Life messed me over! I have always been jealous of anyone who has a grandfather. My dads dad and my grandfather, Virdo Woods, passed away nearly a decade before I was born. (If I was named Virdo I might have left early too.) His wife, Ada, had already died from breast cancer. My grandfather on my moms side, James Robertson, met me, but I never met him. What I mean is that we crossed paths during my first year of life. He met me but I had no more recognition of him than I had of President Eisenhower. Clearly he realized that none of his kids could produce anything better than this newborn bundle of joy because he promptly checked out and went to heaven. (Grandpa Robertson was a deacon in the Baptist Church in Marmaduke, Arkansas. So of course he went to heaven.) That left me with his wife, Grandma Molly.
I didn't call her Molly because if I had she would have shot me. No, really. Grandma was very aware that I was born in Detroit and was being raised as a Yankee far north of the Mason Dixon Line. I only knew her slightly more than a decade (and I only saw her once each year) before she went to visit Grandpa Jim in heaven, but she made it clear that I was a yankee and yankees are only good for target practice. She would regularly ask to see my belly button. She would poke her finger into it and say with a cantankerous grin, "That's where a yankee shot ya!" She never explained why a yankee would shoot a yankee. I suppose she didn't understand war very well. One day I was sitting on her lap and I pulled out my toy pistol and pretended to shoot her. To my utter confusion she fell over dead on the couch. I looked at the end of my pistol. It was not smoking. I didn't know whether to be proud or very afraid. I bumped her. No reaction. I called her name. Nothing. I finally decided to turn myself in. Climbing down to go find my mother and tell her that I had shot her mother dead, I got half-way to the kitchen when I heard her delighted cackle. As I turned back she was shaking a crooked finger at me saying, "I got ya! I got ya!"
My first memories of visiting my grandmother included middle of the night trips to the outhouse. It was the most disgusting thing I had ever heard of and I was not happy. But when you have to go... Eventually my dad and my uncle spent a week in Marmaduke building grandma a real indoor bathroom. There was a little mini-ditch running through grandma's yard from the back of the house to the street. I soon noticed that when anyone flushed the toilet or turned the water on in the bathroom water began to trickle through the ditch. Even my tiny mind was able to figure out that the ditch ran right past her vegetable garden. I didn't ask the obvious. After that day I mainly ate meat at grandma's house.
Our days at grandma's were long and hot. Arkansas had not heard of air conditioning yet. The beds were lumpy. A railroad track ran across a field about a quarter mile in front of the house and hobo's would regularly knock on her door seeking a meal. Grandma always met them at the door, invited them to rest on her porch, and went into the kitchen to fix them something to eat. I watched them through my bedroom window and wondered why they didn't have red clothes-filled-bandana's tied to a stick hanging over their shoulders. Don't all hobo's do that? I watched too much TV. The days were filled with blowing bubbles from the little bottles that mom bought us at Houston's store in downtown Marmaduke, playing with the little girl and her German Shepherd from across the street, and wondering when my Uncle Garlon was going to come over and whisker me half to death. Uncle Garlon had The Beard From Hell. It was long enough to be seen but short enough to be all stubbles. He got great delight from chasing me down and pulling my tender young face against his sweaty-fresh-from-the-cotton-fields-face and rubbing his cheek against mine until I howled in pain. My parents thought it was funny. If it had been 2022 DCFS would have locked this man away. Uncle Garlon was the one that taught me to hate the St. Louis Cardinals. He knew of my love for the Chicago Cubs and he tormented me every time he saw me. He accused the Cubs of playing with rubber balls and declared the Cardinals to be the Kings of the baseball universe. My disdain for all thing Cardinal has not diminished.
Grandma Molly died in January of 1969. We had been living in Chicago for a few years by that time and we drove all night to get to Marmaduke. This was my third experience with death. My Aunt Verniel had died years earlier and I saw my first dead body. (Have you noticed that my family is really bad at choosing names for their children?) And a child friend had been hit by a car and killed more recently. They buried him with his favorite marble in his hand. I suppose whatever is left of him is still holding it today. Grandma's visitation was held at a horrible old funeral home in Paragould, Arkansas. The funeral director sat in his miserable little office down the hall all evening hacking and coughing from some disease that would surely end all of us soon. I was convinced we would all been in need of his services in short order. The family was squeezed into a tiny room highlighted by bad, peeling wallpaper, and pale pastel lighting. Grandma wouldn't be tricking me anymore. I wouldn't be shooting her anymore either. There would be no more bubbles or tainted vegetables.
I didn't know Grandma Molly very well. But she was the only grandparent I ever met. Life did me dirty. And I still miss her.
