As a little girl, my paternal grandmother was no longer able to drive. My father would drive us to visit her which would often follow with trips to the store, deli, or other errands. Occasionally, "Cousin Eloise" would be in town.
Eloise sounded exotic and on the surface, oh boy a cousin to play with! The first few times she visited , I was too young to understand she was my grandmother's cousin - not mine. She was a Grant - a concept that I also failed to grasp until years later.
Cousin Eloise was my grandmother's first cousin - my great-grandmother Isabel Grant's brother, Robert, was Eloise's father. Although they were close in age, Eloise had married and moved to Texas; however, she never had children.
The early visits I don't quite recall what they did. Their last, it's quite vivid. We had two little old bitties in Tower City Center on the upper deck in the sunshine. My father, sister, and I sat at our own table. All the while grandma & Eloise would eat and talk by themselves. We would sometimes split up from them in the shops synchronizing watches to meet back up. It seemed though that they just wanted to talk - to connect. In retrospect it's as if they knew time was running out.
This was sometime circa 1996 or 1997. Eloise died the summer of 1998 and grandma died that spring in 1999.
A few years ago I found this yearbook picture of her from 1942 West Technical HS in Cleveland . The donated yearbook must have belonged to someone Eloise knew as she was one of the few signatures in the yearbook.
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