I spent most of my childhood next to my grandmother. She had thirteen children of her own, including my mother, but in many ways I was her fourteenth. When my grandfather died, she didn’t like the idea of staying alone at night. Since we lived next door, less than a football field distance between our houses, my brother Billie, two years older than I, stayed with her. But when he began school at the age of six, I took over the night shift. I was four years old. The idea was that if my grandmother got sick during the night I was to run next door to my parents’ house and tell my mom. The reality was that on the rare occasions when she did feel sick at night, she never would awaken me for my sole duty, but instead would go across the path in the dark and knock on my mom’s window herself. Still, I stayed with her, although I served no purpose–at least as stated.
Soon, I began to spend most of the day with my grandmother as well as the night. I don’t think it was ever really discussed. It just happened. I liked being with her and she liked having me around. I also liked the orange crush sodas she kept in her refrigerator. If you look at old pictures taken of my grandmother with us, she seems always to be behind me, or beside me, or watching over me–my guardian angel, I’d like to think. This bond between us was there even before I moved in with her. As I grew older, she always said I looked like my grandfather, her husband. She showed me a picture of him taken at his first communion. She was right. Except for the dated clothes he wore, we could have passed as one and the same, or surely brothers. My grandmother and I spent so much time together that my younger siblings questioned how a woman as old as my grandmother could have a child my age. That was puzzling enough to them. They weren’t so much bothered by the fact that she didn’t have a husband, which also would have been a requirement to have a child.
I have many memories of the years spent with Grandma. They are all good memories, although I still can hear the unhappiness in her voice when she thought I should be working outdoors in her flowerbeds instead of watching TV in her living room. I assume she had redefined my purpose for being with her. She was a no nonsense German who believed work was next to godliness. Aside from that difference of opinion on how to use my free time, we got along very well. Once, when we were visiting another of her daughters, I happened to overhear their conversation from the next room as her daughter said to her, “Oh, that poor child is going to have to bury two moms!” The words scared me. I was old enough to know that my grandma would die before me, although I had not given her death any thought up until that point. When she did die a decade later–I was fifteen years old and away at school at that point–I knew exactly what my aunt was saying with such prescience those many years before. I was burying the first of my moms. I still remember the wake service. The eleven living children were gathered in the room around her casket. The oldest–my Aunt Agnes–left the room to find me. She brought me in with the original sons and daughters, saying to me, “You also belong in here with us.” That incredible act of kindness has stayed with me all these years.
My grandmother had a heavy foot. She drove one speed–fast. I wasn’t old enough really to understand that she was a fast driver. I do remember one time hearing my dad say to my mom that it wasn’t safe for me to be riding in the same car with my grandmother. I didn’t see the danger myself, since I always had ridden with her. But I will admit to fear when she pulled the car into her garage. It was a one car garage built apart from the house. When we’d return from the grocery store, she’d make a big semi-circle to line the car with the entrance to the garage. She never slowed down as she maneuvered the car and all I could see before me was the narrow entrance to the garage. I still recall bracing myself as I wondered if she would get the car into the space without hitting one side or the other of the garage. That fear was well-founded because she did hit one side or another on more than one occasion. All I could think in my little boy brain was that the garage was going to fall down on top of the two of us. Fortunately, it never did. But I can still see her behind the wheel of her 1961 blue Ford racing towards the entrance of that garage with little concern for the tight fit before us. I’m happy to say that the garage still stands today. I need to look if there are any visible reminders of those scary moments from days long gone.
My grandmother had been one of the first women in the community to learn how to drive. I don’t know for sure when my grandfather switched from horse and buggy to a Model-T car. I know they were married in January of 1908 and Henry Ford’s first Model-T left the factory in Detroit in September of that same year. I also am sure my grandparents in Texas were not among the first to buy one. Whenever that change came into their lives, my grandpa began to teach his wife how to drive. He reasoned she needed to learn. And for someone who knew her way around horses very well, it made sense that she should adapt well to these new metal contraptions. My grandma told me that she took to her driving lessons with my grandpa. But on one of her first solo drives she ran into a bar ditch. She was short on the explanation to me, but it was serious enough for her to tell her husband she wasn’t going to drive anymore. She was done with it. He wouldn’t hear of it. He got the car out of the ditch and he said to her, “Carrie, get back in that car and drive it!” She did and she never looked back. My dad would say she became too comfortable with it.
Another story that often was told about my grandma’s driving didn’t have her behind the wheel, but one of my uncles. My uncle Rein was born in 1919. During his growing up years, baseball truly was America’s pastime. Babe Ruth’s 22 season career from 1914 to 1935 spanned the same time period, although my grandma abided no team except the St. Louis Cardinals. As my uncle entered his teenage and young adult years, he was part of the local baseball team, as was most every young male of the time. Teams in the area played against one another with the same fervor as the major league teams. Usually these games took place on a Sunday afternoon. One particular Sunday, my grandma and her children were on their way to one of these games. Rein was old enough to drive the car. He was twenty years old in 1939. As they crossed the bridge that spanned the Brazos River not far from their farm, the Pastor of their church–Father Matthew–zipped past them in his new car. That was enough to ignite my grandmother’s competitive streak–for which she was well-known. Combined with her fearlessness in a car, it made for a formidable union. As she watched from the back seat of the car, she shouted at Rein in the front seat, “Don’t let him get ahead of us! Pass him!” And Rein, ever the obedient son, floored the Ford and the race was on. I never heard how long it lasted, but it ran for a while because Father Matthew enjoyed a contest as much as my grandma. What I do know is that Rein got ahead of Father Matthew’s car and they made it to the baseball field ahead of the priest. That fact brought a smile to my grandmother’s face still three decades later as she told me the story. She may not have been behind the wheel, but she was the one demanding Rein go full throttle.
I think my grandmother knew it was time to hand over the keys when she backed out from the Dime Store into an ongoing car. No real damage was done–a busted rear light, as I recall. I sat in the car that day and even I knew something needed fixed more than the light cover. Grandma knew it also. Every day brought her closer to her eighth decade and her eyes just weren’t as sharp as they once were. I don’t know for sure if that was the day she stopped driving, but it was the day we both knew the car soon would stay parked in the garage.
I learned many things at the knees of my grandmother, but I never took to the lesson of fast driving. Not as a lifelong endeavor anyway. I had my moments. In this regard, I again was more like my grandpa, who was less competitive and more even-keeled. I drive my car the speed limit. It agrees with me, although I suspect Grandma would be a little disappointed in my timidity. After her death in 1972, I did drive her old ’61 Blue Ford now and again–learning in it how to use a clutch in the floor and a gear shift on the steering column. Eventually, the old Ford was retired and removed to my dad’s junkyard, where I would pass by, see it, and remember the good old days of riding with grandma, the windows down, wind blowing on my face, hidden as my little self was below the dashboard, no seat belt in sight at that time, speeding down the road, with full trust in the woman behind the wheel.
But I think I did learn an important lesson about life in general from riding with Grandma. It is this–sometimes, too many times, we aren’t the one behind the wheel. We’re along for the ride. We may not know where we are going, we may not know what is around the next curve, but we have to stay in the moment, with confidence that the One who is taking us on this ride through life will get us safely to our destination. In the words of the wise Psalmist, who never drove a car in his life–to my knowledge, anyway–but who still knew a thing or two, “The Lord guards my going and my coming, both now and forevermore.” Amen.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 