Had she lived until today, my maternal grandmother, Georgia Lee King Stringer, would have celebrated her 100th birthday. She was born on another 2/22/22 day, way back in 1922.
Mam-ma was really the only grandparent I ever knew. (Her husband, Henry Emil Stringer, died when I was two years old, and my paternal grandparents lived in New York state.) As I’ve seen all the posts on the specialness of today’s date — 2/22/22 — I couldn’t help but think of my Mam-ma.
Here are some of my favorite memories:
- Her purse always smelled like Doublemint® chewing gum and somehow she always had enough sticks for all the grandkids. How did she know?
- She called the trunk of her car the “turtle.”
- In the summertime, she would often show up at our house with banana popsicles and, no matter how many neighborhood kids were playing with us, she always had enough. How did she know? My kid mind was blown.
- She mispronounced a lot of words like ju-LOP-en-o for jalapeno and I-dee for idea.
- When she was in the sixth grade, she had to quit school and go to work as a housekeeper to help support her family.
- She was always skinny as a rail, but when she was hungry, she’d say “My belly button is just about growed to my backbone.”
- She nuked green beans in her new-fangaled microwave for 20 minutes to make sure they were “good and done.” Boy, were they ever!
- She once made a pot of beans in her pressure cooker and forgot to vent the lid. The beans blew the lid off and stuck to the ceiling!
- She would pick us up after school (woe be to the person who parked in “her” spot) and we would stay with her until our parents come home. She always made us a grilled cheese sandwich with a side of Bugles® chips and dip while we watched reruns of Hogan’s Heroes®.
- She had an old, toothless Chihuahua named Skippy and when “a cloud came up” she would leave her farmhouse and come stay with us in “town.” I was always afraid of that toothless Chihuahua, especially when we made a storm tent out of mattresses and blankets. I always seemed to be the one to sit next to that slobbery dog.
- When she’d spend the night with us, she always slept with me. That is the reason I’m the only one of her grandchildren who knew what she looked like without her wig and her false teeth! Scary stuff.
- In her later years, she was hard of hearing and her hearing aid would whistle and squeal when she talked on the phone. She always said loudly “Well, it’s just me!” when she would call, but she needn’t have done that. The hearing aid noise always gave her away. (This was before caller ID).
- One time, she called me and very excitedly said she had predicted all 10 of the finalists in the Miss America contest she was watching on TV.
- As a kid, when I got to spend the night with her in our farmhouse, she was always cold and she would tell me that “the mice are gonna bite your toes off” if you don’t pull a blanket over us. Eeeek! I always pulled that blanket up.
- She had a rose bush on the farm that she had planted years ago and it was so big. It produced the prettiest pink blooms and, when we would visit, she would cut us off a few and wrap the stems in a wet paper towel.
- She read the National Enquirer®, Reader’s Digest®, Grit® magazine, the San Angelo Standard-Times, and the Miles Messenger.
- I remember walking with her to turn on or turn off the windmill. I can still smell the wet earth.
- When she moved to town, she fed the outside, feral cats leftovers from her supper, even spaghetti!
- She once decided to paint her farmhouse bathroom pink. As she was stirring the paint in the can, she thought of Pepto-Bismol® and got sick to her stomach.
- Creomulsion® cough syrup and Vick’s® Vapor Rub cured everything.
- She used to hand each of the grandkids a catalog from Sears or JCPenney as Christmas neared for us to circle a few toys we might like. “Maybe I can get one of two things you want,” she’d say, but then on Christmas Eve, her little decorated tree would be dwarfed by all the presents beneath it. She always bought the granddaughters the same things and the grandsons the same things, so the girls had to sit back-to-back when we opened our gifts. Same with the boys.
- Pink was for girls. Blue was for boys. Period. End of discussion.
- “Now don’t go by what the box says”, she’d say every Christmas. I might get a nightgown (pink, of course), a house robe, and a pair of slippers wrapped in a box her new-fangaled microwave came in.
- She saved everything. As a child of the Depression, she never wanted to waste anything. And, when we gave her something new to wear for her birthday or Christmas, she would put it away for “someday special”.
- We loved to play Chinese checkers at her house. But, we made so much noise with those marbles rolling around in that metal case she would say “Y’all are makin’ so much noise you’re gonna wake the dead. I can’t hear myself think.”
- She could not stand the strings on celery sticks. We had to carefully peel each and every one of them off to her satisfaction. “That’s my pet pea,” she would say, meaning her pet peeve.
- Don’t lie down or lean your head over the sofa when you eat because the food would “get stuck in your goozle pipe.”
- Her favorite expression was “Well, I’ll be John Henry.”
- We’d catch her cat napping, but she would always say “I’m just restin’ my eyes.”
- She never missed an episode of “Wheel of Fortune”®.
- She could “hock a lugie” (spit) farther than anybody I knew.
- Her specialty was chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, gravy and nuked green beans.
- She always attended our football games (I was a majorette) and any other school function in which we were involved.
- When my school went up a class in football and started playing 11-man instead of six-man, we went through a serious drought where we lost every game for, I think, five years. One of those losses was at an away game. Our boys were trying to bring down a running back and it seemed he was unstoppable. Mam-ma yelled from the stands: “Come on, boys. I can do better than that!”
- And she suddenly passed away a few months before her first great-grandchild was born. She was the only one on either side of our families to predict I would have a girl. And, you know, she was right! My husband and I had a daughter. How did she know that?
Happy would-have-been-100th-birthday, Mam-ma! I miss you.