Dear God, thank you for The Golden Girls

Blanch, Dorothy, Sophia and Rose. I had all but forgotten about them until my brother and his girlfriend, along with my own boyfriend discovered a treasure trove of DVD’s representing the first 3 seasons of the good old Golden Girls in a random bookshelf. Never knew they were there. While playing cards with a friend in an adjacent room, I hear the familiar intro song roll out, “Thank you for being a friend” and the corners of my mouth curl up in a smile of  happiness and nostalgia. “Seriously, the three of you are watching the Golden Girls? That’s amazing!” Out of all cinematic options available in the DVD collection of my current residence, that is what they choose.

Secretly, I don’t really think “They” had anything to do with it. I think God looked down at me and surveyed the situation of my life right now and said, “That woman could use a healthy dose of The Golden Girls to remind her of her own golden girly ness!” And thus, on a daily basis, I watch episodes of the ladies, laughing harder than usual at their geriatric antics.  Not sure what it is about them that brings me such bubbling joy. Perhaps its microscopic Sophia Patillo’s razor-sharp wit. Perhaps it’s Blanche Devereaux’s Southern belle flirtations and seductions. Or is it Rose Nylund’s airy innocence? Dorothy Zbornak is pretty great too. She drops some bombs on a pretty regular basis and she perplexes me in a delightful way. I wonder at the casting director’s choice of Bea Arthur, the broad-shouldered, baritone voiced woman who plays the brains of the show, but as I watch her dominate the stage in her angular shoulder pad-infused blouses, she’s perfect.

I smile. I smile more. I laugh and with a tiny bumblebee buzz of sadness, miss the grandmotherly figures of my own life. My great-aunt Julia Jones was a superb blend of all of these fantastic female archetypes, minus the simplicity of Rose. She was a sharp-witted, charismatic, loving, flirtatious, unrelenting woman in possession of a marvelous intelligence. My great-grandmother Virginia Green was of the same breed, with just a hint of Rose Nylund in her soul. A true southern lady, born and raised in Madison, Georgia and to her dying day a woman of great elegance and ceremony. The truth is, my beloved women are nothing like the characters of The Golden Girls. They are their own breed of character, and any one of them could serve as sitcom inspiration. I am a part of them. They shaped me like the little lemon cakes and cucumber sandwiches they so lovingly prepared for their Bridge games.

Watching the Golden Girls makes me feel like I’m drinking iced tea out of my Grammie’s sunflower glasses in her back garden again, as I did so many times as a child. Growing up, I preferred her company to that of my peers sometimes. I looked forward every week to having sleepovers at her house where I would help her pull weeds or sweep the garage for a nickel. Mostly I just sat around and listened to her as she schooled me Southern style on the importance of family and of being a lady. The “being a lady” lesson didn’t sink in until long after she passed, but I think she’d be proud of her own “Golden Girl” great-granddaughter. I once wrote a poem for her: “There is nothing like a grandmother, so tender and so sweet. Placing gentle kisses on a tiny babies cheek.” I took her piles of greeting cards she had saved for decades and made a flowery wall hanging. She loved it. The other day, while working in my garden pulling the ever-present weeds that like to wind their way around the base of my sugar snap peas and zucchini, I remembered a sign that hung on her own garden gate. The last time I physically laid eyes on that sign was about 15 years ago, and suddenly, there it was in my mind: “The kiss of the sun for pardon, the song of the birds for mirth, nothing is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on Earth.” I’m in the process of re-creating it to be hung on the entrance of my own garden gate.

It is silly that I try to control the flow of LIFE, my life and the circumstances of it when I know darn right that it is inconceivable what I truly need and what is coming next. I never could have forecasted that my current muse and the source of my greatest joy would be a 3 disc DVD set of the Golden Girls, installed and played by my brother and boyfriend. Could anyone even imagine something so random? So here’s what I have to say to that: Dear God, thank you for The Golden Girls. And to the Golden Girls, thank you for being a friend!

Rest in Peace: Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty and Rue McLannahan

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