The Naked Stranger

by Randy Richardson

My grandmother didn’t like her given name, Marcella, which to her sounded too ladylike. So she went by Marc, with a hard “c,” like the boy’s name that ends with a “k.” As a tomboy who ran cattle drives at the age of nine, this name suited her better even as she grew into a striking rodeo queen.

Grandma Marc had a way of opening my eyes to new and different things, and that’s what she had in mind when she took me, at the age of ten, and my eight-year-old sister, on an 800-mile road trip in a camper from her home in Phoenix, Arizona to the place where she grew up, Lake Tahoe, California.

After a two-day drive through Death Valley, we arrived at our destination, a meadow near Lake Tahoe so open and green you could picture Julie Andrews there, belting out The Sound of Music. Against this backdrop a young couple, probably in their early twenties, appeared seemingly out of the thin air. They were oblivious to us, acting as if this was their spot and not ours, and perhaps it was. But we were there first, and they were interrupting our family moment.

On the roadside my little sister and I gazed at these two strangers as our grandfather stood by our side. At the edge of a fresh-water pond, the couple did something more unexpected than their initial appearance. They started taking off their clothes, which would have not been that unusual had they not continued until every last piece of clothing lay on the ground. They were naked. Buck naked.

In the south suburbs of Chicago, where I was from, there weren’t naked people roaming around. If there were, I’d never been exposed to them.

After driving 800 miles, it was, for my grandfather, probably welcome entertainment; a sight for sore eyes if you will. He chuckled as he used his hands to shield my eyes, even though I’d already seen all there was to see. My sister and I giggled as Grandpa gave the play-by-play of the skinny-dippers, or as he called them, “the nudies.”

The nudies didn’t have towels so after their dip in the water they dried off in the warm sun. They were still naked to the world when we witnessed something even more surprising.

"What the heck's your Grandma doing?” Grandpa guffawed. “Look at that. Look at that crazy grandma of yours."

We didn’t need Grandpa’s encouragement. It wasn’t as if we could take our eyes off the show. That crazy grandma of mine talked to the nudies.

I'm sure somewhere there's a Grandmas' Handbook that gives the rules of grand-mothering, and in it there must be a rule saying grandmas aren't supposed to talk to nudies. Apparently, someone forgot to give that handbook to my Grandma Marc.

My grandfather couldn’t stop chuckling, and his laughter was contagious, because my sister and I giggled so hard our sides hurt. But the funny thing was my grandmother didn’t see the humor in it. To her, talking to naked people was no different than talking to clothed people. She saw that underneath it all, we are all naked. She just liked to talk — to anyone, anywhere. When it came to talking, she had no inhibitions.

Grandma Marc was the most interesting person I've ever known so you didn't mind her talking to you, as I'm sure the nudies discovered. She did so many things in her life that she had an endless supply of topics and stories to draw from.

Every summer as soon as school let out, my mother shipped my sister and me off on a plane to stay with Grandma Marc. You don't see little kids on planes without their parents these days but at the time we didn't think of it as anything out of the ordinary; it was just what we did. The only difference between that and waiting for the bus to take us to school was that we looked forward to the place we were going.

Being sent away to spend summers in Phoenix where the daytime heat routinely reaches three digits might sound like punishment, but I didn't see it that way. Going to Grandma's house was fun.

I haven't seen any of the Night at the Museum movies kids line up to see these days. I don't need to see them because I lived them. Walking into my grandmother’s house was like stepping into a museum. It was as magical a place as I’ve ever been.

Kids from all around the neighborhood found their way into my grandma's home. She taught many of them all that she had learned in life. A skilled leather crafter, she showed me how to use the tools to make my personalized belt. She was an expert on minerals, a passion that my sister would grow up to share. Others just came to cool off in her backyard pool that was open to all.

Critters of all kinds made their homes in her home. You never knew what you'd find. Some were of the creepy crawly kind: tarantulas, snakes, scorpions. One time I caught a black widow spider on the side of the barn that ended up taking a room in the house. She had horses and a pony I rode not long after I learned to walk. For a while, she had llamas roaming her front yard. One year her daughter, Les, who was just two and half years older than me, brought a pet skunk to live there. My grandmother never liked the skunk but she never turned away any human or animal.

What made her home truly unique, though, were her collections. I have no idea how many different collections she actually had. There were bugs in display cases over my summer bed. Horse and Santa Claus figurines lined the shelves of her backyard hobby workshop where she also kept many of her prize-winning quartz crystals. Walls and cabinets of her home displayed collections of nativity sets, Native American artifacts and jewelry, and cowboy and western art.

And then there were the bells. More than three thousand of all shapes and sizes were on display in and around her home. When you're a kid, you can't resist the urge to ring a bell. I'd forgotten about that until my own son rang those bells including the huge one from a church tower that reverberated with the memories of my own youth.

In her eighties, my grandmother began losing a battle against Alzheimer’s disease which robbed her of all of those great memories we shared. I saw the early signs of it during a visit to her home. At first glance you wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. But there were little hints here and there. She’d tell a story and then ten minutes later tell the same story again. Then I noticed that my drinking glass looked a little grimy. Later, I saw her washing the glass with cold water and no soap.

When I last saw her, two years later, I’d been told the Alzheimer’s was rapidly advancing. It surprised me then to find her mostly as I remembered her. Although she was frail and moved a little slower, she could still out-talk anyone in the room. The more she talked, the more apparent the Alzheimer’s became. She had no idea who I was. To her, I was a complete stranger, no different than those naked people she’d encountered three decades earlier.

We’re told from a young age not to talk to strangers. There’s good reason for this of course. That’s why it’s so hard to watch the nightly news these days. The world my grandmother grew up in was a lot different than today. I don’t think she ever met a stranger with whom she would not strike up a conversation. Even when that stranger was me.