The greatest storyteller who ever lived

I am now a grandma.  Pardon me while that human tendency overtakes me, making me think I'm the only one who has ever experienced this.  You know.  Like people get when they first fall in love or have a baby, and all the newness and wonderfulness of it all makes other people want to dry heave.  There's little more annoying to others, I know.  I'll try to curtail it. 

My oldest son got married, and not only did I gain a wonderful daughter-in-law, but I also got a 4 1/2 year old granddaughter who sweetened the deal.  We met her for the first time this past weekend.  While some grandmothers dote on the little ones, almost taking credit for how beautiful, smart, and funny their grandbabies are, I have nothing to do with how beautiful, smart, and funny she is.  But believe me, she's all of those things. 

She warmed right up to us, and upon the second day of knowing her Grandma Kelly and Papa John, she wanted to spend the night with us.  Papa John was relegated to the couch, and the footie pajamaed sweetheart crawled into bed with me.  As we lay there, it occurred to me that I'd spent many a night in that very bedroom with my own grandma.  I practically grew up in the house we live in because it'd once belonged to my grandparents.  My grandpa died when I was in first grade.  My grandma welcomed my company, and my parents were more than willing to drop me off for weekend stays.  There's never been a more perfect definition of a "win-win" situation.  

"Hey," I said to her, trying my best to get my point across to a little girl who'd been inundated by meeting a boatload of new grandmas and grandpas in less than 24 hours.  "When I was a little girl, my grandma lived in this house.  I used to spend the night with her, and we slept in this bedroom.  Now, I'm lucky that I'm your grandma and we're having a sleepover, too."

I think it probably went over her head just how special this was to me, but I told her about spending the night with my grandma, and about all the silly stories she used to tell me and all the fun we used to have. 

If you had asked me when I was a little girl, I would have told you that my grandma was the greatest storyteller alive.  I guess if you asked me now, I’d say that she still was the best.  I loved to hear a good story, but not from a book.  That was somehow cheating in my opinion.  What I liked best was to listen to her tell her stories, whether they were ones she made up to appease me or stories about her childhood.   

“Tell me again about the hobos,” I’d beg.  She knew which story.  She’d start out telling me about the hobos who rode the rails, stopping in Bluffton.  She grew up a few blocks from the train tracks, and her two aunts lived in the house next door.   

“How did they know which houses to go to?”  I’d ask after she noted that her aunts always treated them to a sandwich and a cup of coffee.   

“They talked to each other,” she explained they also often left marks, signs that only the hobos understood telling other where to go.  “They knew where to go to get a free meal.”   

My great-great aunts were Christianly school teachers, and fully believed in helping the less fortunate.  I think they both married at the last minute just before the term spinster might be applied.   One had a child late in life, a menopause baby if you will.  He earned the nickname “Hatchet Jack” and became something of an urban legend in our area.  You might imagine my surprise when I learned that Hatchet Jack, who chased necking teens away from the cemetery when I was in high school, purportedly with a hatchet, was my third cousin.  I’m told he can tell you what the weather was like on any day in the past fifty years.  I'd heard stories of him escaping from the psych ward in the local hospital, walking down main street in a hospital gown when he'd decided he wanted to go back home.     

That element of crazy is the one thing that made my grandma’s stories the best.  She was tight lipped about a lot of things, but told just enough to pique my interest. Her grandfather committed suicide by blowing his head off because his wife was mean to him, or so the suicide note said.  Her sister, my great-aunt who did a tour of the state mental institution along with their own mother for having “nervous breakdowns,” tried to throw herself out of a moving car a few weeks before successfully parking her car in the garage and going to sleep, never to awake.  There was the cousin whose mom gave him three baths a day and wouldn’t let him play in the dirt.  He was quite sickly looking and pale.  Germs didn’t ultimately kill him, but the wreck where alcohol might have been a factor did.  Oh, and one of the most scandalous was Grandma’s cousin who lived in Kentucky who went swimming in the creek when she had her period.    

I ate up our messed up family history.  The hobo story, though, was complete in the telling because no one really went batshit crazy in it.  The other stories left a lot to my imagination. 

“One day,” she’d say, the anticipation almost killing me to get to the best part of the story, “this bum showed up on the porch.  Now, they wouldn’t let them inside.  They’d make them wait while they fixed them a bite to eat.”  

They wouldn’t have dreamed of turning away one of God’s hungry creatures, but they had their limits, I guess – Christian or not, they had standards - no hobos allowed in the house.   

“And the coffee was too hot, right?” 

“Oh goodness, yes,” she’d laugh.  “That guy took a bite of his sandwich, and then a big swig of coffee, and he burned his tongue.” 

I knew what was coming next, and it made me giddy.  “So he got up, mumbling about the coffee, and stumbled off down the sidewalk, muttering to himself that the coffee was too hot.” 

“Hot!  Hot!  The coffee’s too hot!  Hot!  Hot!  The coffee’s too hot,” I chanted.  At my insistence, sometimes she would demonstrate how the hobo staggered if the story was a bedtime one. 

“Why did he walk that way?”  I asked even though I knew that the bum was “tighter than a new boot,” which meant he was drunk.  But since it was one story that I felt like I was getting an entirely accurate account of what happened, and not the “G” version, I loved to see how he swaggered and staggered, tripping over his own feet down the sidewalk because that bum was drunk as a skunk.   

Grandma was an all around good gal besides being a great storyteller.  She tolerated me in a way that most other adults did not when I was a youngin’.  When I got bored with sitting still, she let me dig through her countless pairs of shoes, and rummage through her jewelry boxes.  I was never finished until I tried on the blue pumps with the tiny bow or the last pair of clip-on earrings, and heard all the stories that went with them.  While she didn’t own expensive pieces of jewelry, she had a few pieces that meant something because they were a gift from a family member, or had belonged to someone who’d since passed away.    

When I ran out of things to model for her, we’d flip through her photo albums and scrapbooks while she told me about her friends while growing up.  One of them had gone to Las Vegas to dance in a cage.  I never understood why someone would want to be in a cage, let alone how you could dance in one, but I admired the postcards with Las Vegas in big, block letters.  Anna Louise had dated Johnny, and they double dated with Grandma and Grandpa before they were married. She showed me ticket stubs and told me about the dances they went to on the lake.  I pictured them dancing in the sand in the dark, where men as big as giants played music because they were in a “big band.”   (I now have these albums and scrapbooks in my possession, and I'll thumb through them and drown in nostalgia that's a mix of hers and mine.)

She taught me the words to songs that drove my parents up the walls.  I’d sing “The Thousand Legged Worm” over and over again, never really being sure when the song was supposed to end, so when I got to the chorus of “walk around, walk around, on the other 999, if it can’t be found, I’ll just have to walk around…” I’d take it from the top, never knowing when to stop, but it was usually when someone said enough already.   

I learned about my history – those I came from, and some who went long before me.  I reveled in the stories of the family secrets of suicide and those who were a little off their rockers.  When I asked too many questions she’d change the subject.  “When your daddy was a little boy…”   

I grew up, though, as kids do.  I had bigger fish to fry than spending the night with Grandma and hearing made up stories about Harry the monkey, who got into all sorts of trouble wearing ladies dresses and make-up after escaping from the zoo. 

Many years have passed since I begged to hear about her friend Babe Fox (how cool of a name is that?) or the time my dad tried to get my uncle to go down the laundry chute. I remember the stories, though.  My grandma passed away in December 2005, and if you asked me now, I’d still tell you that she was the best storyteller ever. 

And that's exactly what I told my granddaughter - that my grandma was the best.  As we snuggled up and went to sleep, I hoped that I'll be the kind of grandma that would make my grandma proud. 

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