Tag: grandmother

Inspiration and Distraction for Today

Here we go! I hope everyone is taking care of themselves today as we wait to find out which direction our country will go.

Sunday I attended a friend’s birthday event. It was brilliant. In a reserved room at Missoula’s award winning library, she read a few poems for inspiration, gave us a prompt to use the five senses: taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight.

She read a wonderful excerpt from Joe Brainard‘s I Remember. He was an artist and writer. It began:

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie. I remember how much I used to stutter. I remember the first time I saw television.

Artwork by Joe Brainard

It’s a lovely exercise. If you need a distraction today maybe try your hand at writing a poem.

In the ten minutes we had to write and stirred by I Remember this is what my pen and paper composed:

I remember when my cousin, Wilkie Bee, and I stayed with our grandmothers

Our grandmothers were sisters

I remember that one of us would get a banana for best behavior

I remember I never got a banana

I remember the jar of buttons

I remember how I loved to string them onto a string

I remember my grandmother, Nanoo, smelled of baby powder

I remember the sound of the silver bell she jingled, signaling the housekeeper to bring the biscuits to the table or fill her dainty coffee cup

I remember how the biscuits and butter melted in my mouth

I remember how dainty my grandmother was, how she spoke softly

I never heard her raise her voice

Getting to Know My Grandmother

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
William Faulkner

Family movies show the plethora of flower sprays and large crowd at my paternal grandmother’s funeral. Effie Lee Galloway Scott died July1958, a year before I was born. From all the stories told, I feel I knew her and wish we had known each other.

She was a member of Jackson, MS’s pioneer Manship family, the daughter of Alfred Daniel Galloway and Annie Manship Galloway. Effie Lee was a devout member of Galloway Methodist Church, president of the garden club and Junior League, a member of the DAR and other civic organizations.

My older siblings called her Gaga and speak of how much they loved her, always upbeat up until the end and loved by many.

She endured enormous loss in her lifetime. Two of her four sons died.

Francis (Frank) Tomkeyes Scott, two years old, was hit by a trolley car in downtown Jackson while my grandmother helplessly watched from outside the Woolworth store screaming, “Oh my baby.” The newspaper article on this event is graphic and heartbreaking.

Her son, Walter W. Scott, 1920-1945, stationed in Italy and promoted to Captain was killed in action April 29th, 1945, five months before the war would end.

Effie Lee’s third child, Charles Scott, became a first pilot on a B-17 bomber that was shoot down during a raid. He was taken as a prisoner in a Nazi war camp for eighteen months returning to his family in Jackson, MS a forever changed man.

The fourth son, Bert Scott Sr., my father served in the Navy and outlived them all. I wish I had known to ask my father while he was alive, what all that must of been like for him. Did he feel undue pressure as the last remaining son of our prominent Southern family? Did he carry grief for his mother and lost brothers?
Certainly, Daddy was trying to bury some sort of pain through his drinking and alcoholism.

Effie Lee, it’s no wonder from all the loss and sadness she experienced that she died from stomach cancer at age 64. But she lived. She loved fishing and was saluted for her vivaciousness, charm and love during her life. (See newspaper clipping below.)