing what Gramma taught`

By John Zavinski
Herald Graphics Editor

CROOKED DAILY CHECKMARKS followed the names of nine medications on a crinkled sheet of notebook paper on the kitchen counter as we cleaned out Gramma's apartment the evening of her funeral.
Her beautiful, flowing penmanship was gone. I'd noticed it in her letters during the past year.

On Jan. 13 she, too, left us. Her health, like her penmanship, flickered for months then took a dive.

Christmas Day brought one of the saddest experiences of my adult life. There she lay in the hospital, helpless and pained by bed sores, arthritis in her hands and shoulders, and fluid buildup in her chest. She didn't really pay attention as my mother and I opened the presents from me and my girlfriend. I understood.

Most of the few words she spoke rambled, yet made sense to me.

``This isn't happening to me. I was on the honor roll, for gosh sakes,'' she said, as if wisdom should shield the body from the effects of aging.

Her death certificate called Loretta Edwards Hubbard a retired bookkeeper. It should have said teacher.

I had always believed she attended Edinboro University in the '30s but never finished. It turns out she graduated from a two-year teachers' course.

``Then why didn't she become a teacher,'' I asked my mother.

``There weren't any jobs available,'' mom replied.

Looking back, Gramma was like a favorite teacher to my two brothers and me in the way she encouraged creativity, play and learning.

We spent so many Saturdays at her old apartment in Warren, Pa., playing Old Maid, Hearts, Crazy Eights, Sorry, Parcheesi and chinese checkers.

She read to us. We made projects out of construction paper. We shared a love for local history. I helped tend her beds of marigolds, zinnias, ruffled petunias and geraniums, which had me aspiring to become a florist.

Her phone number, disconnected last month, was the first I ever memorized _ 723-9484.

She taught me about finance. When I bought my first 10-speed, she advanced me the $150, which I repaid over my ninth-grade year.

Shortly after Grampa died in 1984, she moved to the senior-citizens tower, where neighbors fretted away the day with gossip and game shows. ``I don't have time to waste like that,'' she'd say. She had too much to read, to learn.

She read three newspapers each day _ Warren, Erie and Sharon. And she devoured five or six books a week from the public library _ novels, biographies, histories of western frontier settlements. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

``First you learn to read, then you read to learn'' was written in a slip of paper among the clippings and notes I found in her Information Please Almanac. She kept the almanac and maps within reach of her armchair to look up people and places she heard or read about.

She noticed details. She probably could name two-thirds of The Herald's news staff (``That photo Anne Redfield had last month ...'' ``Jeff Turk didn't do too well this season on his picks _ I've been keeping track'').

She did much of her Christmas shopping at Waldenbooks. She had an instinct for books she knew my girlfriend would enjoy reading to her second-grade class.

Gramma wrote letters to people like Jim Fisher, the New Wilmington crime sleuth who was my brother's professor at Edinboro. She shared contemporary anecdotes after reading his book on the Lindberg kidnapping. And she was so tickled to get replies.

She followed the N.Y. Mets and basketball at my alma mater, St. Bonaventure University. The latter dated back to the Bob Lanier days of the late '60s. I think it influenced my choice of colleges, which turned out to be the best decision I ever made.

We found a stack of basketball yearbooks, through 1989-90. A sheet of paper tucked inside each one listed every game's scores. Heck, I barely even pay attention to the Bonnies' season record anymore.

She was her family's historian. She collected genealogy for six decades in a black notebook whose first entry, in her handwriting, chronicles the first family reunion in 1931. The reunions, with great rows of tables under the sugar maples at Uncle Sig's farm, ended a few years back; lack of a quorum, basically.

Gramma was always so proud of the little things we'd done _ like the time around age 5 or 6 when I suddenly ordered for myself during one of our frequent trips with Grampa to Piney Woods for a fish fry or porterhouse-steak dinner. Or when I pulled one over on a neighborhood thief by leaving play money on the side-porch window sill in the envelope meant for the paperboy (it disappeared).

She wasn't the bragging kind of grandmother who corners you with pictures of her grandchildren. It was more like a teacher's pride.

Tears start welling in my eyes when I remember how Mom said Gramma would call her at work in the middle of the day all excited at receiving a letter or vacation postcard from me or my brother who lives out of town.

We found every one, along with years of greeting cards, in a box in her apartment. And there was a manilla folder of newspaper clippings, divided by scraps of paper (``Send to Scott'' ``Send to John Mark''). Her letters always came stuffed with clippings about things or people she knew we'd be interested in.

She clipped every one of the hundreds of stories and photos I produced at my hometown paper, the Warren (Pa.) Times Observer, during and after college. Ten years later, she could still refer to specific items with as much clarity as I had.

She never learned to drive, but she once could name every Keystone gas station in two states from her billing work at the local refinery.

Gramma died at age 80, young for her family. Her mother _ my great-grandmother _ died in May at 101, breaking the previous record of 96 or 97.

There are so many things I'll remember about Gramma _ her Bugs Bunny-like chuckle, watching Lawrence Welk during a visit, drinking little bottles of Coke and eating goldfish crackers and Hershey bars.

And while driving back to Warren for her funeral, I absent-mindedly thought of all the little things about my life and work that I'd normally share with her on a trip back home.

We were close _ closer than I realized. To my brother Jim's three children, she was a great-grandmother. To me, she was the greatest.

I only hope I've inherited her family's longevity and that I can carry my memories into those years.