Tribute to my Grandmother

Happy Birthday Grandma
(The Tradition of the Calendar Towel)
by David Perry, written at sea aboard "Crystal Symphony" March 31, 1998


A century ago today, near a small farming town called Sontag, in Franklin Country, Virginia, in a farmhouse room lit by kerosene lamps and warmed with generations, an amazing woman was born: My grandmother.

1898.

How that year always fascinated me. I would ask again, and again "Grandma, what year were you born?"

She would take the pins from her mouth - held there while she sewed on some dress, shirt, pants or blouse for a family member, friend, or client - and tell me.

"1898."

Exotic it always seemed to me, this loving, living link to another century.

Every Christmas morning the entire clan could gather at Grandma Hoard's or "Aunt Mildred's" as she was known to my cousins. There, I would sit at her feet - proudly guarding the tree - and hand out the various presents that cousins and aunts, uncles and friends had brought for this communal celebration. Each family branch had traditional gifts: Claire always made fresh preserves for everyone; Buster and Estelle gave books; Aunts Helen and Blanche would hand out coupons for restaurants, and $10 bills wrapped in scarves and such.

My annual family gifts were (and still are) linen calendars - of a type sadly-seldom-seen anymore. The year would unfurl like a flag, emblazoned with embroidered cardinals, wise sayings, horse-drawn sleighs, and the always popular motif (my grandmother's favorite) "the kitchen is the heart of the home."

The new year presented, the old year was taken down, washed, and stored away with decades of years previous, to serve as towels with which to pull piping hot pound cakes and rolls from the oven.

"When will 1968 come back?" I asked my grandmother as she folded up that troubled year and put in the drawer.

"Why son,” she smiled touching my seven-year-old cheek. "Never. 1968 will never come again." I watched as the time trapped in fabric, like a southern amber, disappeared into the cabinet. I looked at each year differently after that. The days, the months, the seasons - all repeat - but the years…

...Never again

My grandmother's house in Richmond, Virginia (the "big city" where the rural sisters moved just before World War II) was one of delicious sounds, and melodic smells. Cheese bread from the oven; "Silver Bells" from the piano; thick red-eye gravy and grits in the morning; "Amazing Grace" at night.

In the afternoons, my grandmother would tend to her roses - and her mini "country garden" of butter beans, snaps and tomatoes that climbed up the clothes line in her manicured back yard. It was a place of over-the-fence good neighbors, and her younger sister, Helen, whose house was directly across the alley. Blanch, the "baby" of the widowed trio, lived a few blocks away, with my house - my parents' house - the fourth corner of the familial square.

Rising before dawn (always a farm girl), my grandmother would make breakfast. Half an hour later, my mother and I would arrive - three generations sharing a few minutes before we went our respective ways: mother to work; son/grandson to the corner to wait for the school bus; grandmother to the sewing machine, kitchen, garden and a 3:00pm break with the Secret Storm and The Edge of Night.

"My programs," she would announce with a kiss as I trooped in from school to await my mother's return that evening. (In later years, grandma - with a rare show of pique - switched allegiances to The Guiding Light, never forgiving the producers of Edge of Night for killing off Nicole after finally marrying Adam.)

A woman of Buddhist compassion and Methodist conversion, she eschewed smoking, drinking, gambling and the opinions of most television evangelists who always "irked" her with their "self righteous ways."

"I never saw anything wrong with dancing though," she would wink, belying I always thought, a teenage of not totally Primitive Baptist leanings.

Her passions were a peeled apple with the late news, her "Mr. Lincoln" rose bush, family, and checkers with her youngest grandson who never had to let her win.

Laying her hands on the piano, and her grandson's on top of her own, she taught a small boy to play "Silent Night," "The Old Rugged Cross" and 30 years of future hymns and variations.

Her wisdom in part: "Worry is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but gets you no place," and "Any job worth doing, is worth doing right." She also used to stress to her talk-too-much grandson that "God gave you two ears and one mouth, so He must have meant for you to listen twice as much as He meant for you to talk."

Nannie Mildred Tyree Hoard died in 1989 at the age of 92, having only been sick for a brief time. Five years prior, she boarded a plane for the first time to watch her youngest grandson graduate college. Four months before, she was still mowing her own lawn. A week before, her memory surpassed that of an IBM mainframe.

To all grandmothers, this column is for you: written by all your grandsons and grand-daughters, with prose limited by language, with poems of limitless love.