People have always gone out of their way to tell me how lucky I was for being able to spend so much time with my grandmother. If I mentioned that I had to take her shopping or to the doctor or that she was waiting for me and so I had to rush away, someone would inevitably slip into a long reverie on the subject of my good fortune. "My grandmother lives in Peoria...Tacoma...New Brunswick," they would say. "I only see her once a year. I haven't seen her for three years now. I couldn't make it home last Christmas, but I think about her all the time." Then there would be a great deal of pining and sighing. How sad it was that time and geography had separated the speaker from this baker of cookies and keeper of happy childhood memories! They would put a hand on my shoulder. They did not want me to miss their point. "Enjoy every minute of it. Soak up her wisdom. I only wish I were you."

Then they would go off to their lunch dates and tennis courts, and I would get in the car and go fetch my grandmother. The counsel I received from nearly everyone (those with dead grandmothers were as bad or worse) was a never-ending source if irritation to me, in the same way it’s irritating to cook Thanksgiving dinner while someone is leaning against the kitchen door telling you what a pretty picture you make wrestling the turkey out of the oven. Hard work is first and foremost hard, and whether or not it’s ultimately rewarding is very rarely the thing you’re thinking of at the moment. The worst of it was that I had planned to be one of those people myself. I had planned to live far away from my family and miss them terribly. I had every intention of feeling simply awful that I wasn’t with my grandmother in her years of decline, because I loved my grandmother, loved her more than anyone, just as she loved me more in return. Om this faraway city in which I would always be compelled to live due to some unknown necessity, I would meet perfect strangers who took tender and const...