"Come back and see me, if I'm still here."

A month or two ago I joined Ancestry.com, where my uncle Stephen said I would find all the work he'd done over the years. It's fun, like a particularly nerdy sort of video game. I've mostly been fleshing out the Norwegian side of the family. But I have a calendar event for today! Peg died, in 2000. I wasn't told until after the fact, so I didn't get to go to the funeral.

Peg, our next door neighbor, was a huge presence the first half of my life—essentially the grandmother who was always on scene. She and her husband Jack lived in that house for...a long, long time. I see them listed there in the 1940 census. The story I know is that they lived there with a Greek guy named Michael, who left them the house and a dragonfly-green Mercedes sedan; that's a relationship probably lost to history, except for the deed transfer.

Peg was born in 1906, in Cambridge, to Scottish Canadians—I had no idea about that part, but they were from the places that really preserved Scottish folk traditions, in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. She was Very Very Catholic™, which I imagine she was raised with, given the family naming scheme:

Yes, Lochlin's mother was Margaret, Lochlin married a Margaret, and they raised Peg, another Margaret. It's not clear to me that there are Saints David or Sarah, but maybe they skated past a less assiduous priest or two. Peg was staunchly anti-abortion, which in all our time together was probably the only disagreement of substance, so we did what grown-ups do, and talked about everything else. She was always on the ball, a sharp Bostonian tongue that ran at lightspeed, and a conversational engagement that was basically improv comedy.

(Ancestry.com claims she and her husband Jack had a child who is alive enough to remain anonymous; that's sort of mind-blowing, if true, but I Occam's Razor says it's a computer hiccup.)

One Christmas Eve I went to visit her in the nursing home, I think after Jack died, and she got crabby at me: "Go away. I told everyone not to visit me."

Being an honest relationship, I mocked her with a sentence of grouchy animal noises: "Rahrahrahrr. Rarrararar. Raarerrrrarhar!".

She didn't miss a beat: "And I understood every word!".

She had a lot to offer a super-smart wiseass kid. I'm sorry she never got to meet Honor or J, and also sorry she never got to meet Honor's grandmother. I'm not sure what they had in common besides being spectacularly feisty elderly women, but what else do you need? It would have been fun to see.

Every time I saw her at the nursing home, I would head back to college, and she would give me a couple of the most brand-new $100 bills I've ever seen, with the same message:

"Don't spend it on beer and women. Come back and see me, if I'm still here."

Not to worry, Peg. I spent it on gin and bagels.