Sometime early this morning I woke up and as usual a whole list of things started rolling through my head. The rolling list stopped rolling and there was Goobie. My thoughts: This is 2007, she would be 105, or 95, no 105 - 1900 from 2007 is, no, wait, 107. One hundred and seventh birthday last January 4. She died in 1987 at the age of 87 and it's been 20 years since I last saw my sweet grandmother. She died with dignity, a narrow escape from dying in the horrible nursing home where she was, where they had cut off her long white hair because it was too much trouble, where she fell and broke her shoulder and one thing led to another. She died with dignity because my sweet Mama stayed with her in the hospital for six weeks while her little body just deteriorated. Mama slept in the ICU waiting room with dozens of other people waiting for their loved ones to recover. She slept in the stepdown room with Goobie and that awful huffing ventilator. Goobie never really recovered consciousness so she didn't know Mama was there.
Mama says that Goobie and Papa loved me more than their own children. I used to feel kind of guilty about that until my friends started having grandchildren. I understand it now - they do, in a way, love them more, love them different, even more unconditionally than they loved their children. With their own kids, they thought they had to do everything right and on schedule and it was a day-in-day-out responsibility. In the 30's and 40's times were hard with the Depression and no jobs, with WWII, with little education. With grands, the Mamaws and Papaws can spoil them, give them freedom, space, time, and toys at every trip from Wal-Mart. Goobie and Papa still had little in 1948 when I was born, but I was practically theirs - their only child. Mama and I were living with them and Mama was working, so things were a little better for them financially.
I called Goobie Mama until I was a teenager and I can't for the life of me remember why she got the name Goobie. I think it's some derivative of Granny Grunt that my cousin and I teasingly and lovingly called her - not maliciously at all. So Goobie and Papa raised me. Mother (she was Mother to avoid confusion with two Mamas and I later started calling her Mama, when Mama became Goobie) anyway, Mother and I lived with Mama and Papa till Mother remarried and I was back and forth with them until I was 9 and Papa died. That broke my heart all to pieces because he was the only Daddy I'd known, and to this day is really the only one.
Goobie lived with her children for several years, alternating months or maybe quarters, moving around, until the fateful day that I had to have a home and she was it. She and I struck out alone in Memphis (M did help us find an apartment because her house was really crowded with two extra people), and for about two weeks had this apartment in what is now some Courts, near the interstate. That didn't last; it was dreadful. We had no furniture until somehow she managed to get a bed and a sofa from some furniture store in whose internal workings we rode up a freight elevator to choose these pieces. I'm sure we had a lot of choice. School was about to start and we did shop for clothes. I remember one or two outfits and a pair of black shoes she bought me. Evidently we were both miserable, because I didn't start to school there. But we were never in the rain, never bag-Goobie and bag-grandchild, never went hungry. At last she saw the wisdom in moving back to the small town she grew up in/near - Iuka. I started mid-9th grade there and graduated from that high school. Met my VBF, Bren, there and we continue to be Very Best Friends to this day, over 40 years later. I also met Paul there. So God had a plan for us to be in that rural town, blessings abounded even though at the time I was sure we were poorer than church mice.
While Goobie was able to live alone, she lived near her three sisters, two of whom never married, and one was widowed. A tiny hamlet; the sisters' store was one of the focal points of the little community. A railroad community. At one time, I learned many years later, there was a post office there. I still love to go there although the little store is gone. The house we lived in is still there; at one time it had been refurbished but now stands empty beside the railroad, gradually sinking into disrepair.
Goobie is buried beside Papa at a little Methodist cemetery just next to the pretty white church that in the 19th century was pastored by a great-great-(great?) uncle. Mama's plot is nearby and so is Sher's. There's an extra one for Steve. I had thought of being taken back there to be buried amongst the family members, but I'm sure we'll stay here. It doesn't matter. Jesus will know where I am.
I'm thankful for everything Goobie did for me - she was always there for me. We lived on her Social Security income, no small feat with me a teenager at the time. (One Christmas all I got was a round plastic box of bath powder.) We had little, but we had each other. I often tell Sher that I'd like to be able to go back for 24 hours and spend it with Goobie at the Railroad House - the store would still be there, we could walk across the yard to see Clara and Arie; we could hear the windows rattle when the train went by, softly blowing its whistle in the night. She could make me her unbeatable and never-to-be-duplicated tea cakes and I could sit on the porch and read until dusky-dark.
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