Oh! My! Glory!

I introduced Bridget to my grandparents, her great grandparents, this weekend. They met us (and my parents) at The Golden Corral in Pocatello, Idaho, because that is where they meet anyone who comes into town to visit them. Bridget wore a crown throughout dinner and she observed to me that Grandma Shirley has braids. I thought it was high time I posted a tribute to Grandma Shirley in all her eccentric glory.

Let's start with her hair.

Grandma Shirley is second from the left in this photo from my parents' wedding in January 1972. Her hair is pulled back in a low, braided bun with a few Superman curls at the top of her forehead. (Stop here and appreciate my Dad's tuxedo.)

Here is a photo of Grandma with me, Allyn, Melissa (on Grandma's lap), Katy, and Jennie after our piano recital in the Spring of 1980. Grandma Shirley's hair is pulled back in a low, braided bun with a few curls at the top of her forehead.

You may have some difficulty spotting Grandma Shirley in this photo taken on their front porch in 1987. She is standing second from the left in a yellow dress, hair pulled back in a low, braided bun with a few curls at the top of her forehead. (I'll let you figure our who everyone else is. I dare you to find someone in this picture who doesn't need a haircut.)

We've skipped ahead to 2002. Grandma Shirley is sitting in her backyard pretending to wait her turn to play croquet (she wasn't actually playing with us). She has wrapped a single braid from the base of her head all the way around the top of her head, securing the end of the braid with two barrettes behind her left ear. Viva la difference!

That photo journey over 35 years was to illustrate that Grandma Shirley doesn't care for change. Her hairstyle has been the same for the last 45 years or so. (She added the braid-around-the head style to the repertoire about 15 years ago.) Many (many) other things haven't changed about Grandma's life in that time - the color of the walls in her house, her furniture, her soaps (on TV and in the bathroom), her food storage. You get the idea.

Both of my grandparents don't waste anything. During one visit at their house (Brian and I were allowed into the "museum" to enjoy the day with Grandma and Grandpa before we had a child), Grandma and Grandpa told us about how they found a box of canned meat in their basement. It was meat they'd canned themselves and they figured it to be about 13 years old. If I had found meat old enough to be in junior high in my basement, it would be on the first train to the dump. My grandparents used a can a week until it was gone. They choked that stuff down in Sloppy Joes, spaghetti sauce, soup. As they poked the can opener into the lid of the can of meat every week, they would silently pray that they would hear the sound that meant the meat was bad. It only happened once. "That was a good day," Grandpa Curtis recalled.

Grandma used to crochet every day. She made a "deep purple afghan" for each of her children and grandchildren as a wedding present. Why deep purple? Because it matches my Dad's red hair. (Grandma has a lot of rules of fairness, fashion, propriety. There isn't enough time for me to explain why red hair and deep purple go together.) She also made a smaller blanket for each of the grandkids when they were baptized. (To keep all these blankets straight, Grandma tied a small piece of yarn from the baptism afghan to the wedding afghan. My baptism blanket was light pink and I got a picture of the thread tied to my wedding afghan using my newly discovered macro function on my 2 year-old camera that has been on Auto since I bought it.)

Grandma Shirley likes to say things like, "Oh my glory!" and "I says to Curtis, I says" and "You learn something new every day" and "He/she is just like me." She likes to go to Golden Corral two hours before her guests arrive so that she can finish eating before they get there. That way she can talk without the interruptions of bites of food. In the years when we'd all arrive at the Corral at the same time, we got to witness Grandma getting a plate of just bacon, a plate of just sliced green peppers, a plate of just watermelon wedges. It was a sight to behold. And she would eat every drop of every morsel of food on her plates. Add Grandpa telling the stories ("Fine. You tell it, but I would tell it better.") so that she would eat... and then Grandma retelling the story "correctly" and that meant being at Golden Corral through at least two meals.

So, cheers to Grandma Shirley. She let me drink root beer for breakfast when I was a kid, she taught me how to crochet, how to make raspberry jam, and to keep masking tape, a good Sharpie marker, and lots of Zip-lock bags on hand.

What are your favorite Grandma Shirley-isms?