E-Z Rockin’

When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to get out of my parents’ hair for a week or two at a time and go visit Grandma Libby and Granddaddy.  It was a relatively short trip, just a couple hours north of our farm; but it was like entering an entirely different world.

The E-Z Rockin’ Ranch was miles from town, and surrounded by other small farms and ranches.  The goldenrod house had sprung from the earth as just a few rooms, and had been added onto over the years, centering around the dining room.  That dining room contained a big, old wooden table that had more leaves in it than exist in any other farm table in creation.  Even when it was just the two of them, Grandma kept a couple leaves in place.  It made the room feel cozy, and mealtimes feel big.

Every morning began the same way.  I would wake in one of the two bedrooms:  the “north room,” which had a deep, springy bed and a strange darkness in the mornings; or the “blue room,” which had a white chenille bedspread and a painting of Jesus on the wall along with the 23rd Psalm.  (I must have read it a thousand times on that wall.)  As I drifted out of sleep and into waking, my ears would be filled with country music floating through the air from atop the dining room refrigerator.  One speaker would carry hairy-chested old voices singing sad songs, alternating with hairy-chested old voices giving market reports.  (If my REM ended as the ski report was coming over, I would invariably wake in a cloud of confusion.)  Grandma and Granddaddy’s voices would pipe in here and there, at normal volume, even though I was only feet away.

The smell of their morning coffee is the first smell I can remember craving as a child–followed a close second by the smell of Grandddaddy’s Camels, which he would already be smoking.  Grandma’s coffee was like percolated mud, which I would learn when I finally conned her into letting me have some.  They had these beautiful stoneware dishes that were an earthy, taupe-y brown, and the coffee mugs had finger holes shaped like the top of a heart, so that only two fingers would curl through them. 

Granddaddy’s breakfast was fried eggs, served runny and bright with salt and pepper.  I always thought it was gross, but I would eat mine just like his.  He showed me how to cut the whites up small, and mix the oozing yolks in like a sauce.  We would scoop it all up with a fork and put in on our buttered toast.  (If you serve me a fried egg, that’s still the way I eat it.)  Eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, Camel.  Not necessarily in that order.  Granddaddy ate breakfast with his feet up on the corner of the table, always in his Key overalls.  Grandma would make faces, but he’d always done it that way, and he wasn’t about to stop.  We all tried to do it, too…but Grandma exercised a considerable amount of control over us, where she couldn’t Granddaddy.

Grandma would wash the dishes in the kitchen sink while looking out the window and planning a million chores for the day.  One side would be filled with scalding hot, soapy water; the other was filled with scalding hot, UNsoapy water.  If I was lucky, I’d get rinse duty.  (It was easier to avoid the scalding on the rinsing side, as you could somewhat fake it.)  Granddaddy would already be out the door doing the man chores by the time dishes were done.

I always knew that, when I wasn’t there for her to be forced to entertain, Grandma was out doing some of those man chores.  She was no shrinking violet.  She had her own priorities, and her own chores to do, but she loved spending time with her husband.  She just didn’t love his cigarettes.  At any rate, if I WAS there, she was bound to find things for me to do, sharing her drawing books, using me as a dressing dummy, trying to get me to read.  She didn’t have to try very hard.  If there were no good game shows coming in on the rabbit ears, I was reading some old book left behind by aunt Mary or Julie.

If I was there, that meant there had to be a project.  When I was  younger, it was always clothing for school.  Grandma would take me to the fabric store, and let me choose my own material and sometimes the patterns.  I had a keen eye for…well, gawdiness.  I never wanted to look like anyone else.  Grandma encouraged this.  She didn’t know why anyone would want to look like anyone else, either.  She would spend hours in the little front room off the kitchen called “The Torture Chamber,” sewing as fast as she could sew.  When I was older, it was prom dresses or band uniforms.  But the routine was always the same.  Just as I’d settle into a show on tv, or a chapter in a new book, she’d holler out for me.  “Meena!  Get in here and put this on!”

Driving around the farm with Granddaddy was the best.  When he’d let me–usually because Grandma wanted to go along–we’d roll around in the old green truck, driving right over the pastures and looking at cattle and corn.  Sometimes there was pipe to haul–though I was too little to be much help, until I was big enough to reach the peddles on the truck.  (My “first driving lesson” was how to go and stop and hold the wheel straight so the two of them could lay out irrigation pipe.)  I would breathe in Granddaddy’s Camels, thinking there was nothing in the world so stinky…or so welcoming.

At suppertime, Granddaddy would crack wry jokes.  If it was time for the news or Wheel of Fortune, it would be on in the next room.  If it wasn’t, Grandma might put on some beautiful music.  (She had a thing for Julio Iglesias, for the longest time.)  We would eat, but she never made me finish.  She was not my mother, she liked to point out.  Still, if she insisted I eat something, I likely would have to eat it. 

In the evening, Grandma would usually keep sewing–unless there was something good on, like Murder, She Wrote, or Matlock.  Granddaddy would sit in his rocking chair, rocking away with his feet up and a Camel in his hand.  He had one of those flip-top lighters that made him look extra cool.  In the days before remote control, he would use me as his remote.  He would repay me by letting me sit with him in his chair, rocking me (usually to sleep).  By the time the news came on again, Grandma would want a bath.  Sometimes I would sit in there and talk to her, staring at the funny bubbles stickered on the wall.  Sometimes I would just keep rocking.

Every night, Granddaddy watched Johnny Carson.  He would never go to bed until he’d seen Johnny.  This was my favorite time of the day, because this was Midnight Snack time.  Grandma always thought I was skinny, and I think she was determined to fatten me up to a respectable size.  Out would come the graham crackers, or the Hershey’s chocolate bars, or the ice cream with fresh strawberries.  There was always ginger ale.  Grandma kept a supply of Schweppe’s ginger ale at all times, though she never bothered to keep it cold.  She had those colored metal cups, the little ones with the slightly fluted edges, and she would pour my ginger ale into those cups, sometimes adding whatever juice she had mixed up in a jar in the fridge.  (She was forever making juice in a mason jar.)  No matter what the snack was, I always thought it was the grandest thing ever, because it was the Midnight Snack…at 10:30.

It was difficult for me to sleep there, no matter which room I picked.  I was always scared in the pink north room, as it was too dark and too quiet.  And I was scared of the Jesus picture in the blue room.  I would try to go to bed while Carson was still on, so Granddaddy’s noise in the other room would protect me.  Without fail, I was still awake when he did his bedtime routine in the bathroom next door, and when he walked across the creaking floor to their small bedroom, with its full-size bed.  I would definitely try to be asleep before too long, as I knew how much they still really…liked each other.

Tonight when I had my Midnight Snack–ice cream with fresh berries and Hershey’s chocolate syrup–I thought of Grandma Libby, lying in a hospital bed.  One of those fancy new “super-bugs” has kicked her on her ass, and she is perhaps as close as she has ever been to death.  I imagine that as she goes to sleep, she strains to hear the laughter from the Carson crowd, signaling to her that Granddaddy is almost ready to join her.  I imagine that she listens for his footsteps walking across the creaking floor, and her heart warms as she realizes they will soon be together in the bed they shared for life.    I know she is not scared; but I am.  More and more I strain to remember those days of waking up in my own heaven.