Someday, I want to be like my grandmother, Lois Fern.

She is white, but grew up in the poor black part of a small Illinois town called Gilman. Her dad knew how to extract value from trash, and fix anything that was broken. During the Great Depression, his services were valuable. He established a profitable repair shop. In time, he became the local Chevy dealer. He wasn't an educated man, so he handed the paperwork and accounting to my grandmother, who was just a little child; but she was a little child who was going to school.

When Lois Fern graduated from high school, she got a job as a bookkeeper in Chicago. She shared an apartment with several other girls. Toward the end of the month they would borrow money from her for cigarettes. She began stashing away what she would be spending on cigarettes, if she smoked. At the end of the year she took the money and bought a gorgeous fur coat. She came swirling into the room with her new fur coat.

"Ladies...How do you like my cigarettes?"

After a few years she got a job in San Francisco. She would go to the USO dances that were thrown to welcome the sailors back from sea. My grandfather was a tall, blonde, and handsome sailor in his Cracker Jack uniform.

"Gene could dance."

They got jobs in Seattle after the war, and had four children, and went on long family vacations that entailed weeks of riding in a car. They took a dresser full of pictures: drawers of gardening and fishing, Christmases and weddings, cars and garage tinkering, and singing.

When I go visit my grandma, she always gives me a tour of the city.

"Gene and I used to meet here for picnic lunches," she said when she took me to the locks.

"Gene used to get his hair cut there," she said as we passed a barbershop.

"Gene used to play guitar with his band at that bar," she said as we passed a small building.

She points at a square black building on the Seattle skyline and said, "Gene used to work there, for an insurance company. It was the tallest building then." It was half the height of the surrounding buildings.

"Gene and I used to practice with his barbershop quartet here, that's why we named it E-flat acres," she said when she brought me out to the land they had bought.

He has been gone for more than my lifetime. My grandma didn't die when he did. She kept working, and dancing. She volunteers at the hospital and sings with Sweet Adelines. She is the treasurer for several little associations and clubs. She is alive. She is wealthy but frugal. She is healthy but old. She has had a very full and good life.

I'm going to school to be an accountant, but that really isn't the part of my grandma's life that I want to imitate. It's the fullness, grace, intelligence, and love.