My Unofficial Grandmother

She died in June 2003 at age 95. Her name was Selma Koch (pronounced like “Scotch,” not like “Coke,” as in the Koch brothers), and she was the grande dame-in-residence at the Town Shop—an establishment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that sold women’s lingerie to many hundreds of loyal customers, and still does. Bras were its mainstay, and apparently, Mrs. Koch fitted several generations of women with that all-important undergarment. She was also the shop’s owner.

Her role as the “brassiere maven” was the focus of her New York Times obituary. But I had my own relationship with her, and it had nothing to do with bras.

I can’t quite recall how it all began. During the 1980s and well into the 1990s, I was a Town Shop regular, and over the years, I accumulated quite the collection of lacy, beribboned robes and nightgowns, thanks to the delightful salesladies who saw me coming, welcomed me with open arms and waited on me hand and foot.

One day, I wandered into the shop’s back room for some mysterious reason—possibly to place a special order or change my payment method—and ended up hanging out with Mrs. Koch (I never called her by her first name) for at least an hour. That became a regular thing, and oh, the conversations we had, and oh, how I adored them. And her!

Funny, she was only 7 years older than my mother, but she felt like a grandmother to me, not that I had a clear sense of what a grandmother felt like.

My mother, the second youngest of nine children, was estranged from her own mother. She never explained the cause of their estrangement, but my not very original theory is that by the time she and her little brother came along, Grandma Fanny was done with childbearing and child-rearing. My mother probably felt like the runt of the litter. Shunted aside and left to manage for herself.

I only met Fanny a few times. A few old photos have kept her in the family mix for me, and I can see some resemblance between her and various cousins. I think I inherited her terrible hair.

My father’s mother, Lena, died when I was 12, so of course I remember her. Just not very well. And anyway, she was a traditional wife and mother who tended to hover in the background. Lena, I hardly knew ye.

Grandmothers aren’t always wonderful, but they can be.

Some people with troubled or absent parents end up being raised by their grandmothers—a scenario I can’t quite imagine but, given my own problematic parents, I might have benefited from such an arrangement, especially if that grandmother had been modeled along the lines of Mrs. Koch.

For one, my unofficial grandmother never lectured me. Chatting with her was like chatting with a peer, but without the usual judgments or hidden agendas. Once, she confessed that she never balanced her checkbook, preferring to leave her finances to some unnamed deity who favored her as a hard-working businesswoman with an all-important role to play in the community. I confessed that I didn’t balance my checkbook either. Not because the god of money looked kindly on me but because of certain dysfunctional habits I acquired earlier in life. I didn’t confess that part. She wasn’t judgmental, but I didn’t want to give her a reason to think ill of me.

Mrs. Koch was also interested in the revolving door of the men in my life. I could tell her about my dates: where we had dinner, what shows we saw, what concerts we attended, and how serious these relationships were. I could also share episodes of heartbreak. Somehow, my hurt feelings, doubts and insecurities would fade under her loving gaze.

I was still a Town Shop customer in the early aughts, a couple of years before her death, and it amazed me that she continued to come in to work twice a week in her 90s. Well before that, her son Peter and his children had taken over the day-to-day operations of the business, but Mrs. Koch still felt at home on her perch in the back room. That’s how I’ll always remember her.

I may never be a grandmother, but I’d like to be.

I’m at that age when most of my friends have become grandparents. They never seem to tire of sharing photos of their grandchildren and recounting their various milestones: their first words, first steps, first haircut, and first day at kindergarten. They even show photos of their artwork. My friends are even loonier about their grandchildren than they are about their children, their pets, or their husbands.

But grandchildren, like every other human on the planet, are individuals, with their unique genetic makeup and personality profile. Some of them are delightful, no doubt, but others are sure to be hellions. That’s a statistical certainty.

The same may be said about grandmothers. Some may be nurturing, while others may be rough, controlling, or outright cruel. I’m pretty sure I’d be a member of the former group, unless my grandchild was a wild child who played with matches or dumped trash all over the floor.

My son, a millennial, doesn’t intend to have children, ever. Between climate change, AI, and the threat of nuclear war, it just doesn’t seem to be a wonderful world in which to raise children. And he’s not alone. Many of his peers feel the same way, and I can’t say I blame them.

Is being a grandmother all that great? What if I turned into one of the toxic grandmothers you read about on Reddit? What if I couldn’t live up to the example set by the Mrs. Koch in my head?

These questions are rhetorical. Of course I’d be a fab grandmother! I think I’ll offer my services to a young family living in my building on a trial basis and give it a shot.