Ninety Plus.

Sylvia Opal Graddy

July 24, 1921 - November 14, 2011

To read more about my Grandma...

Granny & the Suze. July 27, 2011.

written July 27, 2011

My grandmother's name is Sylvia, but I didn't know that until I was eight years old.  Her middle name is Opal and she hates it, but she's always been "Granny Opal" to me because of a joke with my Dad that backfired on her circa 1983.  Despite my dad's family living nearly a thousand miles away in Jersey, she's a common name in their households.  One time, one of my cousins went into a grocery store and asked a clerk where the "Granny Opal apples" were located.

Granny was raised on a farm in Arkansas with five brothers - two older, three younger:  Nelson & Orville, then Floyd, Jim T, & Garland - or Preacher, as everyone knew him; Uncle Preacher, to me.  She had an older sister named Gladys, too, who died when she was just a few years old.  Grandma's brothers teased her incessantly; they told her she had chicken legs.  She never thought much of herself because of it, but if you ask them, they did it because they thought she was the most beautiful girl they knew and they didn't want her to end up with a big head.

During one of many summer vacations I spent with her (I think I was eleven) she caught me with an at home hair frosting kit - the white goo caked in my hair.  She went on for days talking about how handsome her daddy's hair was, so dark and lovely, and how I'd "ruined" mine by turning it "yellow."  That woman loved her daddy.

She's been married three times - once to a man named Braden, who died in the war and twice to my PopPop.  She had one baby: my mother.  I recorded a conversation with her last year and I asked her to tell me about my mom.  What was she like as a child? "Perfect," she said, as though it were the most obvious answer in the world.

She was in a car accident when she was in her twenties.  It shattered her pelvis.  This always came up when I was being really silly, because she would laugh and say "Oh stop!  You'll make me pee my pants!" Apparently, a result of the injury.

PopPop was stationed in Paris when my mom was in the third grade and I always hear stories about Granny and mom exploring the city.  When I was on my way to Ireland, for the first time, in 2005, Grandma told me she'd been.  I asked her what it was like and she said, "I was just in the airport, but it seemed nice."  In the hallway by her room, there's a big map of Europe with x's over all the places she's been.  "Landed here in 1960" is written over Dublin.

My mom, my sisters and I lived with her in Hinesville, Georgia while my dad was stationed in Korea.  She had four lots of land that took up a whole side of our block - one had the house and an in-ground pool, one was shaded by pear trees, one housed the garage, and one was open - our makeshift baseball field where my sister, Carrie, took a line drive to her eye.  Granny bought us a trampoline against my mother's best wishes and my Dad built us a tree house and a see-saw in the garage lot.  The fence was lined with bushes that I'd hollow out with gardening sheers and use as forts.  I finished first and second grade there.  I developed a deep love for Power Rangers, rescued hundreds of frogs from drowning in the pool, took in baby birds who had fallen from their nests and swam like a fish every day from April to October.  We always had homemade pear preserves.

I learned to cook at her house.  She taught me how to make scrambled eggs when I was seven and I woke up every morning and beat the eggs, set the stove and scrambled, all the while basking in my independent ability to cook.  I don't even really like scrambled eggs, but I made them anyway, just because I could.

When I was in first grade, I went through this phase where I went to the nurse's office every day complaining of a stomach ache and begged to be sent home.  After the first few days, my mom had had enough of the nonsense and refused to pick me up.  Grandma was there, though, feeling sorry for me, driving me home, putting me to bed, turning on Punky Brewster and bringing me anything I wanted.  "Would a candy bar make you feel better?" Why yes, Granny.  Yes it, would.

She had the nastiest dog any of us had ever met.  His name was Happy, ironically, and, while I desperately wanted to be friends with him, I knew not to get too close to him because he had a tendency to snap.  My grandma felt sorry for him though, and blamed his vicious demeanor on the neighborhood bullies and their teasing .  I have a scar above my top lip from where Happy bit me on Christmas Eve of '94.  I had been sitting on the floor across the room and apparently, he didn't like that.  I still remember my dad calling from Korea and hearing the news.  At seven years old, I had no doubt in my mind that, had my dad been in the same time zone, that dog would have died.  Think Liam Neeson in Taken - that's him, except my dad has more height and more guns.  I think I even tried to downplay the whole thing out of sympathy for the dog.

One night, I woke up to Happy, crazed and barking, in the yard on the opposite side of my bedroom wall.  He snarled and snapped at a opossum that had wandered into the hydrangea bushes.  Granny was right behind him hollering and carrying on, smacking the hissing animal with a broom.  That had to be a sight.  I was really young and it was the first I'd ever heard of a opossum, aside from on Bambi - but with the noises carrying through my bedroom wall, there was no way I was associating whatever was out there with the cuddly creatures in the movie.  I was scared.  I asked my mom if opossums could eat through brick walls - a question that is so often repeated amongst my family members (yeah, whatever, I was cute).  Anyway, the opossum wasn't as lucky as Happy was that Christmas.  Dad arrived home on leave during the early hours of the morning and the opossum met his fate.  There was a pitchfork involved.  (Sorry, PETA - nobody messes with daddy's girls.)

Happy finally warmed up to me during his last years.  He was really pitiful by then - what hair he had left was matted and gross and he had these crazy cataracts that made his eyes glow neon green.    His vision was so bad he would walk right into the furniture - people too, sometimes.  I was just ecstatic when he'd finally let me pet him.

My grandma really loved cats, too, and there were always a few around her house, even if, technically, they weren't hers.  I'm not sure, but it might have had something to do with the magically replenishing dish of cat food on the front porch.  The ones that were hers were always impressive - seriously, the most beautiful cats you've ever seen - and huge!  She was constantly feeding them and petting them and feeling sorry for them.  She called the boys "tom cats" and she called Athena, my very first pet, "Little Bit."  Athena's still alive.  She's currently curled up underneath Granny's bed.

My grandma mowed the lawn with a push mower until she moved to Statesboro in 2004 to be closer to her doctors.  She wrote me handwritten letters until the day she couldn't hold a pen steady enough to write any more.  She always, always has gum.  One of my visits isn't complete until I "pick out something pretty" from either a store or her home - usually her jewelry chest.  She makes the best pie crust; taught me how to, too.  She's flirted and charmed every boyfriend I've had that she's met and still asks about them too.  "How's JohnnyBoy?" she'll ask with a sparkle in her eye.  "I don't know, Grandma," I'll say with an eye roll.  She took a particular liking to my first boyfriend, her "Margarita Man."  He was a bartender.  "I always really liked him," she told me yesterday. "We always had a real good time."  Out of all the boys my sisters and I have brought home to her, they've all loved her.

One summer, when I was about thirteen, her old friends, the Calhouns, visited.  I think Calhoun was pretty high ranking in the Army, though I can't remember his rank.  He had served with my PopPop years prior.  I was sitting in the living room watching something - probably repeats of Boy Meets World on the Disney channel - with my sketch book stretched out across my lap and magazine clippings scattered around me, as they chattered away in the kitchen.  Calhoun wandered over to the counter where Granny's medicine bottles were lined up and said, "by golly, Sylvia!" he said (a South Carolinian right out of a novel) "What in the heck do ya need all these pills for?"  "Oh," she went on, "those are my birth control pills."  My grandma, bless her - she doesn't miss a beat.  I, of course, found this to be the most hilarious thing I'd ever heard in my entire thirteen years of existence and apparently so did Calhoun and his wife.

Summers with her were great.  She bought me whatever I wanted at the grocery store and let me eat it all as frequently as I liked.  Want six popsicles at a time?  Grandma will let you have them!  I watched so much TV my eyes just about fell out of my head and I stayed up and slept in as late as I liked.  I never did chores.  She was the tidiest person on the planet and she'd clean anything before you even had a chance to get it dirty.  One summer, she let me set up a yard sale in her garage every Saturday.  I sold everything - old odds and ends, pears from the trees - I even sold some of the furniture inside the house (with permission, of course).

She loves my giggle.  She and my Grandpop (my dad's dad), had that in common, and despite nearly everyone else finding it annoying, I'll never be embarrassed by it because of them.  Maybe that's why I love weird laughs so much.

My grandma has a thick southern accent and a bunch of old catchphrases to go along with it.  When you ask her how she is, she says either "Oh, I'm as fine as a frog's hair"  or "I'm as fit as a fiddle."  She always tells us "don't take any wooden nickels" and ends conversations with "a bushel and a peck."  She likes her hair permed and she hates to be without her lipstick.  Last week, she nick-named my dog, Susie, "Pedro."

She always told me, "better to laugh than to cry."  That's stuck with me.

She's stubborn and she's ornery and if you don't know what that word means, go look it up, because that's my grandma.  The woman knows how to hold a grudge, too.

Sunday was her ninetieth birthday and on Monday I took her with me to pick up my sister, Carrie, from work and then to get ice cream.  She must have started ninety plus sentences, very matter of factly, with "Well you know, I'm ninety plus, so..."  to which I would reply "You're ninety plus a day!  That makes you ninety plus?"  And we'd laugh.  It does, apparently.

She's not mowing any lawns any more and making pie crusts is a serious chore.  It's tough for her to make it from her easy chair to the kitchen table with a walker.  She's hard of hearing, has leukemia and her Parkinsons has caused some dementia, so if she tells you I'm pregnant with twins - trust that I'm not.  She's got jokes though and despite being unable to hear someone two feet away from her, she can still make out my giggle from across the house.  She needs help with a lot of things, and that's really hard for her.  The other day, as we were getting her ready for bed, she said quietly "you won't like me anymore after this."  That being said, you can add crazy to that list of things she is.

I've spent the past week here in Georgia visiting her and my mom.  Whenever I give her a hand with things, I start talking about all those old stories we have that make us laugh (many of them way too embarrassing for this platform).  I remind her about all the things she's done for me over the years - the cleaning, the popsicles, the downright spoiling - it's about time I get to pay her back for all of that.