There are quite a few little old ladies in my ‘hood who attended high school at Manzanar. Bambi, who lives across the street from me, who is about four foot eleven and reminds me so much of my grandmother, was even named Bambi while she was attending high school behind the barbed wire fence.
Bambi the Disney movie premiered in 1942. The same year Manzanar was opened. Bambi says she doesn’t remember what her real name is.
Little Osaka is what our neighborhood is called because its denizens, as opposed to those in Little Tokyo, fared from Osaka. You get to know your neighbors in Little Osaka; many of us have dogs, many of us are walking either East (toward Sawtelle and the restaurants and Japanese market) or West toward Ralph’s, the big supermarket chain that’s two blocks away.
The first time I met Bambi we got in a fight. She was struggling with her Ralph’s shopping bags at the corner light and wouldn’t let me help her. I pleaded with her. It made me nuts watching her lug, then place down her heavy bags every few steps.
“You’ll get home a lot faster, if you let me help you!”
“No,” she smiled stubbornly with her very prominent teeth. “I’m in no rush.”
I’m guessing Bambi is ninety. Her skin is a little wizened but basically un-lined. Her hair is silvery grey-blue and she wears a cardigan that’s almost exactly the same color, no matter how hot it is. She’s, as I mentioned, strong enough to carry shopping bags. And as I found out today she even has a part-time job three days a week. She does paperwork of some sort for a plumbing company on Sawtelle where she has worked for years.
She has four children and she can’t remember how many grandchildren. But nobody ever seems to come around. They live in different states, different time zones. Sometimes she doesn’t even remember their names. Is there something wrong that a little old lady lives so alone? Without apparent need for very much except to live in her own manner?
“Do you miss your children?” I asked her recently. “Do you wish they lived near?”
“No,” she answered. And I believe her.
Every day at about five o’ clock (she’ll start earlier now, I’m guessing with the very short days) Bambi walks the three blocks to Ralph’s for a chocolate doughnut–one she takes home and has with a glass of milk. This is, she explains, her little treat to herself for making it through the day.
With all the non-stop haranguing about what to eat to achieve healthy old age, you find out the secret is a daily dose of fried dough in hydrogenated fat.
The truth is Bambi’s longevity and physical strength have to do with the fact that, even in L.A., she has never driven a car. She walks or takes the bus. In fact my own grandma was the same.
Grandma lived on chocolate, cheap sherry and ground round she made the butcher grind in front of her. She lived across the street from us in a little studio and wasn’t invited to dinner all that often.
I fight the impulse to take Bambi in and feed her and talk to her to make it up to my own grandma for putting her in that nursing home, Virginia Hall, all those years ago. I just did a search and it’s still there. Dementia Assisted Living in Shreveport, Louisiana. Bambi won’t let me help her schlep her bags home from the market, but Grandma would have let me save her. In fact, she begged me to save her.
True, she was going nuts—an old boyfriend of mine found her wandering around in her nightgown looking for me at some God-awful time of night. And of course, true, I was nineteen, my mother should have taken charge instead of putting me in charge with the explicit instruction to “find a decent home.”
I dutifully went round to all the nursing homes in town with Ralph Nader’s list of red flags: the smell of urine, dopey looks on the patients’ faces, patients strapped in their chairs watching TV.
But the sad truth is I found the best of those places, moved Grandma in, and went back to college. The next time I saw Grandma she didn’t know me. She even went on to pat my head when I put it in her lap, and to tell me that I was such a pretty girl, and why was I crying? I remember that her legs couldn’t move.
My grandma is not Bambi and Bambi isn’t Grandma.
But even if I live to that ripe old age of either one of them, I’ll never forget her blank doped-up eyes or forgive myself for what I did.
by 
