THE OPERA GLASSES
“…she and my grandfather used to take them to plays and ballgames.…”
Last summer, near the end of my grandmother Robbie’s life, I was tasked with helping her organize the belongings she’d brought from Tucson to my parents’ home in Los Angeles, where she would live out her final days in hospice care. This was when I discovered the collapsible opera glasses. There was something satisfying about the click they made as they sprang open. Robbie told me she and my grandfather used to take them to plays and ballgames, and that I could keep them.
Robbie had a relentless curiosity, a love for travel and exploring the new. In the years after graduating college, she lived a nomadic life, spending winters with her family in Phoenix and summers waitressing in hotels, many in National Parks. One summer in Yellowstone, she befriended a bellhop named James. They kept in touch after she moved to New York the following spring and got a job waitressing aboard a South America-bound Norwegian tramp steamer.
In her letters home to her mother, James was “a friend from Yellowstone.” In her letters to him from aboard the ship he was “Jim,” then later “My dear Jim,” followed by “Darling,” and finally “Love of my life.” But all the while she was writing to Jim, she was engaged to Johney, who was overseas in Norway. Love triangles were a common theme at that time in her life. “I do not recognize the archaic rules of society,” she wrote to Jim in defense of her right to go on dates with other men while in long-distance relationships. (She was always going on dates—her letters home are peppered with the names of the men she went out with.)
Still, Jim was different from the others. When Robbie returned from South America to New York City in the fall of 1950, Jim was studying Russian at Columbia University. They spent that fall sightseeing all over the city. Then he proposed, she broke things off with Johney, and in 1951 they married. Eventually they settled in Arizona, working as schoolteachers so they could travel every summer.
Sometimes falling in love with a person makes you also fall in love with the place where it happened, and though she and Jim ended up out West, Robbie adored New York City and her time there. Today, I keep the opera glasses on a shelf above my desk, a reminder of my grandmother’s adventurous spirit and her ties to the city I’ve called home for more than a decade now. When I look through their scratched lenses, I see her slipping them into her handbag to catch a show at Radio City Music Hall or go sit with Jim in the cheap seats at Yankee Stadium. On the Staten Island Ferry, wind billowing her skirt, she’d gaze through the glasses at Manhattan’s skyline. Then she’d hand them to the love of her life, saying, “Would you look at that!” with the breathless wonder that stayed with her until the end.
