My grandmother taught me my first joke. But it took at least two years before i could get her to laugh at something I made up myself.
“I’ll laugh when you say something funny,” was the best I could get, which for someone who figured out pretty quickly I was being allowed to win at Checkers, I could not understand for the life of me why I couldn’t win a punchline. But one day it finally happened, and that was a good moment.
We all grew up pressing four leaf clovers in the dictionary with Pa, not Nanny. But when she finally “got tickled” enough to laugh-- the fact that I’d never gotten a courtesy laugh made it all that much better. -- that’s a moment I wish I had waiting for me today between two sheets of wax paper as we flip through the pages of the dusty Merriam Webster.
Another of those memories would be the joy of discovering TV on DVD with her. These were the days before binge watching was an American past time, when whole seasons had to be plotted out around the hours of the Meridianville Movie Gallery. But between Ryan Atwood and Tim Riggins and Sawyer from LOST, I learned as much about my grandpa as I did about my Nanny. She had a type, to say the least. (And it wasn’t Matt Saracen.)
I’ve always lived in two worlds. One was on screen, and from Sesame Street to Wilmington, via the WB, I’ve grown up sipping coffee at Central Perk, shagging batting practice for Chipper Jones, and enduring all of the pre-Saban seasons of the Crimson Tide with my grandmother right beside me.
It’s a rewarding world, one I love to this day. But the 2nd one is by far superior. It’s this world. The characters are no less eccentric, but they are extremely real. Made of flesh and bone and a lot of love, it’s you all, here today.
Nanny and Pa welcomed everyone we ever brought home into their house and into their hearts. A softball player who needed a bathroom during a game or a prom date or a college roommate...they’d come eat and probably wind up taking a nap on the couch. And then they’d be asked about forever, like they’d grown up with the rest of us on Bullard Road.
They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but what I see as the quiet heroics of Mildred and Norman was their courage and gumption to go ahead and roll it on down the hill a little ways. They went to Alaska and came back with Cindy. They settled here in Huntsville and built a life for Debbie and Nub. And when they went to Texas, they made sure to have room for Ricky and for Butch and for anyone else, from any side of the family, who ever needed anything.
And that’s continued for us, the grandkids. All of us, at different times and overlapping times... 205-828-0202. It was a straight line, up and down the center of the headset.
It was a direct path.
It was the shape of calling home.
It won’t always be Hazel Green for us anymore. We’ll have to work together, harder, to make sure that we are in fact still working together to honor everything that she’s done for our family.
But that’s something Nanny told me once-- I can’t go through life not liking people because they didn’t have to work as hard or come as far as I did.
Home is not something you remember. It’s something that you take with you, where ever you go, so that you see and feel-- and make others feel-- welcome.
It’s grandmothers holding kids on their knees and reading the Sunday “funny papers”. It’s pretending to help grandfathers with the word JUMBLE. It’s drawers full of postcards and newspaper clippings and enough sets of all 50 states’ quarters so that each kid, grandkid, and great grandkid could lose theirs at least once in a move.
It’s what we take with us from now on that will keep Nanny with us from now on. She was home.
