Gone Crazy in Alabama

Gone Crazy in Alabama by Rita Williams-Garcia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have fallen in love with Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern, the Gaither Sisters. I was late discovering this series for "Middle Grades" with great historical lessons.

It started with "One Crazy Summer," with the sisters visiting their wayward mother in Oakland, CA. Then the aftermath and return home to Brooklyn in "P.S. Be Eleven."

The latest installment is "Gone Crazy in Alabama" when Pa sends the girls "Down South" to meet the relatives on the farm. I so much enjoyed the voices of the girls as they complete each others' explanations in an almost poetic harmony. They remind me so much of my middle sister, my niece, and me.

I was so charmed that every time I opened the book at the next chapter, I couldn't hold back the smile on my face. Their adventures, learning the family history, helping gather the fresh eggs, and help milk the cow reminded me of days in Forsythe, Georgia, so long ago.

I was happy just reminiscing until something went terribly wrong, when I found myself in the middle of the night, with an unexpected page-turner. No spoilers here. You have to read it for yourself.

Rita Williams-Garcia is a winner.

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My Very Own Quarterback

My grandson Markus is the quarterback, defensive end, and kickoff return receiver.  Hey, nobody is on the bench.

 

Will you still love me...

OK, Baby Boomers, we wrote the songs.

Will you still love me tomorrow?



Will you still need me when I'm 64?



And then there's the one that hasn't been written yet:

Will you still love me when I don't know who you are?

Tinker decided one of my bookcases was falling down from overload. After he repaired it, he said I needed to get rid of some of the books to make space for the photo albums. We have photos from every vacation, cruise, roadtrip, family occasion we have had since we got married in 2002. After we went digital, we took hundreds of pictures of everything and shared them with our friends on the internet. Then we printed about 15% of them using one of the online photo services like KodakGallery or Shutterfly...whichever one is having a sale when we need one.

After I got all the albums labeled and shelved, I started wondering what we would ever do with all those prints. They're nice to have when friends come over and ask about our travels...better to look at the prints than have them go with us up to our office and look at the computer screen.

Then I thought about my dear sister Laverne. LaVerne is 85 years old and has dementia. I hesitate to use the A-word as it seems like a sentence for my future health as well.

Anyway, LaVerne and her husband Goody traveled all over the world when they were able, and now they have a collection of photo albums. When I visited with LaVerne on one of those days when she didn't remember that Goody was her husband, I pulled out one of her photo albums and she started remembering events from those trips. Then she asked, "Why is it that every time I turned around, Goody was there too?" She turned the page and said, "There he is again."

Sometimes you just have to laugh to keep from crying.

My Day for Good Karma

Did you ever feel like you were overdue for something good to happen. It's been one of those years for me.

Today was going to be my "Day Off." I had no appointments, so Sweetie and I planned to go to the State Fair. But Tuesday, I learned I had to take my sister to the Dentist. My 84-year-old sister and her 91-year-old husband moved to Raleigh to a retirement home earlier this year, largely due to my insistence. So guess who gets to take them to their appointments.

So I scheduled it as early as feasible to allow the old folks to have breakfast and be ready for me to pick them up. The dentist is five minutes from their retirement home, but the office is on the second floor with stairs on the outside of the building. I usually park in a handicapped space at the foot of the ramp, so my sister can use her walker. Brother-in-law, who is less steady on his feet, but refuses to use a cane or walker, would probably try the stairs, but it would take half an hour. I have a placard for handicapped parking that I only use when transporting them. This time I forgot to hang it on my mirror.

After I had been sitting in the waiting room, while Sis was in with the dentist about 15 minutes, a woman comes into the office, looks around, and asks me, "Did you park in the handicapped space down there?" I say yes, and she says, "You forgot to put your placard in the window. You need to go get it...quickly." So I go immediately and hang the sign on my mirror. Within less than a minute, a police car comes cruising through the parking lot, stops behind my car, checks the handicapped placard, and moves on down to the middle of the next section, where he stops.

When I go back to the waiting room, the dentists' receptionist tells me what happened. Someone in the one of the offices near where I parked called the police, but one of her co-workers heard the conversation and came to tell me. Apparently she has helped others like this before.

My first thought was, "What busy-body has time to call the police when there are plenty other empty handicapped spots available?" Then I thanked God for the other busy-body who took the time to run and tell me. Then I had to wonder if the local police don't have anything better to do. When we finished the appointment, the police car was still there, and stayed while I helped my old folks into the car, and exited the parking lot in the other direction.

Do we have to eat to entertain?

Do you feel obligated to feed anyone who comes to visit you at your house? When you're not having a party, didn't invite them, but they just stopped by. Maybe they called first...people don't just drop in like they did in the Olden Days when I was a child. Do you feed them?

When I was a child, people did just drop in. Mostly it would be Sunday afternoon, or just about any afternoon in the summertime. We didn't know they were coming, they just stopped by for a visit.

I know Mother always felt obligated to offer them something to drink. "Would you like some ice tea?" before they could sit down. If they said yes, or even said, "Could I just have some ice water?" Mother would go fix something to eat. If we had some cake or cookies, she would get out the glass dishes and serve them dessert. It often happened that there was nothing left of the cake or cookies, since there were so many of us children in the house, so she might send one of us out the back door to the corner store to find something to "serve."

And of course we were sometimes the ones dropping in. I remember my brother George would sometimes take me with him to visit his girlfriend Shirley. I was about 4 years old, so he would have been about 15. I never knew why he would ask me to come. It could have been any number of reasons.

1) He was too nervous to go alone.

2) He was using my cuteness factor to ensure that Shirley would let him in.

3) Shirley always served something if he brought me along.<<<<-------

Of course that was the reason I went along. Shirley always served Burry's Fudgetown cookies. She put a bunch on a plate and I could eat them all by myself without having to share with my sister Toni.

I tried to break the cycle of feeding the drop-in guest. Of course, these days people don't drop in unannounced the way we used to. We can stop in at the Goodberry's or Starbucks when we need an afternoon sugar fix.

P.S. George and Shirley recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

DNR

The doctor showed them the big yellow sign, meant to stop the staff in their tracks. This one said "Do Not Resuscitate." She asked my sister and brother-in-law if that was their desire. I thought they already had a "Living Will" but it turns out the attorney back home said to wait until they get to North Carolina, since the legalese would be different. But they responded, "Yes, that's what we want."

The thought of it cut me like knife. I needed clarification, just to be sure. "You mean, if they find you with your heart stopped, you don't want them to use those paddles to get you going again?" "That's right."

I told the doctor, we needed to discuss this further. I discussed it with their daughter who is snow-bound up north. She said to ask him separately what he would want for her Mom. She would abide by their decision.

I told someone yesterday that I would go ski-diving on my 80th birthday. While I don't want to be kept alive by extraordinary means (I'm saying this today at age 64), as long as there is some joy left, I want to hang in there. Maybe I'll see things differently if and when I reach 80 years. I hope not.

Conversation with a youngun

"Grandma, have you been to North Dakota?"

"No, but I've been to South Dakota?"

"You've been to South Dakota?" Then turning to Grandpa,"Grandpa, have you been to North Dakota."

Grandpa says, "Yes."

Grandma interjects, "Grandpa has been to all fifty states."

Youngun is surprised and impressed. "All fifty states? But have you been to Canada?"

"Yes"

"How about South America?"

"Yes"

"Europe?"

"Yes"

"Antarctica?"

"No, I haven't been to Antarctica."

"How about Asia?"

"No."

Now the youngun thinks he's on a roll. How about Africa?

"Yes."

"Hmmm...but have you been to Nigeria?"

Grandpa chuckles, "No."

"My uncle John is from Nigeria. Grandpa, have you been to any other planets."

Grandpa and Grandma chuckle. "No, we haven't been to other planets."

Youngun says, "There is such a thing as aliens."

Grandma asks, "Who told you that?"

"Nobody. I just know."

???????????

Material for NaNoWriMo 2010.

Remembering Daddy

Daddy's birthday would have been June 20, so it always fell near Father's Day. For most of his life, we believed that he was born in 1900. Like many blacks born in the south in those days, he didn't have a birth certificate, and relied on something scribbled in the family Bible. It wasn't until he applied for Medicare that we found out what we had long suspected. Daddy was born before 1900. We knew he remembered the Wright Brother's flight in Kitty Hawk a little too vividly to have been only three-years-old.

The Medicare application required a birth certificate to prove that he was 65. Since he didn't have one, they would accept the birth certificates of two of his children to substantiate his age by the age he gave on the children's birth certificates. The trouble was, Daddy wasn't consistent about his age. For a child born in February 1926, he said his age was 26, disregarding the fact that he had not passed his birthday, June 20 of that year. For a child born in July 1931, Daddy showed his age was 31.

That sent the Medicare folks to looking at the Census for 1900. There he was listed with the family as a child. So he qualified for Medicare all right, but the discovery became a source of family amusement for the rest of his life. Daddy passed away in 1968, and the not-so-old age of WHO KNOWS.

Excerpt from my memoir:

When I started school in Petersburg, I was in the afternoon class for first grade at Giles B. Cook Elementary. Daddy walked me to school everyday until he decided I could handle it alone. Instead of telling me I was old enough to go by myself, one morning he was especially slow getting ready. I waited with my book bag in hand, and nagged him that I would be late for school. It was important to be there in time for lunch, when I could eat my bologna sandwich and have a carton of school chocolate milk. After I had nagged for a while, Daddy told me to go on, and he would catch up. I went off down the street, watching for Daddy to catch up. By the time I reached the corner where I would turn, I could see Daddy leaving the house. He followed me at a distance from there on, and at every turn, I would look back to make sure he was still following me. There were no major streets to cross and hardly ever a car passing at that time of day anyway. By the time I reached the school, Daddy was not even in sight, so I waited until I could see him, and waved good-bye as I went into the school building. I was on my own from then on.



The photo is Daddy with my sister Toni and me, on the campus of Virginia State College. My mother finally received her four-year degree the same year that my oldest brother did. They graduated together from Virginia State College.

Will I know when it's time

For the past month or so, I have been checking out retirement homes in the area, looking for a place that might be suitable for my oldest sister and her husband. She is 83, he is 90. They live in an over-55 condo community in Southern Virginia. Siblings and friends have all agreed that they shouldn't be living alone much longer. My brother-in-law is actually sharper mentally than my sister. He still drives. (Should have quit 30 years ago) And he still has a new joke to tell every time I talk to him.

My sister taught me algebra in high school, and later taught college calculus. It's distressing to see her declining. Some days she's quite lucid, other days not. Brother-in-law is ready to make a move, but he defers to his "Queen." She says we are all plotting against her, and she has no intention of moving. At least that's what she says.

She has agreed to come for a visit this month, and spend two nights at one of the two finalists on my list. I hope she will think of living in a retirement community as a vacation from the struggle of day-to-day chores. It takes the two of them together to perform any task. And I do believe a retirement home schedule of stimulating activities will improve the quality of life for both of them. But it's hard trying to convince someone to do something they say they don't want.

I often wonder what I will be like if I should live so long. I told Tinker, I'll be ready to go before he will. He won't give up his back yard as long as he can walk.

Lessons in Dying

We learn that death is a part of life through the course of our own lives. Nobody sat me down to tell me, and I consider myself blessed to have learned at an early age. It doesn't get easier, but with each death I am closer to being able to cope with my own mortality.

Our family dog, Midnight, died when I was a toddler. My sister Toni considered him her dog because we got him when she was the baby of the family. Midnight was a mutt, probably part Labrador Retriever. He had a blue-black coat and a purple stain on his tongue that Toni would show to threaten anyone who might bother her. She said it showed how mean he was. After she thought she had scared someone sufficiently, I would place my hand on Midnight's tongue to show how gentle he really was. Midnight was hit by a car and died. Toni and I were devastated. Daddy went out somewhere and brought home a puppy the next day. I guess the lesson for a toddler was that life goes on.

The next death in my life was the most crushing of all. My mother died of breast cancer when I was twelve. It was 1958, the time when children were seen and not heard. Cancer was talked about only in hushed tones. I guess people thought that if you didn't say it out loud, it wouldn't happen to them. There was no chemotherapy in those days, only radical surgery and radiation. I knew about the surgeries, even though the hospital didn't allow visitation by children under twelve. I knew there was cutting and burning so that her chest was one big burn scar, and there was hardly any muscle left to her upper arms. But I didn't know she would die. Adults didn't talk to children about dying.

My Mother takes on a different life through family saga, so that I have come to know her from an adult perspective. She knew she was dying, and made her request for how she would be laid up for viewing. But that conversation never included me, the baby-girl.

I had a little more warning when my husband died. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in February, 1997. The doctor said it was inoperable. I didn't know that was code-word for "get your affairs in order." His only request was that he not linger and suffer. He agreed reluctantly to chemo and radiation, encouraged by a doctor who thought he could shrink the lemon-sized mass on the main artery to the lung, and make it operable. I did my research, hoping we would have two to five years. He died two months later in April 1997.

I have since lost a sister and a brother, and it doesn't get any easier for me the survivor. I wanted them to be in my life forever. But they were both philosophical about their own deaths. My brother was a quadraplegic and had lived 35 years after that tragic accident, beating the odds by 30 years. My sister had Parkinson's disease, and found peace after her struggle to even open her eyes every day.

On January 1, we lost Annie, my late brother's widow. It was Annie who helped my brother beat the odds, and helped him have a quality of life far beyond what any of us hoped for him. She was from Kenya, a nurse, and herbal practitioner. But more than that she shared an uncommon peacefulness with our family. Since my brother's death she worked in China, teaching English. She moved back to the States last year. And then we learned in August that she had terminal gallbladder cancer.

How do you comfort someone who is dying? It was Annie who was trying to comfort me. She said she was ready to go home and be with Ron. She died peacefully on New Year's Day.

The lesson does not get easier, but I have good examples to follow. May God grant me such courage.