Gammy and Gurdip

This past Friday, March 19, 2021, was my grandmother’s birthday. Mary Elizabeth Strother, known to me as Gammy, but also as Mother Mary and Marigold (a favorite of my father’s nicknames for her). She would have been 97 years old. Friday was a sunny and warm day here in Minneapolis. The day before the Spring Equinox and the Persian New Year (Nowruz). It was a bright and auspicious day. The end of a week in which the world marked the anniversary of the covid-19 pandemic and our family marked the anniversary of moving to Minneapolis from Bethesda, Maryland amidst great anxiety and uncertainty. Friday, March 19 was also the seventh anniversary of the death of my father-in-law, Gurdip Sethi, who his wife called “Deep,” my children called Daduji, and who I simply referred to as “Dad.” For our family, it has been a week of memories and longing, of marking history and reflecting on — with joy and sadness — the many wonderful years spent with both Gammy and Gurdip. While their lives only intersected for a decade or so at the end, starting when my husband and I met in 2005 and were subsequently married in 2007, they shared a common passion: walking.

Both Gammy and Gurdip were epic walkers. Gammy walked 3 miles a day into her 90s, often on the windy streets of her hillside home in Pasadena, California where she lived for over five decades. Gurdip’s stride was legendary and, it seems, a trait he has passed on to my husband, who regularly leaves me in the dust on our neighborhood walks together (my mother-in-law remembers a similar experience when she would walk with Gurdip). The well-known health benefits of a daily walk were most certainly not lost on Gammy or Gurdip, however I like to think that there was something more to their shared love of walking than purely its salubrious virtues. Walking invites slowness and requires patience (even for fast-walkers like Gurdip). It opens up different ways of observing and experiencing the world that are otherwise lost through alternative modes of travel. Certainly our senses ignite when we walk: we better hear birds and rustling leaves; we feel the wind against our face without the intervention of velocity from a bike or car; we can smell our surrounding neighborhood (the flowers, the soil, the trash, the exhaust, the rain); we can stop to touch things (the rough bark of a tree, the cold metal of a railing, the crinkling plastic of an errant piece of trash); and we can see our immediate surroundings in hyper-realistic clarity — the close things, the minutiae.

I like to think that a love for walking also translates into an optimistic approach to life; that walking somehow inspires a way of engaging with people directly, corporeally and sets a person up for taking on life’s challenges, literally, taking things in stride. Walkers emit a sense of confidence, especially when they are gifted with great posture and height like Gammy (at 5’10”) and Gurdip (at 6’1”). Walkers embody verve. They harbor a zest for everything.

Gammy certainly epitomized these qualities. She was a mover and a shaker: PTA President of the San Rafael Elementary School when her three children were in attendance; an executive assistant at CalTech (“practically running CalTech for years,” as my father says) and later the office manager for PhytoGen Seed Company; a consummate knitter and seamstress; a great cook, especially of spicy casseroles. Gammy loved to spend time at the beach (Alameda Bay and Santa Barbara) and the mountains (Big Bear Lake). She enjoyed reading and live theater and dancing. She was a lifelong student, attending lectures organized by the China Society of Southern California (an organization for which she was a board member) and regularly visiting the museums near her home (The Huntington Library, The Norton Simon). She had great fashion sense and personal style. She was an engaging and entertaining storyteller (as she used to say, “Never confuse a good story with the facts!”). She was the life of the party.

Gurdip, too, was magnetic. Tall and handsome, with piercing black eyes and a deep voice that could be, at once, both soothing and commanding. He loved music (especially Urdu ghazals) and singing. He enjoyed good food — both eating the many wonderful dishes created by his wife and cooking, especially at the grill. He was a generous host. He was constantly working and making and moving: whether traveling from small town Punjab, India to Boulder, Colorado (in the 1960s) for his Master’s to Berkeley, California (for Ph.D. work) to Rochester, New York where he eventually settled, had a family, and lived for 40+ years; building things in his basement workshop; cleaning the gutters; doing the dishes; gardening and pruning trees; ironing his wife’s saris; folding laundry; or making the perfect gin-and-tonic (with bitters!). He was inquisitive and inventive, skills he perfected while working for decades at KODAK. He had elegant hands with long, slender fingers, which confronted me during ruthlessly competitive games of Gin Rummy; the same hands that held his grandchildren with immense strength and love and compassion; the hands that eventually caused him pain as chondrosarcoma spread from his right arm.

I think of both Gammy and Gurdip when I walk the wooded trails near my house. I think of the paths they have trod, the shoes they have worn out over the years. I think of them together too, laughing at my wedding reception and walking arm-in-arm as Gurdip accompanied Gammy to her car after family dinners. I am trying to be a better walker. To do it everyday, in rain or shine, during humid mosquito-ripe evenings of summer and bracing winter mornings when the temperature drops into the negative teens. I am trying, too, to impart a love of walking to my children: to help us all slow down, to breathe patiently, to relish the details and beauty of the world around us, to take it all in.