“Grandmas hold our hands for just a little while but hold our hearts forever.”
— Unknown
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It was a simple principle. And it worked.
The little red plastic car had a magnet in it. Another magnet was molded in the hand-held piece shaped to fit two fingers. Two tiny fingers.
“Remember how I showed you,” I recall her telling me. “Do it the way you’re supposed to, and it will work.”
I sighed and tried it again. The way she had told me to do it in the beginning. And just like magic, when I waved my finers over the toy car, it rolled across the tabletop. Propelled by the scientific principle of opposing magnetic fields.
My dad’s mom spent a lot of time with children. Her grandchildren, the neighbor’s children, anybody’s children who came to her house.
She had lots of practice. She did it most of her life. Born in 1905 and married at age fifteen, she was raising my father by the time she was 18.
My father was adopted by his brother and his wife in 1924 when he was not yet a year old.
The couple my dad knew only as mother and dad were biologically his aunt and uncle. My sisters and I knew them as grandmother and granddaddy. However, the family relationship would not have been any different by any other names. Nor could the love have ever been any stronger.
Raising kids and running a household was all that Granny ever knew. In her 88 years, she never had an employer and never drew a paycheck. But she worked seven days a week, loving her family, raising her child, and (to hear her tell it) helping raise other children—hers, her neighbors, her friends.
Nobody knows to what degree she actually “raised” them. But if she ever wiped their noses, fixed them a meal, refereed a disagreement, or helped get them back on the “straight and narrow,” she laid claim to some part or parcel of their raising.
She was just that way. She helped where she was needed, giving of herself and what little she and my grandfather had to offer.
And it wasn’t necessarily a question of need. Most of “Granny’s kids” had good homes. They simply enjoyed visiting hers because of the warmth and love they found there.
I was blessed with loving parents. But I was “twice blessed.” I had her for a grandmother.
During visits to her house, she sometimes crafted toys from spools, paper, string, and other improvised household items.
On rare occasions, we frequented the toy store on Main Street next to the post office to splurge for a model kit.
That could be where the toy car I found myself playing with again last week came from. I just remembered it stayed in “my drawer” in her chifforobe. The same bottom drawer where some of my father’s old toys aged with mine.
When I grew from toy cars to real ones, she continued to help “raise me,” offering advice, solicited and otherwise, on navigating the perils of adulthood while enjoying the happiness of a life well lived.
When I decided to buy my first car at age 14, I told her all about a used 1951 Chevy I found, sharing with her my experience of going to the bank with my father to learn about financing. She promptly warned me about the evils of borrowing money. That it was better to “save up to buy what you need.”
“I raised your father better than that,” she added with a scowl.
The she pulled her “pocketbook” from its hiding place in the closet and gave me the money to buy the car. But only after making it plain that she expected to see me every week when I got paid at my new after-school job at Beall’s Department Store.
“You can just pay me,” she said. That way, “You don’t have to pay any interest.”
The toy car resides in a display case with other automotive memorabilia. And it still works perfectly when I play with it. Employing time-tested principles that have never changed.
I try it every now and then, just to think about her. Recalling her philosophies about the happiness of a life well lived.
All, time-tested principles that still work today.
—Leon Aldridge
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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Center Light and Champion, the Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche, the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.
© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2024. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.
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