Family

I told some friends I would write My Thots about my grandmother today, the one who used to stand behind me and sing the old hymns while I played piano.

She and I were almost exactly fifty years apart in age. Grandma grew up the youngest of eight children sixteen years apart, rode a pony to school and had the dubious honor of the first divorce in Christian County. It seems her dashing young husband made a habit of coming home drunk on pay day with no money left in his pockets. She might have lived with that, but when he took off his clothes and lay out in the front yard, he tipped the scales in the wrong direction. Evidently he wasn’t that good looking!

After the divorce she tucked her hair up under a cap and drove a milk truck to care for her infant son until she married my grandfather, who was ten years older.

Grandma was widowed the year I was born and left with two more sons to raise. She put them through university, turned our old family home into a very successful nursing home with a waiting list that often exceeded forty people, watched the first man walk on the moon, sang at weddings and funerals in a sweet clear soprano voice, went to the same Sunday School class for nearly sixty years and always seemed to think she was the most adorable woman in the room.

I alternately worshipped the ground she walked on and hated her. She was a perfectionist with little patience for anything less than that from anyone else, but she loved me. I knew that. Everyone seemed to love her too, her town actually had a Ruth Smith Day to celebrate her.

I grew up with a house full of “grandmothers” to tell me stories, nurses aides who regaled me with tales about the grittier side of life, and nurses who took me under their wing when I needed a grown-up friend outside the family. Grandma took a personal interest in everyone of her “guests” and everyone of her employees. I can remember running to the hospital with her to visit them, or going to their apartments to take them food, or sometimes riding with her to pick them up for work.

Grandma was not the romantic I am, but she cared very much in her own solid way. In the course of her ninety six years she provided the lifeline that kept many people afloat when they might not have made it otherwise. As a child, I saw them all as part of our family.

Family to me is still all those people I love and want to care for, probably due to Grandma.