She is one of the blank places. I stare and stare at this photo, but she remains inscrutable. How old is she here? Is she a girl? What did she dream about? Want? Or was she already married? She would give birth to four children: three boys and a girl. She struggled with illness, but lived to be sixty-one, not a bad lifespan for a woman of her time.
I can’t remember stories about her, and I once asked my mother why I knew so little.
Mother, who never met her, said, “Her children idolized her, so you’ll never get a picture of the flesh-and-blood woman. They think she was perfect.”
Maude Louise. My father’s mother, who died when my father was nineteen. Here’s the story the way I remember it.
My father played high school football. He loved high school football. He wasn’t a large man, but he was scrappy and–as he said–too dumb to be scared. And maybe too smart for his own good. When he was a senior in high school, he realized he had another year of football eligibility. He deliberately FAILED English so he wouldn’t graduate and could play one more year of football. I have no idea what his parents thought about that, but he got away with it.
There’s a part of me that wonders if maybe he wasn’t quite ready to grow up and leave home because his mother was sick. She died the day he was supposed to graduate. He didn’t go through his graduation ceremony. He stayed in town for her funeral, then he did that most Huck Finn of things, he lit out for the territories. He hitched rides on freight trains. He sat over campfires and ate meager meals with other men during the Depression. He heard their stories and saw the country. He did what work he could to make money to survive, including painting. Sign painting. House painting. Anything that required a brush he could do.
How that boy’s heart must have ached as he missed his mother. How he must have wondered if his father would ever have a reason to be proud of this aimless, wandering youngest son.
I got to know my grandfather, so I know that he was, in fact, very proud of my father.
Maybe what I know about my grandmother is this: What my father learned of love and loss from her helped shape the husband and father he became.
For that, I love her, too.
I have always considered myself lucky that I knew one great grandmother who was very very active in my life – who I adored, as well as a set of grandparents and my Oma in Germany.
You’re very fortunate!
Other than giving us (I know, not you) $1.00 for Christmas, i really dont know much about Granny. I guess I should ask Lil.
Yes, you should.
Becky:
Out west, where I grew up for fifteen-and-a-half years, before Dad ripped the tender roots of our teenage souls from the warm and sandy southern coastal California soil to transplant us here in Alabama, we lived just across the street from my Dad’s parents. Dad’s mom was the one who met us when we poured out of the school bus every school day afternoon. She snacked us up every day and was the one who looked after us in the summers when Mom and Dad were at work. She reared us as her own children and we are better human beings today for her influence. She never shied from giving us a switching when we needed it. Some of us needed it more often than others.
She died the March of our senior year in high school. It was cancer and I still remember the Sunday afternoon when, while at work at the Grub Mart, mom came to tell me she was gone and to take me to her home just outside of Jacksonville where she had passed.
We called her “Mur” (pronounced “Muh), the name grafted to her person by her eldest, a son, who couldn’t quite get his toddler’s mouth around the word “Mother.” Six more children followed him and the name stuck for three generations. Grandad always called her “Sugah.”
I remember her hot biscuits and the beefiest beef stew I ever had the privilege to eat. I used to break open one of her steaming cat head sized biscuits, drop a pat of butter on each half, and then ladel on a thick slather of the stew. I wish I had some of both just now. Mostly I wish I could hear her laugh just once more, one of the most infectious you’d ever want to hear.
Thanks for calling that memory out of me with your picture (which looks remarkably like a teenage girl I knew in high school) and your well chosen words. And thank you for your gracious and kind email. It made my weekend and I enjoyed every word of it.
I’ll be in touch…when it seems the good thing to do.
Grace to you, and love for sleepy friendship reawakened!
Jim
I LOVE your stories, and I hope your children treasure them, too. Oh, I want some hot buttered biscuits right now!
You were so lucky to know your grandparents!
And I’m so lucky to know you. =)
Now you have me thinking about my grandparents. Guess I’ll have to write about them, too.
Do it!