Andrea Dana

 In the summer of 1995 I went to see the movie “Antonia’s Line” with my grandmother, who was 83 years old at the time. This Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film was about a woman that wakes up one morning and decides that it is the perfect day for her to die. It's not that she's ill or anything, although she is in her eighties, but being a very clear-minded lady she knows instinctively when it's time to go. The movie then traces back forty years and nearly five generations of women as Antonia recounts returning to her village with her daughter Danielle after a twenty-year absence. Her own mother is dying and Antonia is to inherit the farm she grew up on. At the end of the movie as Antonia slipped away in her sleep, my grandmother turned to me and said, “Honey, that is the way to go. Sign me up!”

I thought of this movie last Sunday when my grandmother, Tillie (Kronick) Leslie, in her 96^th year woke up and called me to wish me Happy Birthday. She then spent the day going to a movie, shopping on Bloor Street and in Yorkville with my aunt, and returned home to eat dinner, brisket from Yitz’s Deli. It had been a great day! And at the end of her 34, 918^th day on earth, Tillie fell asleep and died. Just like Antonia.

 My grandmother, whose external beauty was a reflection of her strength, could easily pass for 75. In fact, no one ever believed that a woman with such clear skin, perfect hair, and that sparkle in her eye, could possibly be so old. Tillie was ageless. It was a known fact. She was classy, poised, and her ability to adapt to the changing world for almost the century that she lived in it left everyone she met in awe. But as I said while delivering my eulogy at her funeral, the most amazing thing about her was that she had duped an entire community by giving off an energy that made them believe she would live forever. She was more active, more alert, and more put together than people half her age. To the more than 300 people that turned up at her funeral and shiva, she was a legend.

So how did Tillie fool us all into thinking she was unsinkable? It wasn’t just lipstick and high heels. Long before Sweetspot even existed, my grandmother was living the “sweet” life and she loved every day of it. I now have her calendars that date back to 1978. The days are color-coded and jam packed with activities. She was constantly trying new things and adjusting to new styles. Tillie loved the theater, restaurants, drinking wine, going to parties, and golfing. She took courses at George Brown College every year for as long as I could remember. She married the “Right” guy (Dr. Harold E. Leslie) and when he died almost 30 years ago, she picked herself up and became the original “Single Lady.” Sorry Beyonce!

My grandmother lived through two world wars and many wars after that. She was around during the Depression, when television was invented, Israel became a state, Kennedy was shot, a man walked on the moon, and the twin towers fell. She traveled the world with my grandfather in 1959 and 1963 and when describing to us many years later  how they couldn't get off the plane in India due to a Cholera outbreak, she shrugged her shoulders and said, "Isn't the world just one big jerk?"

So could it be any more appropriate, or for that matter coincidental, that in this picture from more than fifty years ago, my grandmother (front row in a sleeveless black dress) happens to be sitting three women away from Gert Track (in a black one sleeve dress), the grandmother of Sweetspot founder and role model Joanna Track?