Iris M. Lueck

An obituary too long for the newspaper because they charge by the line

Dear Readers,

My grandmother recently passed away. In place of a short story, I’m sharing the piece I wrote to read at her memorial tomorrow. May 4th, 2023 would have been her 100th birthday.

Iris M. Lueck (nee Maue) circa 1942.

For years, my grandmother hosted Christmas dinner at her house. She’d set out all the dishes she’d cooked on a buffet table, and she hated it when somebody sat at the dining room table and forced everyone in the buffet line to awkwardly move around them. So, she made up a rule: the first five people in the buffet line would sit at the card table that she’d set up as overflow seating. Anyone who wanted to sit at the formal dining room table could do so if they let others go ahead of them in line. 

If you’re thinking about “The Soup Nazi” episode of Seinfeld right now, you’re not the only one. My grandmother’s regimented approach to the holiday dinner earned her a nickname among the family: The Christmas Nazi. It was a sobriquet that she never failed to live up to; one year, when grocery stores first began to carry clementines, she commanded us all to eat one. 

The thing is, she loved Christmas. She’d spend days wrapping gifts for everyone, meticulously selecting paper, ribbon and decorative package ties, fashioning elaborate bows that put everyone else’s stick-on ones to shame. She baked piles of cookies: sugar cookies, Russian teacakes, Ritz crackers sandwiched with peanut butter and covered in chocolate. Her tree was heavy with the ornaments she’d collected over the years. A Hallmark Keepsake ornament shaped like a popcorn popper plugged into a light string, and a mechanism inside jostled little chunks of styrofoam around inside it. The pop! pop! pop! racket it made was the soundtrack to Christmas at her house. 

If she got hard-nosed about Christmas, it’s just because she wanted it to be perfect, and after all the work she put in, having a few people make the minor sacrifice of sitting at the card table wasn’t such a big ask, was it?

When I was small, Grandma Lueck wasn’t my favorite person. Once, when I was three or four years old, she got really angry with me when I put lotion all over my arms. She didn’t have much patience for me when I got scared when she took me to see Snow White. So when she came to my school for Grandparents’ Day when I was in kindergarten, I was annoyed. I wanted my other grandma -- the one who hugged. When Grandma Lueck sat next to me, I moved over a seat. When she moved to be next to me, I huffed and moved again. She thought I was joking until she realized I wasn’t. Then, she asked, “Do you want to sit next to her…?” and pointed at a teacher or an aide or someone else’s grandma. She wasn’t mad. I think it actually hurt her feelings. I feel pretty bad about that now.

Over time, though, she became the person I wanted to spend time with most. She used to take me to a diner called Nan’s that had a big jukebox in the middle of the room. One night, when I was about ten years old, we were sitting at Nan’s and talking about music. She jokingly guessed that my favorite singer was Frank Sinatra. Something shifted that night. Maybe I sensed she thought I was growing into someone who was interesting to talk to. 

I loved spending time at her house. It was covered in carpet that should’ve been named “Mid-Century American Puke Splotch,” and had some odd knickknacks, such as some very ancient, inedible Mike & Ikes and a large glass jug full of old popcorn. KLBB radio was always on, playing Big Band and ’50s pop. I listened to many, many hours of the Super Saver Radio Hour, in which elderly people called in to get discounted gift certificates to dinner theaters and supper clubs. 

I remember one day, Grandma and I went downtown for some reason, and she took me to Candyland where I got gummy worms. We took the bus back to her house, just barely beating a summer storm. I ate the candy and played with vintage paper dolls while the clouds darkened the sky. 

On other days, we’d walk down to Central Avenue, to the Tastee Bread Outlet. On the way there, she’d tell me stories about the houses we passed, like the one on 27th and Taylor that was built when twin girls married twin boys and lived in it side by side. 

Grandma and I used to watch the Montel Williams show together. Grandma especially liked the episodes that featured psychic Sylvia Browne. (Mind you, this was before Browne was revealed to be a complete fraud.)

When I was 15, my parents finally started letting me stay home on the weekends while they went up North. Teenagers who weren’t boring would have used this time to party or get into other shenanigans. I went over to my grandma’s house, and we played Scrabble while sitting on her front porch. I found her Scrabble board when we packed up her apartment. When I opened it, I thought I’d find the pad of paper with the score to the last game we’d played on it. She always kept score. But there was nothing there but a blank sheet of paper; the last game we’d played had been torn away. 

In high school, she came to all my band concerts. When I got accepted to college in New York, all she said was, “Oh, you got in?” 

That tepid response irked me, but I also knew she wasn’t going to come right out and say she would miss me. But when I came home for Christmas that year, there was no doubt that she was happy to see me. (She was not happy to inform me that Nan’s had closed).

When describing her, we used words like “stoic,” “tough,” and “ornery.” She didn’t get sappy. She wasn’t a hugger. But the flip side of all that was that she didn’t say things she didn’t mean. When she told me I looked good in bright colors, I knew it was true, because she did not waste time with empty compliments. 

My grandma may not have been someone who gushed about her feelings (unless she was talking about how much she hated Donald Trump) but I never needed that from her. True, she could be irascible, and true, the only thing tougher than her was her beef roast. But it’s also true that she was sometimes toughest on the things -- and people -- she loved most.