My grandmother Rose has never done anything to hurt another person in her eighty-six years.
I know this because I have known her for my entire life and because when you know someone your entire life you develop the specific comprehensive knowledge of them that comes from accumulation rather than observation. You know not just what they do but what they are capable of and what is outside the range of them, and Rose has always been outside the range of cruelty.
She is the kind of woman who saves the wrappers from presents because she finds them beautiful.
She is the kind of woman who asks the cashier at the grocery store how their day is going and actually waits for the answer.
She is the kind of woman who prays for people who have wronged her rather than talking about them.
She is, in the specific language of a certain generation, a good woman. And the goodness is not performed. It is structural. It is the thing she is made of at the deepest level, the thing that does not change under pressure or fatigue or inconvenience.
