Today is my grandma’s birthday. Or, it would be, I suppose. She would have been 74 today.

She died in May 2003, when she was 70. Until a friend read me the obituary over the phone, I thought she was 69 when she died. I remember my brothers and I going to the county fair with her in 1983, when I was ten, and she told me that she would turn 50 later in the year. I did the math and figured out that she had been born in 1933. I thought the newspaper had gotten it wrong until my mom found some official paper or other when she was sorting through my grandma’s stuff that gave her birthdate as November 14, 1932.

Since then I’ve wondered off and on about it — did she think she really was born in 1933? Was it a fib she’d told for so long that she no longer knew it wasn’t true? And in that case, why lie to make yourself one year younger? I know she was a teenaged wife and mother, and it those circumstances, in the late ’40s, wouldn’t she have wanted to make herself older? Or, if she was trying, mid-life, to make herself younger, wouldn’t she have taken off more than one year? Or maybe, just maybe, that “official” paper my mom found got it wrong, and the date my grandma told me was the correct one after all. It’s a puzzle I’ll never have the answer to, probably, but that doesn’t stop me wondering.

It didn’t occur to me until I was nearly an adult myself just how young my grandma was. Looking back, I realize that she wasn’t yet 60 when I graduated from high school. Some of my classmates had parents older than she was. She was only 39 or 40 when I was born, and I wasn’t even the oldest grandchild, not by a long shot. My oldest cousin was born in October 1966, which means that my grandma was, at most, 33 years old when she became a grandmother for the first time. That’s the age I am now, and I feel too young to have a ten-year-old, let alone grandchildren.

I wasn’t close to my grandma, and it would be a lie to say that I miss her. Honestly, I feel I barely knew her. When my brothers and cousins and I were little kids, we spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ ranch, and my grandma was fairly involved with us, but when we turned into bigger kids it seemed she lost interest. (And, to be fair, as adolescents we weren’t nearly so keen to hang out with her as we’d once been.) I can’t even remember for sure the last time I saw her. Lydia was little, walking but not yet talking, so it must have been two or three years before I moved to Sweden. We never talked on the phone and rarely exchanged greeting cards. During my growing-up years we lived less than five miles apart, but once I was a teenager we seldom saw each other outside of holiday celebrations and special events. After I moved away to go to college, I saw her even less often, though that was scarcely possible.

I don’t know, even, where I’m going with all this. No neat and tidy closing lines are coming to me. I just remembered something, though, something that should feel more significant than it does. Her name was Beverly.