If you’d asked my paternal grandmother sometime before around the age of 95, she’d have told you that May 30th was her birthday. Somewhere in her mid-90’s, time (and a lot of other things) lost a lot of meaning, and she apparently proclaimed one day that her birthday wasn’t May 30th, had never been May 30th, and would never be May 30th. It was, in fact, May 31st.
In all due respect, I say, whatever.
Personally, I will always see May 30th as my grandmother’s birthday, largely because it is also, in an odd coincidence of time and space and the wackiness that is my family, my mother’s and my mother’s mother’s birthday. I used to give Nana, my mother’s mother, a hard time because she’d thrown off the math. Granny was born in 1902, Nana in 1923, and Mom in 1942. If Nana had just come along a year sooner, there would have been a perfect 20 year gap between each.
This year, we’re merely going out to dinner for my mother’s birthday – a quiet day. Nana passed away in 2009 (today would have been her 90th birthday), Granny a month after my daughter, her 25th great-grandchild and her namesake, was born in 2005. “I know she knew about Earl,” my father told me after Granny passed. I’d been too sick and with a brand new baby and was one of only a very small handful from our very large family who couldn’t make it to Mississippi for the funeral. She’d always said she’d never live to see me have children, but she did. She hung on to 103, waited, then relaxed and slipped away not too long after my father held Earl’s picture up to my grandmother’s largely closed eyes.
Now, I loved my Nana dearly. Still do. But I spent a lot of time with Nana. I saw Granny maybe twice a year, three times if I was really lucky. She had a mystique about her that Nana never had. I know some in the family, especially since her passing, have shared stories that aren’t always favorable about her, and I don’t doubt they’re true, but I always looked at Granny a little differently. Then again, I’ve always been all about the history of our family, the way our tree branches weave and veer and double-back at times and how that shapes us into the looney, loving, contentious, crazy people we are. She changed greatly in her last few years, perhaps showing a self that had been bitten back for decades or maybe just showing a side that was never there until her brain started to age and fritz and rewire, but I didn’t see her nearly as much in those last years as I should have, so I’ve allowed myself to cling to her when I remember her best, sitting on her front porch, telling a 9-year-old skinny me that I had “good birthin’ hips for twins.”
In preparing to start my next leg of life pursuing my MFA in Creative writing, I was flipping through things I’ve written previously, and I came upon this piece I wrote in 1998. 15 years ago, dear God, and I wrote the thing NOT in my first year of college. It’s always been one of my favorite pieces, absolutely colored by my own rose-colored perspective, but still true at it’s core. And knowing I have family who reads this blog (much to my amazement considering the…ahem…blueness of it at times), I thought today, on what would have been her 111th birthday, would be a good day to share. Not all in the family, I’m sure, will agree with my view of her, but this is how, in my head, my Granny will always live.
The swing screeches in its hooks as the cool, crisp autumn-in-Mississippi wind flicks the remaining leaves from branches of towering, ancient trees. The old house creaks its own symphony when, without warning, the wind changes directions. I sit on the swing, my legs dangling, relaxed as my feet don’t quite touch the boards of the porch. The crackled paint has been scraped up bit by bit by the shuffling feet of swinging great-grandchildren who are taller than I.
The woman sitting beside me, withered by the years, but not quite as withered as most her age, exudes a presence. Her greyish-white hair is perched in a thin bun on top of her head, helped out by her beloved “rat.” Cloudy grey eyes take in every little detail through glass lenses in desperate need of cleaning. Two thin lips curl into a small, but contented smile, her version of it anyway. The blue and purple flowers on her hand-sewn dress ripple in the breeze, their blossoms withered more than she.
I watch her stare out across the yard, not taking anything, even her breathing for granted. I know her years are growing few. Maybe not even years anymore. The earth’s been blessed with her presence for 96 years already. Good years. Her smile and courage have led her family through the best and worst of times. The history she’s seen and lived sounds like it comes straight out of someone’s wild imagination. Still, she’ll recite almost every word in that raspy voice, closing her eyes every now and then to see the memories rather than just hear them. On occasion, she’ll falter on a word, stop, give her mouth a rest or maybe adjust her teeth, and jump right back in to the wild tale.
Everything bad you’ve heard about her past comes from someone else. She doesn’t say a downcast thing about anyone, including the infamous second husband who tried to poison her when she was nine months pregnant. People are good – somewhere inside. There’s good in all of us, although none are perfect except The Good Lord Himself.
Her life has always been good, no matter how much she didn’t enjoy parts of it. After all, she has survived. And that’s good. Her existence has been colorful. Very few born in her day can claim three husbands and a divorce which was her doing. The first husband, Colon – yes, like the bodily organ – died in the early thirties, leaving her in the small house in Soso, Mississippi, with four hungry mouths under the age of 1o to feed in the throes of The Great Depression. The second husband, Mister Jack – whose Native American mother named him Mister hoping it would earn him at least some false respect (didn’t work – everyone called him Jack) – was a blackguard who gave her two children. The first died at age six months of an illness completely curable these days. The younger of the two wasn’t his gift. That’s the one she was carrying when he tried to kill her, the one who was born shortly after their divorce and his banishment from the county in 1937. The oldest husband, Orange Raisin – known pleasantly as O.R. – came along in the late thirties and finished off her brood with a beautiful baby girl somewhere around ’42. At age 40, childbearing years were finally behind her. In the 1970’s when O.R. passed away after a long illness, so were her marrying days. Twenty-five years later, her six children, seventeen grandchildren, twenty-three great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren watch over her and care for her. She is happy.
Sitting on the whitewashed swing, I look at her in amazement, trying to find the stress and strain I know must be haunting her in some hidden niche of her mind. But all I find is peace. I have always wondered why her wrinkles are so few, so soft for her age. Watching her enjoy the breeze, I realize it must be because she’s content…relaxed in her existence. At peace with herself, and the Lord, and those around her. No grudges are held underneath thick, tattered fingernails. No envy pangs her frailed bones. No hatred resides in her sundropped heart. No mud has dried between withered toes.
I turn my eyes to absorb the Southern Beauty around me. The warm green fields are grassed over, their crop-filled years long forgotten. In the distance somewhere not present, I hear the echoes of happy children. Hard-working children. A real family where love was overflowing, discipline was a necessity, and everyone said goodnight before blowing out the candles. This land is alive with her memories.
Just inside the screen door, I hear my father, that only child from the second marriage, sharing a story with one of his many great-nieces. It’s a story of my grandmother’s unique brand of psychology. He had wanted ice cream during recess and had mischievously formed the habit of sneaking a nickel from his mother’s purse before bed, tucking it safely in his dirt-filled, ragged wallet. The kids at school thought he was the richest fellow in the world if his mother was giving him that kind of money everyday just for an ice cream. However, Mama soon got wind of the nightly heist. She could have made a fuss. She could have embarrassed him in front of his siblings. But, instead, she crept into his room one night, found his wallet, and replaced the nickel with a true treasure. When he awakened, he found the quarter. Mama knew.
Mama still knows. Thought old dentures, she grins slyly at the story which her supposedly deaf ears have heard. Her eyes dancing, she turns to me and nods in satisfaction. Her happy voice croons in its own scratchy melody. “I have good kids.”
Update: The tallies have been raised, and after much counting and re-counting and pleading with cousins on Facebook about who may have spawned more, my grandmother’s living, bloodline legacy stands at 6 children, 17 grandchildren, 26 great-grandchildren, and 16 great-great-grandchildren with another one on the way.
and, um, am I Truman (or True-man. Heh. I just made two people snort.)?
soundtrack for the past two days, and I’m beginning to think I’ve stepped into some kind of Twilight Zone.