Return to An Album to Celebrate the Lives of Adrian and Dot Gwin

Looking Back:
Never quit kickin'

SITTING there in his long-handled underwear, he leaned far back and pointed one leg at the ceiling.
Then he hollered, "Wahoo."

Gramps said, "Now that's a Brother Rabbit story from Uncle Remus, but it really ain't the one I was aiming to tell you. You ever hear the story of the two frogs in the churn?"

Long time ago a farm wife set the churn for tomorrow. She put in yesterday morning's milk and two skimmings of cream to make more butter. Then she set it out on the back porch to turn in the warm summer night. She covered it with a cheesecloth, but she neglected to tie it down.

Durin' the early evenin', two frogs jumped up on the porch and eyed the churn, wondering what it was and what was on top of it. Coincidentally, they both hopped at the same time, and the cheesecloth went down and the two frogs went into the churn.

They kicked and kicked, swimmin' about, trying to find a way out. But of course, the old-fashioned crockery churn narrowed inward toward the top, and it was utterly impossible for them to get out. So they swam and kicked for hours.

Finally, way 'fore day, one frog panted, "I just can't keep on" and quit kicking and sank in the sour milk and died.

The other frog kept on kicking, and soon found they'd churned up a big ball of butter, and he climbed up on it and jumped out.

The moral is, Don't ever quit kicking.

My pate gleams slick and shiny-bright
At morning, noon, and in twilight.
Like Christmas snow, what hair I have
Is to my aging ego, slave.
The knee is bent, the back is stooped;
With half an effort I am pooped.
With hearing aids my ears are wired.
Trifocals keep my eyes from tired.
My belly bellies o'er my belt,
My waistline's solid lard
That e'en with diets will not melt,
And makes my breathing hard.
Assorted pills are in my diet
To help me keep my skizzums quiet
That once a tight-tuned regular guy
Counted on to make him fly.
My toes have blackened as the fungus
Took residency among us
And with corns of long duration
Keep my feet in agitation.
Not to mention facial wrinkles
That with grooves my visage sprinkles.
And my nose, once Proud Patrician
Now shows bulbous red condition.
Arthritis wracks my every joint.
I feel it like a stabbing point
In ankles, elbows, knees and neck
But liniment keeps all in check.
Incontinence long took o'er my bladder,
And just to make the bad more badder
My bowels gone the other way
As constipation rules the day.
My teeth have crumbled o'er the years,
My store-bought ones beguile,
But I have neither qualms nor fears
To scrunge me when I smile.
Nor do I own a dang toupee
Though skinhead is my fate today.
I lived a lot to get this way.
A pox on young'uns who would say
That I'm decrepit. This is my song:
They oughter wish to live so long.
And here the plot begins to thicken.
They gotta know I ain't no chicken:
I'm 98 and still a-kickin'.

Looking Back:
Traversing states is unforgettable experience

WE'VE done some traveling in our time, and met some interesting people.

When our boys, John and Pat, were little, Dot and I decided we'd try to put them into every one of the 48 United States before they "got out from under us"--if we could.

Somewhere along the line Alaska and Hawaii made it 50 states, and we went for that.

And in every state, and Canada and Mexico, we met somebody who was interesting or more interesting or unforgettable.

When you're driving around the country with two little boys, you don't meet many horse's behinds.

Sometimes comedy crops up. Once in a restaurant I asked if that was our waitress. John, about 8, said, "No, Dad, our waitress looks like a praying mantis." And, for a fact, she did.

Another waitress made me comment after she took our order "I wonder what old West Virginia holler she crawled out of."

When she brought our food, Dot asked her, and I, recently from Louisiana, heard her say, "Bogalusa, Loose-y anna."

We went north to Maine and into Canada on one of our first trips. The French-Canadians spoke little English in the restaurant where we ate lunch, and we got our ice tea with ONE ice cube in each glass, melted into a small square of foam.

No matter. They were so anxious to please us we never complained.

South to Key West we went another time, and there's lots to see down thataway. But the best part was the people, and we enjoyed them immensely, all the way.

Then across the country to California we drove, and all the way we found the people as interesting as the sights.

Three, four times we crossed the whole country, middle-roaded, southern route, and northern exposure, and always we found people who fascinated us at places that were famous tourist spots and places you never heard of before.

But what about Hawaii and Alaska?

Rarely had we made reservations ahead on any of our trips--but for the big one, we planned every night's stop, and made a motel reservation, guaranteed, for that night.

Sometimes we got there in early afternoon, and the boys reveled in motel swimming pools. Sometimes we drove until late to reach our reservation, and the boys bedded down in the back of the station wagon.

We left our car with friends, formerly of Charleston, in Redwood City, near San Francisco, and they drove us to the airport.

Friends, formerly of St. Albans, kept us five days in Honolulu, and our car and friends met us back in 'Frisco.

Then we drove north to Seattle, where we had motel reservations for when we came back from Alaska.

But we'd made NO arrangements where to leave the car or other luggage.

I was all trepidation as we approached the motel in Seattle. Would they, could they, keep the car and our carful of baggage?

I parked out front and walked into the office.

It was late afternoon, and our flight to Fairbanks left at midnight.

There was one person in sight as I entered the lobby and approached the desk.

And he was Casper Milktoast incarnate. But in all his dimunitive stature and timid appearance, he stepped to the counter and asked, "Yes?"

I explained that we had a reservation for a week from now when we returned from Alaska, and the rest of my worries.

He looked out and asked "Is that the car, with the family in it? I nodded yes. He said, "So what's the problem?"

Leave the car right there, where the clerks could watch it. Bring everything else in, to store in the bellhop's room.

The motel bus would take us to and bring us from the airport.

He was one of the nicest men we ever met.

Looking Back:
Pianos were lively additions to living room

THERE have been four pianos in my life. Each one was like a Paderewski concert.

(Yes, I've heard the master pianist, in person.)

First of the four was Aunt Maggie's old player. It had perforated paper rolls that somehow played the music. I knew it from babyhood.

It had foot pedals you pumped up and down to make the rolls go round, just like pumping the old parlor organ to get the music out.

And there was a pile of music rolls to keep you busy any Sunday afternoon, pumping out that music.

I well knew the player piano in Aunt Maggie's front room. (It wasn't the parlor; that was the room with the bay window, seldom opened but for special company.)

The front room had a regular piano, too, and a fireplace and a bounce-on sofa that pulled out to make a double bed.

But that player piano was the heart and soul of Aunt Maggie's front room in the first 15 years of my life.

Sometime in the 1920s, Mother got us a piano. A real piano that weighed a thousand or two pounds and was taller than any of us kids.

Mother had a set of porch furniture--a settee, a straight chair and rocker--made of rattan. Rattan was "the thing" right then. Rattan is dried yellow grass stems, and grows in Rattania or somewhere, and at one time all porch furniture was made of woven or twisted rattan.

Whoever had the piano didn't have any rattan furniture, so they traded even, porch stuff for piano.

It was a tall upright, heavy and black. It was nearly in tune, and was playable.

Mother could play it. My sister Julia, about 8, got lessons from Mrs. Smith, and soon could play almost as well as mother.

When we moved to the country, mice invaded our house and built a nest under the piano keys. Keys over the mouse nest wouldn't play - they were padded underneath with the mouse nest.

My brothers took the piano apart and got the mouse nest out from under those real ivory keys, and more than three blind baby mice with it.

Julia and Brother James learned a lot of music on that high and mighty old upright. Me, I could never understand how every eighth key was the same but different, so I flunked piano from the start.

That old piano had three panels on the front, each one a sort of grill with black silk behind it. Each of those grills had tattered holes wherekids picked and punched and made raggedy places which became just part of the piano.

Ma sold it years later when we moved to New Orleans.

After I got married, when my wife Dot was going to have our first baby, she said she missed a piano in the house. Then, one day, I saw an ad wanting to sell a "new piano, bought by mistake and repossessed"--and bought it.

Nothing down, $25 a month.

At the time, $25 a month cut into the breadbasket, but I bought a music box. It was a little Gulbransen spinet, a dwarf-sized upright piano with full keyboard, but not much more than waist-high on a crawdad.

When they delivered it to the house, Dot was as tickled as a potbellied pig being curried with a corncob.

She played it off-hand, by the ear, by the book, and by the hour. John learned piano when he was tiny. No wonder. He had heard piano right outside the bellybutton for several months of his mother's pregnancy.

Then one day we gave that grand little upright spinet to a niece and were without a piano.

But not for long.

John was a high school senior when Dot took him up to Londerees and told him to pick a piano. She told him we would rent it until he graduated and he could buy it later.

He didn't hesitate, just pointed across to a fine looking young upright.

You guessed it.

Steinway.

We were as tickled as that potbellied pig.

This was before the heydey of oriental instruments. The little Steinway was bigger than the spinet, not as tall as the old rattan-traded upright, but a lot bigger than any child's toy or junior model.

We've treasured it from the day it entered our living room. Hundreds of fingers have danced on that keyboard.

John married and moved away, and Dot "bought" back his piano. He's had two in his living room. He never passes a piano. He pauses long enough to tickle the teeth of any smiling piano he sees, standing up as he goes by. His son Jeremy is like that, too--loves to ripple off some notes in passing.

Recently, our other son Pat said he'd like to have the piano in his home, and we watched as professional movers took that 31-year part of our lives out of our house to go to Pat's.

Well.

When Aunt Maggie went away, her 1906 player was still in her front room.

When Ma sold our outsize upright, I hardly realized it was gone.

When Jeannie got the little first-baby spinet, we were glad she could have a piano.

But there was a catch in my throat when the movers wheeled out our longtime musical companion. Our living room seems naked without it.

Somebody said put the TV in there.

In a living room?

I couldn't do that. A living room is for LIVING with people.

Looking Back:
Recalls days of streetcars

REMEMBER the first time you ever rode a streetcar or a bus?

Have you passed the memorial ride on to some little boy or girl as an experience to be remembered for the next 60 or more years?

My own first time on a streetcar, as I recollect, was when I was about 5 years old, and it was a memorable ride. We went for miles, it seemed, from downtown Birmingham clear out to East Lake, the Camden Park of that time and place, if you know what I mean.

And last year, about this time of year, we passed the first bus ride on down to our grandchildren and some of their friends.

We spent the Christmas holidays just passed with the grandchildren in Las Cruces, N.M., a town which until two years ago didn't have a public transit system.

And nothing would do for the kids this time but that we take another ride on the Roadrunner. That's what they call the street buses there--the Roadrunner. New Mexico's state bird is the big, sassy, long-tailed, long-billed, long-legged Roadrunner, a native Southwesterner that is seen dashing across the road every now and then. It is supposed to be good luck just to see one.

Well, when Las Cruces' city fathers put the buses on the streets, nobody had thought to take the kids for a bus ride until my wife, Dot, suggested it.

The kids went wild about it in a gentlemanly and ladylike way.

So we got up a party and went bus riding. (Dot thinks like a first-grader in situations like that. If you're gonna take the three Gwin grandchildren, take along a half-dozen friends for company and fun.)

We met at "our" house and walked down to the bus stop, doled out the quarters so that everyone could pay his own fare and had a ball getting on when the big Roadrunner stopped for us. We rode downtown to the terminal junction and swapped buses to go to Old Mesilla, then caught another one back to the big shopping mall a half-hour later, ate lunch at the mall, and then caught the bus back home.

It was a perfectly memorable day for all the kids, including the 4- and 5-year-olds.

They were fascinated with the rattle and the rumble of the bus, and the hiss and the swoosh of the air-operated doors. They had a lot of fun changing buses at the transfer points. They had more fun holding their own coins and putting the fares in the glass box, watching the coins rattle down inside to disappear with a "flop" as the driver dumped each fare out of sight. Things that are old hat and routine to some people are exciting new practices for kids who never did it before.

It was a real adventure just to sit on the bus and watch the people get on and off. It was an adventure for the children to sit there and watch the scenery go by--from a different vantage point than the family car, because it seemed so--so big inside a bus.

It was an adventure to just get off the buses because the doors smack shut behind the fellow getting off ahead of you, and you have to grab the push-bar on the door, and then the door just swooshes open again with a great hissing of compressed air.

And downtown at the transfer point, it was an adventure to change buses, with the grown-ups walking to the front of waiting buses to check for the right one, and the boys and girls running from one to another like ants at the picnic table, squealing, and shouting, and lining up orderly and nice when Bus No. 6 was spotted.

On those bus rides with the kids in Las Cruces, I was taken far back to the first streetcar ride out to East Lake when I was a preschooler. The car came with a mighty clanging of a bell, and I learned that the motorman--the man who stood in front of the car and actually ran it--banged that bell with his foot.

I seriously doubt that many people remember a streetcar like that one, because it was a strictly warm-weather car--wide open to the elements, without sides at all, but with a side running board where you got on and the conductor walked to collect the fares. There weren't any doors or windows, just that open-air streetcar with wooden seats varnished yellow-brown, with lattice backs. And there was a ridged aisle-way down the middle, with raised wooden flooring, sort of like we later called "duckboards".

I remember it was a great thrill to ride that streetcar six decades ago, and I'm glad that Dot remembered that little kids today will remember for all time their first bus ride, and that we took them on it.

Sure is fun being a grampa sometimes.

Looking Back:
Southern trip delights three generations

FOR our Golden Wedding, instead of "Down to Dover" we drove Florida over.

With our grandchildren, and not in ol' Dobbin's shay, but in the Ply Van and the wagon Chevrolet.

Long time ago Dot put on her thinkin' bonnet that has a lot of rainbow ribbons on it, and came up with this: Take the grandchildren on a tour of Florida's wonders.

And we did. With John and his wife Sharon driving, we ran the gamut:

NASA and the Cape Canaveral tour. Daytona Beach. Disney World. Universal Studios in Orlando. The Stouffer Orlando Resort Atrium and shopping center. Epcot Center. Silver Springs. Up through Georgia's peach country to Stone Mountain, and so on home.

More than 2,000 miles of excitement and fun for the four of five grandchildren we had along (Courtney elected to stay home)--Jeremy,13, Charity, 12, Sarah, 11, all of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Lauren, 11, of Huntington and St. Albans.

They enjoyed swimming in the motel pools and snacking in the cars on goodies that properly litter a car from stem to stern, and eating in fast-food places that were familiar and once in a Cracker Barrel which was a new experience and thrill to them.

Grandma's wheelchair went in the van with her, and my four-toed walking stick with with me, and thank God and all good people who devised the handicapped parking places everywhere. Grandma in the wheelchair always got us to the front of long waiting lines, for which also we thank God and good people everywhere.

Our kids were properly bug-eyed at the wonders of NASA at the Kennedy Space Center, and they took the two-hour bus tour to see, among other things, the shuttles and launch pads. Jeremy gave me the highlight of the bus tour of the Space Center: "Grandpa, I got to see my first, real, live manatee." (He wants to aim his education for a career in marine biology or some such related study.)

Next day, Daytona Beach. Seawater and sunscreen. Everybody got into the ocean at Daytona, nobody broiled to sunburn-red, and Lauren frankly admitted that she would gladly forego the rest of the trip just to stay at Daytona Beach.

Leaving, John saw in his rear-view mirror a wallet fly off the roof of a little red car from Quebec and ran back and retrieved it. We watched for that car for several days. Fortunately, the wallet had full identification, including phone number, and we were able to talk, after we got home, to the only English-speaking member of the family and to mail the wallet to its 15-year-old owner.

Next, from our Orlando motel, Disney World. They went, while Grandma and Grandpa drove 25 miles the other way to Lake Mary, where Wanda Chan has "The Petunia Patch", a little curio-antique shop. Wanda was, for years, our near neighbor on Keiffer Drive in St. Albans, and her oldest daughter Melanie is an engineer of some kind on the shuttle program at the NASA Space Center. Wanda and her children are almost as family to us.

Oh, our grandchildren: some of them got Mickey Mouse ear-hats at Disney World.

Next day--Universal Studios of Florida, where Sarah volunteered to be the "victim" in getting kicked off a fast-whirling merry-go-round, and thus starred in a closed-circuit TV episode that we watched on the TV screen, while at the same time watching her lying perfectly comfortable on a concealed stool, the studio men kicking at her hands with an artificial leg. We got an inserted view of a mean old man kicking, presumably at Sarah (he had on pants to match the artificial leg on a stick.) It appeared on the television that she was desperately holding on with her hands, while the revolving backround made it seem she was
whirling rapidly, and a big fan blew her clothing and hair like she was spinning fast on that merry-go-round.

The man told her to look frightened and scream, even though she was resting comfortably on her belly on that stationary stool 18 inches off the floor. Sarah's screams were magnificent.

Next day we met with our other set of non-grandchildren, Brian and Chris Tomberlin, and their parents Dan and Patsy. She is the former Patsy Hart of St. Albans, and we had visited them over the years in Georgia, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Tennessee, Virginia, and maybe other places where Dan had jobs as curator of museums, among others.

That was our "break" from the sightseeing tours, but they took us to that magnificent Stouffer Resort atrium and the shopping mall.

Eye popping.

And then, the Epcot Center, with the reports as good as the other days.

We took to our wheels again and rolled northward to the greatest (to me) attraction in Florida--Silver Springs.

I rode the glass-bottom boats there in the mid-20s and again some 30 or more years ago and was fortunate to be able then to swim in the spring-pool. We rode the boats this trip, to see the wondrous clear water, and you could count the pebbles on the bottom, 81 feet down.

We streaked northward next day, up through peach country, and I got, in Tifton, Ga., four jars of Tupelo honey, comparable to West Virginia's Linn honey and called by the World Book Encyclopedia "The world-famous Tupelo honey."

We went on up to Stone Mountain, not far from "the home of the Braves"--Atlanta. And the kids got to see the literally world-famous, monumental sculpture on Stone Mountain. Charity said seeing "the big picture on the mountain" was a highlight of her trip.

Before we went on to the Shoney's Motel nearby, we stopped on Bethesda Church Road to see a niece, Sue Harless and her family, including her mother, Mrs. Ginny Hedrick, once of Beckley.

We got home at 10 p.m. after 10 great days, and we think our grandchildren will never forget that wild, wonderful Florida trip with us, as our Golden Wedding present to them. And our 6-year-old station wagon never chirped off-key the whole trip, just chortled along like a contented canary, and for which we thank God and Jack Gessel.

Looking Back:
The little manger scene

MOST everybody has a private family "tradition" wrapped up in Christmas decorations.

Ours--to us--just suddenly seemed to be exceptional.

And, it really is.

We've used this same little bit of Christmas 46 consecutive years.

We call it our "Old Faithful' and it's still good and getting better all the time.

It's our nativity scene--what the French call a "creche". You know, Mary and Joseph and the baby in a manger, with wise men and lambs and a donkey and cows and an angel hovering overhead (atop the stable stall).

The stable is thin painted cardboard and the figurines are just painted plaster, but it has a hole on the back for a small white light. and I think maybe that's what attracted me in the first place. (Actually, Dot probably had more say-so in buying it than I did.) She remembers that we paid $2.95 for it at Stone & Thomas, in the Christmas season of 1947--our first Christmas in our own home.

Our first child, son John, would be almost 2 months old that Christmas of 1947, and we were happy to have the little nativity scene to remind everyone of the real meaning of the holiday.

With all the packing and unpacking, over the years, the thin cardboard of the stable stall has broken and torn in several places, and I shaved out wood slivers and patched it with glue, and it's not so torn and bent today that you'd notice. And some of the figurines have been chipped and nicked, but not so as to destroy their character or usefulness.

There's Mary and Joseph and, in a separate little cardboard manger, the Baby Jesus. And there are three kings, and an angel on the rooftop, and a camel, a donkey, a cow and three lambs in custody of a shepherd.

The roof originally had real hay glued on for thatch, but it's all gone except vestigial remains. I plan each year to sort of rehabilitate the whole thing and re-thatch the roof, but you gotta keep your priorities in order, so wrapping presents and trimming the tree takes me away from little Old Faithful.

Somewhere along those 46 Christmases we acquired eight little plastic choirboys which we usually set out in a row near the nativity scene, and all along those early years little son John--and a few years later, our other son Pat--played with the choirboys and the kings and Mary and Joseph and the others, and became quite familiar with the cast of characters which make up the Christmas scene.

It's a small thing, the entire set--the stable stall being not more than 3 inches deep, but with a painted interior to give it great depth as you inspect it. And it's about 8 inches wide and no more than 8 inches tall.

I've seen some representations of the nativity scene that fill up the entire top of a good-sized table, with a whole herd of animals and a stable stall that would accommodate a fair-sized Baby Jesus--but our little Old Faithful has always been a most attractive part of our Christmas decorations.

One year, several years back, when the children were more prone to play with the set than they seem to be today, Mary and the shepherd were missing when we began packing the set for another time. We hunted high and low, but they were plumb gone, and we mourned that maybe, just maybe, they'd gotten into a trash can and were gone for good.

But sometime in the summer, down in the basement among some other stuff that the kids had been playing with, we found the shepherd and Mary. And we cheered and laughed and took them back upstairs to the box in the front hall closet where the whole nativity scene is usually stored.

This season the little scene is set up on my grandma's washstand near the corner where the tree sparkles in many-colored splendor. It's just a little thing of cardboard and plaster--but it holds a special place in our hearts--and I often think that maybe others have such a piece of Christmas decor in their lives.

I bet there are many special scenes like this. Maybe some that have been used many more times than ours. But none could have given more pleasure to more kids over the years than our little Old Faithful.

Looking Back:
Rolling pin a treasured piece of family lore

You can't buy goods like this today.

Couldn't in 1910, either, when this rolling pin was a homemade present to Ma from Grampa Gwin.

He made it on a foot-powered lathe in his home workshop, and he didn't  expect her to use it as a club on his son's head. And of course, she  never did.

She rolled out biscuits and pie dough with it for more than 40 years, and I've used it now for more than 40 years. I have never seen another rolling pin of this pattern.

I've also rarely seen another rolling pin made in one solid piece--the bought ones today are all tricked-up with swivel ends and loose handles that come apart in a few years.

This one, with reasonable care, will last at least another 80 years, and  I'd put money on 180 years more because of the integrity of a kitchen tool that merchandisers seem to overlook deliberately today, in the interest of selling another when the first breaks or wears out.

Grandpa William Sutton Gwin was a Confederate who was captured by the Yankees at the battle of Selma and held for the rest of the war.

His home acreage was at a little place called Wilsonville, just a few miles north of Selma, which was a good-sized town even in Civil War days.

He owned some Wilsonville land, and when the railroad wanted to build a depot, he gave a triangle of land--about half an acre, where the road crossed the railroad--on condition that if it ever ceased to be used as a depot, the land would revert to his estate.

And while he died in 1916, I got a registered letter in 1961 from a lawyer wanting my (and about 650 other descendants') signature for the return of that property. My share would have been 75 cents or less, so I signed it over so the little abandoned depot could be sold.

Grampa Gwin was a better businessman than a farmer. He was a justice of the peace, a magistrate for many years, and a major influence in Wilsonville and the county.

He made this rolling pin just for fun (I've always enjoyed woodwork, so I must have inherited some of it) and sent it to his oldest son's wife--my mother--within a year of their marriage on Washington's birthday, 1909.

And, while he was a good businessman and a good woodworker and a good justice of the peace, he also was a philosopher of sorts.

I have a letter he wrote to my dad shortly after the marriage--a letter that Dad saved until he died in 1921, and mother saved from then until her own death in 1954.

It was before the rolling pin, and of course before the fatal morning when I was born.

Mother often told the story: She was "very pregnant," labor pains were casting their foreshadows, and Dad got a telegram.

"Come at once. Father desperately ill with stroke."

Dad asked mother, "Do you think you can have this baby all right if I run up to Wilsonville?"

Mother said she told him straight off the shoulder: "Mr. Gwin, I have had three healthy babies without a mite of help from you. Go on to your father."

So he did. He caught a train that afternoon to Wilsonville and got to see his dad before he died that night about 7.

Little Adrian was born at 7 the next morning.

But back to the letter.

In it, Grampa Gwin gave some news of the family, and some advice about marriage, and ended the letter with the philosopher's gem that Dad treasured.

It is a piece of advice that, if we could all do it throughout our married lives, we'd always be happy.

"Remember, son," the old man said, "Remember the two little bears: Bear, and Forbear."

Looking Back:
You gotta love Grandma

I was completely in love with her.

It was because she knew everything. She had the answers. Now, she was just a little bit too proper sometimes.

But she was delicate, fine-woven like a fairy. Ephemeral, but solidly positive, too.

She was my grandmother, my only living grandparent.

Being the baby of four children, I never got much instruction from the others. They didn't bother to teach me anything. They just sort of tolerated me. Oh, they let me catch on, if I could, but they wasted little in showing me how.

Grandmother was different, and I loved her for it. But under it all, I saw her as a little bit too prissy-proper, and I wondered why I loved her so much.

But I was totally interested in cooking, and she delighted in sharing her know-how. To tell me, and show me, how things ought to be.

Way back yonder she must have been the world's best cook. In the decades right after the Civil War, she had to provide for and cook for a family of six. Right out of thin air and whatever she could raise in a garden and a barn yard.

She was smaller than I was by a good little bit.

I wasn't big at all, but grandmother was tiny and wrinkled, like a prune. But to me she was like a fairy.

She knew everything about a garden, about the things we were going to eat the next day and the next and the next.

That day in 1928 we sat on the porch swing at Aldrich, and I was helping fix the fresh vegetables for supper. (Dinner was the noon meal. Supper was the evening meal. Lunch was what you put in a paper bag and carried somewhere for dinner.)

Grandmother had a pile of string beans in the lap of her apron.

I had a clutter of new red potatoes on a flour sack where my apron lap would be if I'd had one.

I was scraping those potatoes because she told me to. I was being very careful to scrape lightly, so as to get only the pink outer skin, none of the yellow-white under-surface.

She said that was the best part of the potato.

She was right, too.

Today, nearly 70 years later, I still give away the fluffy, mealy, tasteless insides of a baked potato, and eat my potato skin and someone else's.

Well, you get the idea.

We had on the swing with us all the vegetables we'd gathered. A mess of okra, just the medium-small pods for flavor and tenderness.

Grandmother made me search the tassel-ends for worms, be sure to cut 'em away, and their 'tracks' too, after slicing off the stalks on the ends.

She showed me how the cabbage worms could be inside the head, without a trace showing--you had to strip off the outer leaves to find the traces.

She taught me to string beans and snap 'em up short. Grandmother labeled anyone who snapped beans long as lazy, shoddy.

And onions. Any half-gardner could pull up shallots, but it took an educated eye to know which onion plant had a big, nice bulb underneath those green tops.

She taught me how to shell out green blackeye peas. Hold it up and down at the top. With the other hand, gash it on the seam with your thumb, then slip that forefinger into the split from the back and pull down--and you've got all the peas shelling out into your palm and down into the pan.

With all her wondrous know-how, she was to me just a tiny mite too proper sometimes, but she soared above it all this day.

I was a country kid, not yet a teen-ager.

Sitting on the swing, just watching her shell blackeye peas, I absent-mindedly picked my nose.

Grandmother dropped her blackeye peas, r'ared back in the swing, made a horrible face and said, "Aaaaaaaaaaoooowwwww! You nearly make me puke!"

Now there was some real he-man language.

She made me go wash my hands.

I did, wondering all the while if she knew any more of the words that nice little old ladies didn't use, and if she did, which ones, and how...

Well, forget it.

But I never heard her say it again. Ever.

Looking Back:
Covering provides comfort, memories

SHE'D have been more than a hundred years old when I was born.

That would make the coverlet more than a hundred now.

She was my great-grandmother, Susan Watson Flynn. While she died ten years before my birth, I've always known her personally--by proxy.

From sleeping under her coverlet, and from the first-hand tales about her from my mother--who knew her well.

As a wide-eyed child, Mother saw her raise, wash, card, dye, spin and weave the wool for the coverlet. And Mother helped her in those operations as only an eager little girl could. When I was a youngster, I heard the tale so often that it seems to be my own experience.

I still have the coverlet--faded, ragged, and now more than a century old.

I had it out recently and repacked it with cedar chips for "mothballs."

Wouldn't take a thousand dollars for it. You can't put a price on memories.

I've heard its story on those many occasions all during my childhood when we used the coverlet nightly.

My mother said she was about 7 or 8 (she was born in 1877) when her grandma asked "Mr. Vardaman"--Mother's father--for several sheep to
raise wool.

They lived on a square-mile homesteaded farm, and he got the sheep easily.

Ma said her grandma largely tended them--when they needed attention.

She told me the tale. "I remember Father shearing the sheep one spring day, and I remember oh how greasy and matted the big wads of wool were.

"Grandma smoked a clay pipe, and Father disliked the smell, so she smoked on the porch and by the chimney corner. The pipe would get greasy brown, until she put it in the fire and let it burn out clean--and I remember that I equated the greasy, brown look of that dirty wool with the greasy brown of the old clay pipe.

"Grandma got a whole pail of homemade lye soap and we soaked the wool in tubs of soapy water, then squeezed it out in the spring branch. It took several days to get the wool even slightly clean."

Mother said she helped her grandmother, who would have been 70 or 75 years old then, card the wool. Carding is combing wool out into straight-fiber pads, getting the knots and kinks out.

Then Mother watched as the old lady of many talents spun the fibers on the big wheel, manufacturing the soft thread, which became a bed cover to last a hundred years and more.

I can't remember if Ma said the wool was dyed before or after the thread was made, but cochineal was used for the red and I forget what made the everlasting green dye, so apparent today against the faint pink of the faded red.

According to the tales I heard in my early youth, it took more than a year for the old lady and the little girl to transform the hair of the sheep's back into a soft, warm coverlet.

And Ma always said that Susan Flynn had the pattern in her head, that she never used a sketched or printed pattern at the big wooden loom.

I learned most about the distinctive coverlet while sitting cross-legged on the floor behind Mother's sewing machine, being the "motor" for it--pumping the treadle--as she pieced another quilt for our beds.

She had cut old clothes into workable squares and was stitching them.

I sat and made the process faster by pumping the treadle on command. It all reminded her of her own childhood when she'd helped her grandmother make the coverlet.

She'd line up another square, get it headed right under the needle, and say "Go."

I'd go, and she'd flop another piece into place on the fly and we made that quilt-top grow with a will.

All the while she'd be telling me of squeezing out that greasy wool in the spring-branch, spreading it in tangled masses on the thorn bushes, and the whole story of a wonderfully well-made coverlet.

The cochineal-red has faded into a barely discernible light pink not after a century of wear, but the green--wish I could remember what made the green dye--remains clean and green today.

Our children slept under it as small people, great-great grandchildren of the maker, Susan Flynn.

I hope that some day one of our grandchildren will take it home to preserve for another, and yet another and perhaps another generation to sleep under, this ancient antique coverlet, handmade in its entirety by a venerable ancestor of us all.

LOOKING BACK:
Memories soar from fortune cookie

COUSIN Oscar Luker and his battered fiddle broke out of a fortune cookie and carried me back 70 years.

We ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant, and the fortune cookie had a slip of pink paper in it, with an astute observation: "He who has imagination without learning has wings, but no feet."

Cousin Oscar.

He had wings but no feet when I knew him long ago.

He could fiddle the old-time square-dance tunes like no one else I ever heard. He could "call the figgers" as he whipped out the tunes, and through the music and the callin' you could see the whirlin', bobbin', swingin', swayin', high-steppin', and high-falutin' dancers swirling up a tornado on the barn floor as Cousin Oscar's wings lent them flight.

He also could tell tales by the hour.

And, he could recite some of the ancient Greek classics, though he'd never been to school past the sixth grade.

Wings, but no feet.

He could sing the old-time camp-meeting songs in a rich, rolling baritone without looking at a book. Then, he could swap his voice off into a near-perfect tenor to sing some of the Irish melodies he loved.

But with all his accomplishments, I never knew him to strike a lick of work.

At anything.

He just sat around on his fanny and let his wife, Mittice, wait on him. As much as she would.

He was about as uncouth-looking a slob as you ever saw, ordinarily. Mostly he had a two- or three-day growth of whiskers, jowls that folded over the folds of other fat around his neck, and a tremendous paunch in his lap when he sat down.

He generally wore a long-sleeved underwear top for a shirt, with chest-hair curling through the weave, which made him look scruffier than a mangy dog.

But he had wings.

Cousin Oscar had been a carpenter, I was told, and had built some fine houses, they said. Made a little money, they said, invested it wisely, and then quit walking and started flying.

He had read everything he ever saw that was written, and Cousin Oscar Luker could discourse on art and astronomy, law and legerdemain, medicine, money and metallurgy, opthalmology, predestination, quill-pen practice--even Xanadu and Zoroastrianism.

Imagination without learning?

He had little formal "book learning," but he had learning. His wings needed no feet. His soaring imagination, coupled with the prodigious volume of self-learned wisdom--his mind was as orderly as his frame was sloppy--his imagination gave Cousin Oscar a certain prestige in his community.

He was a son of my mother's Aunt Annie V. Luker, who wouldn't have weighed 100 pounds. One of her sisters was Aunt Cynthia, who would have topped 300, approaching 400. (Mother's by-word for a big woman was "big as Aunt Cynthy".) Cousin Oscar sort of took after her, I always thought. He would have weighed at least 250 with his shoes on, which they generally weren't.

He played the fiddle by laying it across his left arm, with the arm down in his lap, and bowing across his knees. Never put the fiddle under his chin.  "How can you call th' figgers with th' fiddle holdin' your mouth shut?" he'd ask.

His indolence, plain laziness, never fazed Cousin Mittice a whit. "Mittice, I'd like a cup of coffee," he might say. And she, pixie that she was, might say, "Well, while you're up, get me one, too."

And that's where imagination and wings gave way to footwork. To his eternal credit, in my mind, he never complained when she turned him off. Mittice always got her cup of coffee from his hand. And his fiddling WAS fantastic.