My maternal grandmother — my Bubie — would have turned 100 yesterday. She was the first of my grandparents to pass away. That’s her holding me as a baby. I was her first grandchild and inarguably the most awesome, though she always wisely pretended that my brother and cousins were cool, too. She was smart like that.

I’ve told this story a million times in front of audiences, but I’ll tell it again now. It’s the story of how my Bubie was the first person in my life to give me shit about being a writer.

I was about seven years old. Bubie asked me — as grown-ups always do to little kids — “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I said, “I want to be a writer.”

And she smiled and looked down at me and she said, very sweetly, “Oh, that’s nice. You want to starve.”

Now, she was kidding. She was kidding, people. But of course I was all of seven and I didn’t have the sarcasm filters yet, so I thought she was totally serious and that if I grew up to be a writer that I would starve.

Clearly, though, the threat of starvation did not stop me.

I have basically two regrets in my life when it comes to Bubie. First is that she never got to meet her great-grandkids. Second is that she died before learning that I became a writer and — as my waistline will testify — have not yet starved. She would have been deliriously happy, and I would have poked fun at her over the whole starving comment, and that would have been very good.

She passed away in the spring of 2001. A few months later, when the planes hit the towers on my thirtieth birthday, the superstitious part of me whispered, “She left early because she knew the world was going to become awful.”

God, if she could see the world now, she’d be well and truly—

I was going to say horrified, but the fact of the matter is that she’d be pissed.

Women of Bubie’s generation were rock-solid and tough as nails. They had to be just to survive. They had pretty much zero rights — couldn’t buy a house or a car without a man to co-sign. Couldn’t attend most colleges. Couldn’t go to work without being harassed. Couldn’t complain about the harassment because no one cared.

So, yeah, she’d be pissed to see the hard-fought gains realized during her lifetime under threat. Bubie was sweet and kind, but she was also stone-cold when the situation demanded it. A hard-headed pragmatist who got. Things. Done.

She danced through the Great Depression, which apparently is what drew my grandfather to her. They won a lamp at a dance contest, which was a big deal back then, I guess, because they talked about it a lot.

Now, look, I loved her husband — my Zadie — dearly, but he wasn’t exactly what you’d call a Type A self-starter. He never had anything resembling a career. Bubie kept the house together. Bubie kept things moving along. Zadie was maximum chill; Bubie could relax, but in the back of her mind, you knew she was always doing the math.

So she raised three kids, mourned a fourth that would never be. Ran the household. Kept the books. Did it all with a smile and a hug.

Oh, yeah, and also tried to keep America safe for democracy. I swear this next part is true…

Sitting on the shelf to my right as I type this is a sheaf of papers from the National Archives, which I received by filing a FOIA request. See, it turns out that in the fifties, my Bubie was a spy.

I mean… Kinda.

Look, it was a weird time, OK? The Red Scare. And while lots of innocent people were hurt, the cold hard fact of the matter is that there actually were, y’know, commie spies out there! Just not as many as people thought.

So apparently Bubie was concerned about some chatter she’d been hearing in certain circles and she went to the FBI. And they were concerned, too, so they encouraged her to befriend some of these people and see what was what.

As best I can tell, nothing came of it and no one was hurt, but there’s her FBI file on my shelf. And what we get out of her time as an informant is this story…

Bubie is shopping one day at a local department store. The cashier rings her up, but neglects to give Bubie a receipt. On the way out, the security guard stops her, asks to see her receipt. Which, of course, she doesn’t have. And the cashier — out of ignorance, overwork, forgetfulness, or malice (we’ll never know) — says, “I’ve never seen this lady before.”

So Bubie is hauled into the backroom and she tells the security guy that she’s a fine, upstanding citizen who would never shoplift and, in fact, she works for the FBI…

…and then proceeds to call her FBI handler who vouches for her with the security guard and gets her off the hook!

It would be a better story, I grant you, if she’d actually stolen the stuff and used the FBI to get away with it, but ’tis not the case.

The day she died, I came home from work to a phone call from my mother, who told me Bubie was in the hospital and it didn’t look good, but don’t come because I wouldn’t get there in time anyway. I immediately hopped back in my car and hauled ass down the hilly two-laner that would eventually connect me to the highway to the hospital. I was doing ninety in a forty, thinking only of getting there in time. And a cop hit his lights behind me.

And the only thing I could think was I don’t have time for this.

So when I went over the next hill, I found the first driveway I could. I pulled in and killed my lights. The cop came up over the hill and kept going. I backed out and took off again.

(To this day, any time someone on the road cuts me off or tears past me like a bat out of hell, I think to myself, Maybe they’re not a jerk; maybe someone they love is dying.)

It didn’t matter. Mom was right. I didn’t make it in time.

It was my first real experience with death. I’d lost my great-grandparents, but they lived far enough away and I saw them so infrequently that while I missed them, they didn’t leave a hole.

Bubie’s passing ripped an enormous chasm in my life. I wasn’t sure I would ever get to the other side.

But I did. Because Bubie got me there. Because she’d been teaching me how to deal with adversity and the general stuff of life for as long as I could remember.

There are things she taught me that only became clear as lessons in retrospect. I know that one thing she didn’t teach me was to be sad. When someone I cared for was in and out of the hospital, Bubie never told me to be angry, or sad, or upset, or even mildly annoyed. She told me to be strong. “Just be strong, honey,” she would tell me, “and everything will work out.”

And it did.

“Fight nice,” she would say when I would get into an argument with my mom or my brother. It was OK to fight. It was OK to be angry. Just…be nice about it. This is your family; they’re still gonna be there when the smoke clears.

She told me to treat each day like an adventure. I can hear her: “Love a little, laugh a little, dance a little, argue a little, make love a little each day.”

And she told me to live life one day at a time, which is something I still haven’t quite mastered. I’m working on it, though, I promise. I’ll probably be working on it for the rest of my life.

But that’s all right. Because the work is what gets you through. The work is what gets you across that chasm.

I knew you’d get me there, Bubie.