There are quite a few branches there to be sure, of mismatched friends and who-not I’ve come to claim as family, but it starts further down, at the root, and trust me, it is one hell of a strong one.

Her name is GamVa.

Short for Grandma Virginia. Who isn’t actually my grandmother.

She’s not even really related to me. Not even a little bit. But that doesn’t make her any less “blood” in my eyes. She’s been as indelible a mark in my life as Blackburn molasses are to a sugar biscuit.

And as real as a thorn.

GamVa never had any children. Just a husband. Papa Leon. She spent several years abroad as a nurse, during World War II. I’m not sure what Papa Leon did, though, during the war. He had polio, and aside from a wry sense of humor and a very successful knack for financial planning, he did little more than drive his motorized ECV down the main street of Philadelphia (Mississippi, that is) as a way of asserting himself, I imagine.  He was also an avid collector of books.

A collection I inherited, I’m more than happy to say.

My only solid memories of him, he died in my tween years, was the green visor he wore at all times, an arguably unhealthy insistence that I read Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad “if nothing else, mah boy,” and his ability to hide any ignorance of a given subject, which was rare, behind a steady gaze.

He was a perfect match for GamVa, and after he passed, I melded his essence, if you will, into hers, who, in lieu of children, had U.L., Salathiel (which, by the way, is a name I didn’t have to make up), and a feist named Spanky.

On these three, she doted.

And her dotage began in full-earnest the year I turned nine.

She’d been around long before then, but after Tigi’s death, it seemed a natural move for GamVa to “assume” that place made vacant by Tigi.

Though they weren’t all that similar.

GamVa, having never had children, had little patience for them. I count it a blessing that I’d been brought up the way I had been, as I would rather have been in absentia, somewhere else in the house, reading any book I got my hands on, or pretending I was Lady Aberlin, than to be underfoot.

In retrospect, that seems to have been my saving grace. Because she always looked to me as “adult-lite.”

That’s not to say that GamVa wasn’t charming in her way. Through her, I learned the value of not just a hard-earned dollar, but what could happen with a well-placed dollar. What love she may have not naturally developed for children, she had in great, banded bundles for smart investing. And this is something she encouraged in me. She had all the patience in the world for clever conversation, stock portfolios, and bridge…which subsequently led to an obsessive habit she had of carrying several decks of cards, always, with her: stuffed in suitcases, her purses, the glove compartment (with her nerve pills), in every drawer of every room in the house.

She’s 93, today. And yes, there are days when she can’t remember what a refrigerator’s function is, or who I am, but she can, without hesitation, tell you where absolutely every deck of cards in the house has been stashed. She spends her days with U.L. and Salathiel (her boys) worrying over little more than a game of Gin Rummy or Skip-Bo and if she’s “had muh suppah yet.”

Incidentally, she eats constantly, if you don’t keep an eye on her, and half the time, makes you “go fish” in the middle of a game of spades.

I love her in an easy way, though, now, because I realized that all my life, she never placated. She never changed. She was giving, considerate, but fair and stern, and, like a human expectorant, didn’t abide by raucous behavior, filthy decorum, or laziness. That, though it may come across as a harsh representation of a woman I do truly love and deeply, is actually quite the opposite in my mind.

It is GamVa, as much as anyone else in my life, who instilled in me the absolute value of Real Character.

Here, in my small life which seemed to be continuously supplanted with rich personalities and then at such a young age, was a woman, once tall and sturdy, who had tended to the wounded as a war nurse abroad during the tumultuous 1940s when the world was against itself, who taught herself three languages, and who said what she meant, all the time.

That’s Real Character: owning the piece of ground on which you build your promise. No matter what.

This next bit won’t be the best story to make my case, but it’s the first of such cases she’s made in my life, so I’m going to share it with you.

1986. I’m nine. We’re at GamVa’s large, beautiful old house, an expansive, rollicking piece of competing architectural history, with its pillars of salt (that’s what I used to pretend they were), full of rooms no one ever used. The house is gone, now, sadly.

U.L., Miss Nickels, Salathiel, Papa Leon, GamVa, and another woman I cannot recall, are sitting in the back of the house, in an overlooked room GamVa turned into a “card-playuhs nook,” rustling cards over a green-felt table top. The edge of it was wood-lined, with cup-holders and trenches, I imagine for cards, but instead, they held thin dishes of cashews and olives and dips.

I was in the library, adjacent to this room, by myself, as I was most of my childhood…often by choice. I had been watching NOVA on PBS, one of a handful of television shows I was allowed to watch, growing up. The feist, Spanky, now long dead, was several feet away in front of the hearth, on his pillow.

Between us lay a chewed tennis ball.

I’d never really tried to like, pet, or remotely look in the direction of Spanky before.

I wish that I’d left it that way.

Instead, I chose to sprawl out on the floor, and being primed with an adolescent’s energy, plopped myself onto my stomach, in front of the television.

This proved to be a mistake.

Spanky, though fat, sprang to his jowls and shot, like a bullet, to my face, and before I could react, he had bitten me, on my bottom lip…and wouldn’t let go.

The odd thing is he wasn’t growling.

I, however, was yelling.

The room flooded with everyone except GamVa, who knowingly lingered to the last, standing framed in the doorway between the two rooms, a slight smile hanging on her mouth.

“Spaahnky.” He released his bite on her lilting calling of his name, and went back to the hearth and lay down.

U.L. was angry at the dog, but GamVa calmly said, “Noow, Larr-uh. This isn’t his fauuult. He’s a dawug. That’s what dawugs do.”

U.L. went to defend me, next.

“Ah’m not anuh angriyuh at Kris than Spaahnky. But, what we’ve loorned,” she continued, in my direction, “from this is that dawugs do what dawugs do, and people, people don’t.”

A pause, and then, “Try sittin’ in a chaiyuh.”

Heartless? Not really. Childhood-robber? Probably. I mean, what kid doesn’t like lying on the floor in front of the television? The point? Understood, loud and clear. There’s a time and place for all things, and when one of those things is where a child should sit, the answer is always in a chair.

The bite was more of shock than of pain; I needed no stitches. I certainly didn’t try to “warm up” to Spanky, after that, but I learned that afternoon that whether we realize it or not, who we become has a lot to do with where we lie.

Literally and figuratively.

See…I never told them that I’d teased the dog with that blame tennis ball, after I sprawled out on the floor. He had every right to come after me.  No, instead, I just sat in the chair and kept watching “Return of the Osprey” on NOVA, my two hands, firmly locked like a vice, across my stomach, my fingers tightly around that tennis ball, hidden beneath my knuckles.

And smiling.

Just like Gamva had been in the doorway.

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I’d never taken a trip with Kim and Amanda, at the same time; I’ve certainly spent time with them separately, and had a wonderful time with each, but I wasn’t sure the casserole would take, so to speak, when all the ingredients were added.  We all have a certain amount of spice, and god, let me just stop with this…suffice it to say, it was an experiment.

And it was a success.  The trip was lovely, the weather was gorgeous, the ride entertaining. (Actually, at the moment, I’m still at the beach, sitting here debating on the absolute merit of a mimosa…I, at least, have to be honest about that). And as is the ritual, we drove straight to the beach house, hastily threw things into the rooms, and tore off our clothes: we wear our suits on the ride down underneath the most loosely fitting clothes we can legally wear in public. We worry about food and the like, afterwards.  What’s important is the beach.

Midway through the drive, however, we, naturally, had to stop for gas. Also I was gung-ho about purchasing a ridiculous pair of sunglasses. Our stopping point was Waynesboro, a sad and confusing little town in the eastern depths of Missississippi, right on the state line.  It’s a confusing town for several strange reasons. First, you enter the town, at least from the highway we were on, through a cornfield, scarecrows and all. It was very a la Jeepers Creepers, a movie that has scarred me and convinced me that of all the futuristic inventions possible that Hollywood and the Sci-Fi Channel have all but subliminally persuaded us are capable in our lifetimes, my vote is on memory erasing.

Upon entering the city, if we call it that, in the middle of corn, as you will, there sits a Western Sizzlin’, a restaurant so intent on ”steaks and a good country buffet” that it cannot afford a “g” at the end of the word “sizzling.”  This restaurant is by nothing, except, of course, corn, which I pretend was a smart, corporate business decision – a product placement of sorts.  Generic brand, (I mean, it’s just plain corn) but, as the argument goes, the quality is just as good. And if you have enough elbow grease, you can have cornmeal which down south means cornbread, which down south means manna.

Naturally, the next thing that comes into view is Wal-Mart, and in a twist of fate that must make the very ground of Bentonville, AR, quake with continued profit and pride, across the street – excuse me, the road – is the high school, the War Eagles, as they’re called.  That, in and of itself, is an interesting name for an athletic department, and I’m sure, warrants research.  I love the idea of research. The logic would suggest that there must also be a Peacetime Eagle, but having visited Yellowstone National Park, at the tender age of 13, I can assure you, all eagles are graceful and vicious. I saw one eating a field mouse just for kicks. I could tell; it was all over his beak.

Still…

A few “blocks” past this arrangement of retail and education, sat a unique display of fast food conjoined triplets – KFC was attached to Taco Bell which was attached to Long John Silver’s, all in the same building – and an array of gas stations with names like Hack’s Hot Biscuits and Bait. It was square in the middle of this “plaza” that the only thing that brought us any small amount of comfort stood, a Chevron.

Caveat Emptor.

A no-name, average, 1984-esque Chevron. (I mean both the year 1984 and the Orwellian idea that it was blandly branded, at least considering the names of the other gas stations).

Two things happened at the gas station, besides getting gas, that I filed under Strange.

The lesser thing was a snippet of a conversation I overheard while perusing the hanging-from-the-ceiling “stand” of faux-designer sunglasses.  An elderly woman was regaling to an elderly man, not her husband I could tell, about how she, in a quick pinch and fix, would mix mayonnaise and ketchup and sugar and make her own Thousand Island dressing.

I was both engaged, instantly, and disgusted and also: Where was this Thousand Island, anyway?  Was the original dressing some sort of community effort among all 1,000 of these nameless islands; was it in an attempt to create better relations among them because, perhaps, up until this point of culinary discovery, they were warring tribes hellbent on island domination?

And would they be offended, to know that despite their secret history of war and peace and civilization, they had been reduced, in the 21st century, to a simple recipe of ketchup, mayonnaise, and sugar, according to an elderly woman in Waynesboro, Mississippi? 

I put my sunglasses back on the upside-down-tree of sunshade options, and decided to get a Gatorade.  At this point, Kim was about to come in the gas station to search for a bathroom (it’s a trait we all three share – this need to know restrooms), when she motioned for me, through the thick glass wall, to come outside and she meant right then.

I obliged, curiously.

I stepped through the doors, and there she stood pointing. Amanda stared out from the backseat, sleepy but interested. 

And there, taped up onto the door, on 8.5″ by 11″ white typing paper, was the following Notice:

If you are wearing a hoodie or a mask, of any type, please remove it before entering the store. Thank you.

What immediately interested me is that such a sign has found a need to be displayed, at all, but those are just the times we live in, I suppose, post-911…but what affected me about this assumed admonishment is that it’s taped up on a window at a gas station in Waynesboro, in a town that can’t possibly hold more than 2,000, if that, in Mississippi.  Forgive the constant repeat, but if such a sign is necessary here then I am worried for the rest of the country. The sun was shining, the sky clear, but I shivered.

You don’t put a sign like that up unless there’s a reason.

And then, I thought of that sweet, elderly woman at the counter, eagerly offering recipes.  What if she’d been here that day, the day that the reason for this sign occurred. It broke my heart to think she might have been a Victim, instead of a faded Victorian. (We’ll have to talk about the remaining styles of Victorianism in this state, in another blog, but it involves several great aunts and  GamVa, my grandmother Virginia, who like the state itself, remains dedicated to its cultural heritage and at times, unnecessarily, Latinate in speech and monologue).

I told Kim to take a picture of it, both for posterity and also, so we could show it to Amanda, and she tried, but it wouldn’t take. The picture didn’t come out.

That was odd, until I decided to focus on that part, instead; maybe it was a sign.  

Maybe the camera couldn’t focus because the fear itself had diminished (I can justify anything – just watch); I told myself that since the sign had been posted, it had worked; it had deterred would-be thugs and such from stealing and potentially hurting elderly women.  Which is a crime all on its own, in my opinion.

We got back in the car and kept toward the beach. Tank full, humor abetted, concern registered, although…I still didn’t have sunglasses.

And I have to be honest, besides gas, that was the whole point of stopping.

This “learning lessons about life,” well, that was just a fun, free and unexpected gift…at best, merely a footnote.

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