Over a Century

Today would have been my grandmother's 101st birthday.

The thing is, it doesn't feel like it should be.  Not that it shouldn't be her birthday, it is.  Just that it does not feel as though she should have been 101 today.  The really funny thing is, my grandmother always felt old to me.  Perhaps that's because she was 60 years older than me, and that kind of age difference to a young child always makes the older party really, really old.  I think it was more that she always acted like an old lady.  Having lived through the Great Depression, old habits died hard with her.  Even when there was no need to scrimp and save, she did so.  Fancy things were few and far between, and even indulgences were relatively simple, most often in the form of a Whitman's Sampler.

Which is not to say she was not a good grandmother.  She took us to all the Old Line Mardi Gras parades, even going so far as taking us into the barns as a few were preparing for the rides.  There she instilled a love for the pomp and circumstance of Mardi Gras that is truly known to only native New Orleanians.  She knew all kinds of things about the celebration and had a great collection of Rex and Comus doubloons, as well as invitations to the balls and even favors from a few.

She also taught me how to braid my hair.  For years, I remember watching and admiring as she braided her own greying hair into plaits and then arranged those in a complicated, but signature hairdo.  In all the time I knew her, I never saw her with a different hairdo.  One day, she took some colored yarn and taught me to do a classic three-strand braid.  After I had perfected it on the table in front of me, she held the long yarns behind my head and I perfected doing it without looking.

She taught me how to do hand embroidery.  She made felt appliqué stockings for everyone in the family.  I remember watching her making them, and wanting to help.  But I do not remember how it cam about that she taught me how to do the embroidery.  I just know she did.  It was always a thing I did at her house.  Even now, as I make similar stockings for others, I am sometimes transported to her dim back den on weekend evenings as my great-aunt knitted on one side of the brick chimney and my grandmother sat on the other with an array of threads, tiny felt pieces, sequins and beads on a tv tray table in front of her.  I can see and hear The Lawrence Welk Show ending and one of my brothers racing to the tv to change the channel for The Love Boat.  Then, as Fantasy Island came on, there was always a bowl of fudge ripple ice cream.  I don't often get nostalgic for those evenings, but every now and then something happens and I see myself there.  And it's really not a bad memory to have.

But wherever my grandmother is, I hope she is having a great birthday celebration -- I hope there is a big Whitman's Sampler Box and a bowl of fudge ripple.