Punk Rocker

Minnie Kate (Mays) Massie.  If Minnie Kate's name is found nowhere else on the World Wide Web, then at least her name may be found in an Internet search as long as this essay about a hot day in July remains online.

I'd known Minnie Kate many years before I found out that she carried a once very popular southern name of Minnie. What I knew her by was Grandma, Mom, and Miss Kate. Grandma was my ex-Y's grandmother. And mine too.

No, this is not a story of first cousin's marrying, but of Grandma deciding that I was hers. And it was a privilege to be considered Grandma's granddaughter. You'd have known that if you had heard the respect, almost awe, in which visitors would say her name when they dropped in for a visit.

Grandma always treated me as family, but I knew I was one of hers the day I carried her to a church reunion in Amherst County Virginia during the summer of 1989. (No, I didn't physically carry Grandma to the reunion. Carry is a southern word for giving someone a lift somewhere.) Grandma was 93 at the time and decked out in a black and white summer dress that she had stitched by hand not more than a week before. That day was the inaugural wearin' of that dress.

Now, if you would, please adopt a central Virginia accent as you read the rest of this essay. You see, Grandma was born in Amherst, if I remember correctly (a quaint, attractive small town with level land), and she lived most if not all of her married life in Covesville, Virgina. Which is just south of Charlottesville--about 15 miles south as the crow flies--and a little north of Schuyler (pronounced Sky*ler), Virginia, John-boy Walton's home. So if you come up short on what a central Virginia accent sounds like, you can rustle up a Hollywood version of the same, which is not to say it's the same. Or you can order a copy of How to Speak Southern. Which I swear is a later edition of same book (I remember the picture) that was kept in the bathroom of a certain place where I worked in Charlottesville in the late 70s. Without that humorous book, as a foreigner to the central Virginia accent, I'd never understood my clients. (Now, referencing that book is not meant to make fun or intended as an insult. That book actually spared me from having to ask people--well, at least not with great frequency--to repeat and re-interpret their statements for me. Without it, I would have looked slow or perhaps touched in the head or perhaps born without the ability to understand plain English.)

That day at the reunion, Grandma proudly introduced me as her granddaughter without blinking an eye and without any additions. Not once did she mention I was related by marriage, which was amazing if you know southern culture. I mean, without intending harm, southerners love to draw the connections about who is related to whom via what marriage. I took grandma's unadorned declaration as a message that I had come to reside in her heart as one of her own.

The summer had been a hot and steamy one. Filled with many happenings (stories for another time). And I was living with Grandma for the entire summer while my ex-Y was renovating the place at Albemarle Lake, which I wrote about in What Size is the Sky. 

Grandma lived in a traditional white, two-story wood-sided home just off the highway, which had been built up in front of her when they straightened the road and leveled the grade to not quite so mountainous. It was one of those very plain, no frills homes that spot the Virginia countryside. With two rooms on the first floor split by a stair case that led to three bedrooms upstairs, sleeping Grandma and Granddad in one room, and their five kids in the other two. A covered, gray-planked porch out front stretched the length of the home, housing handmade wooden rockers and an assortment of chairs with hand-stitched cushions made from old bedspreads. One front room had been the parlor and the other front room the kitchen where the wood cookstove, and primary heat for the home, was kept.

My MIL Frances, a wonderful woman and the best MIL anyone could hope to ask for, was raised there where they used that cookstove, grew most of their own vegetables, washed clothes by hand (water got from a pump), and used an outhouse, the kind with the non-flushing toilet. Like John-boy, Charlottesville was the big city to Frances while she was growing up in a town so small you could miss it in without blinking your eyes. Charlottesville was the nearest place to get a gander at the modern world prior to movin' off to begin her adult life and new job in our nation's capital.

I said "front room," when referring to the downstairs rooms, because Grandma and Granddad's kids were good to them. When they grew up and left home, they worked together to make sure their parents had the modern conveniences they had missed out on growing up. They installed baseboard electric heat and added on a narrow back kitchen with a wee bathroom stuck on one end. The front kitchen became Grandma's and Granddad's bedroom so they wouldn't have to climb the stairs, and the new, narrow kitchen housed a table made by hand by Grandma's own father, a wood and metal hoosier style cabinet (like the one seen to the right of this text), a larger refrigerator, an electric cookstove, a metal and enamel sink with bottom cupboards (an all-in-one deal like the top photo in the link) poised dainty-like under the kitchen window, and a wringer washer, the same washer Grandma had when I lived with her. Despite being so narrow that at times you had to time your comings and goings with someone getting up from the table, the kitchen was the heart of the home and the place where we hung out when we weren't escaping the heat on the front porch.

This story takes place one Saturday morning during the worst of the summer heat in late July. Frances and her husband Britt had arrived the night before, and Larry and Sharlet were due in about a couple of hours. Frances and her younger brother Larry (the next to the last of the five children and the baby respectively) followed in their sister Katherine's footsteps by going to work for the FBI in Washington, D.C., with all three of them marrying people who also worked for the FBI (as you might imagine, family gatherings were a real hoot). Frances and Larry lived just outside of Washington (two other siblings, Junior and Bill, were local, and Katherine moved to Georgia when her agent husband was assigned there). And for most of their adult lives both Frances and Larry, along with their spouses, made the trek from their homes from the bedroom communities of D.C. to Grandma's at least once a month and then every weekend or every other weekend as their parents advanced in age.

The heat had yet to become oppressive that morning. Indeed, we were having a relatively pleasant morning heat wise, considering the calendar and how hot it could have been, when I waylaid Frances in front hall before she could join Grandma in the kitchen.

"A few days ago Grandma asked me to cut off her hair into a really short style. And I told her I was hesitant to do it because she's had long hair her whole life. I wanted to wait and ask you." (Grandma wore her hair in a bun and I spent hours over the years brushing and wrapping her hair in a bun at the back of her head.) "She said that the loose hairs are tickling her face and harassing her ears and making her feel as if she has bugs crawling on her. I'm afraid she won't like it after I'm done." (Honey, I am not a hair dresser, but I will try anything--one of the things Grandma liked about me--, and Grandma had recently discovered that I cut hair by watching me cut my ex-Y's hair in her very kitchen.)  "And I'm afraid she'll end up looking like Ronald Reagan." (I may not have said that last bit.)

"Well, I suppose Grandma knows what she wants and if she wants is her hair cut off, then I suppose you ought to do that, right?"

Duh. Did I feel small. Not that Frances made me feel small. She was as matter a fact about it as she could have been (Frances frequently added "right" to the end of a sentence), and while I'm not too good at reading judgment, Frances was none too good at hiding it, and so I know, she was being matter of fact. It's just that her saying that wised me up to the fact that I wasn't treating Grandma as an adult; I was waiting to ask her daughter's permission to cut her own hair on her own head. And believe you me, after I became an invalid and became IN-valid, I would soon see how others would attempt to deny me the right to choose as well. And it's not like Grandma was suffering from dementia; you'd've known that if you watched her play Scrabble with me when no one was watching. (When others played with Grandma, she cared little about her score, but knowing I like a competitive game, when we played alone, she could knock my socks right off.)

So after the last of the breakfast dishes were washed, I sat Grandma down in the kitchen and cut her hair right off her head, and yes, she sort of looked like Ronald Reagan in his later years.

And truly, I have no idea what possessed me, standing as I was behind Grandma and finishing up her new do, but with Larry and Sharlet coming shortly I thought it would be real funny if I took some hair gel and spiked Grandma's hair as a sort of Saturday mornin' once-in-a-lifetime gift to them. When I mentioned the same to Frances, who was seated next to Grandma, she laughed and said, "Don't ask me! Ask Mom!" Grandma was a bit deaf and so we sometimes carried on conversations when she wasn't looking, but there I was again, not consultin' with the source.

Oh my, was Grandma superbly pleased with both the idea and the chance to be mischievous!

And that's how Grandma came to be seated in the front room on one of her handmade rockers with hand-stitched cushions made out of bedspreads, a book in her hand rocking and reading, seemingly obtuse the the goings on around her, dressed like Whistler's mother in the summertime with a punk rock hair do waiting for Sharlet and Larry to arrive.

Meanwhile, Britt--thinking we were all sorts of crazy but willing to go along--, Frances, and I calmly waited in the kitchen for Larry and Sharlet to arrive as if it were any other Saturday. Ready to answer Sharlet's predictable question, "Well, where's Grandma?"

Sharlet doubled over and her face turned the shade of the center cut of a ripe water melon, and we all thought one or the two of them would bust a gut or have a heart attack. My word, you never saw such laughter when the two of them popped their head's in the living room to say "Hey" to Grandma and saw instead our family's very own punk rocker.


Dedication: This essay is dedicated to some of the most loving, wonderful and enjoyable people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing: Minnie Kate Mays Massie, Frances Massie Brittingham, Maurice (Britt) Brittingham, Laurence (Larry) Massie, Sharlet Massie, and Katherine Massie DuRant. May Minnie Kate, Britt, and Katherine rest in peace.