Recently, someone asked a question that I suspect has been asked of you: Which person has most influenced your life? My answer was my grandmother, who reminded me of no one as much as "Ma Kettle" -- the actress Marjorie Main. One expected her to ford a stream, use a shotgun, or ward off the Indians till the Cavalry came.

My grandmother possessed a contentious curiosity, soapbox mentality, and phenomenal memory. Forceful, grandma was not coquettish; prideful, she was not immodest; she would inveigle and even overwhelm, but never profane, a listener.

The facts of her life may be simply stated. Helen Smith was born in Lamont, graduated from RIT, and married a man who later farmed and worked the rails. They had two sons, worked the soil, and later moved to the Wyoming County town of Pike, population 400. Grandma picked beans, made quilts, and crafted pottery -- always, flaunting a hungry yearning to learn.

Up close, she tended to neighbors. From afar, I marveled at her steady diet of affection for people of discipline and self-reliance -- "good, decent, law-abiding folks" -- not Eric Goldman's "MetroAmerican," privileged by lineage to rule. Her rectitude expressed America's native purity. I am certain she never uttered a four-letter word.

Her people, she explained carefully, were the millions of Americans who worked and saved and paid their taxes -- willing to be overlooked, but refusing to brook neglect. Endorsing them, she defined herself, and seldom wandered from a moral vision that was almost clinically clean.

My grandmother attended church suppers and school board meetings -- gravitated more to Henry Fonda than Jane -- and viewed the Eastern Seaboard as injurious to the social decencies of an earlier, ordered age. Even in the 1970s, her manner spoke of the Eisenhower years. For 83 years, until cancer maneuvered her into its clamp, she made existence move her way.

She knew nothing of Andy Gibb or Alice Cooper. She abhorred the offspring of Benjamin Spock's America -- spoiled, convinced of their superiority, and disdainful of the past. Yet she was also a pioneer, and did precisely what she wanted -- take pride in housework; spawn a loving home; and head her family with civility and grace. My grandmother was a liberated woman before the term liberated was born.

On March 3, 1995, they held her memorial service; and as they met in the same town where Helen Smith went to church and raised her children and where the wind always whispered, I had the most overwhelming sense of coming home to some locale that belonged.

The pews were crowded. Sobs rang through the clapboard church. We sang the hallowed hymn, "My Faith Looks Up to Thee." Eyes closed, I felt my grandmother's memory settle on my consciousness. Later, leaving the chapel, I turned and saw, or though I saw, in the shadows of early afternoon, in the town she graced, in the land she loved, the most remarkable person of my life.

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