Thursday March 28th, 2024 9:15PM

Memories of my grandmother

My friend Nicole was excited last night because she's going to spend the weekend with her grandmother. Her excitement was contagious, and I found myself wishing I could hang out with my grandmother.

Going to visit my grandmother in Cordele is one of my favorite childhood memories. I like to think that at least a part of my sense of humor comes from my grandmother She and I both loved the Pink Panther cartoon and "The Muppet Show," and we watched them together every chance we got.

What little dancing I can do I learned from the ballroom scenes of "The Muppet Show" as my grandmother and I waltzed around the bedroom.

We used to go out in the yard and pick up bird feathers. Then she’d take a two-ply paper bag from the Piggly Wiggly and cut a narrow strip from it. We’d insert the tip of the feathers between the plies and wrap the paper around my head to make an Indian headdress.

My teepee would be a card table turned on its side in the living room, an old blanket draped over it. My grandmother would let me eat my dinner, which usually consisted of SpaghettiOs, in my teepee.

I realize that SpaghettiOs doesn’t sound like traditional Indian fare, but my grandmother didn’t have any buffalo meat or maize lying around. Besides, I wasn’t around back when Indians lived here and neither were you, so how can we say for sure they didn’t eat SpaghettiOs?

Once, when I was a teenager and a big fan of the 70s cop show "Starsky and Hutch," I convinced my grandmother to watch it with me. And the next morning, she proudly announced to her friends that she had stayed up late with me watching "Husky and Starch," which is, of course, what I've called the show ever since.

There were only two rules at her house. First, don’t fight with the pillows on the sofa. And second, don’t drink the last Coca-Cola.

That second rule was because she wanted to be sure there was at least one Coca-Cola in the refrigerator when she woke up in the morning. And she only drank Coca-Cola out of those old six-and-a-half-ounce glass bottles.

My grandmother started nearly every day of her life with one of those six-and-a-half-ounce jewels. As soon as her feet hit the floor in the morning, she headed straight for the refrigerator.

I don’t really know for how long my grandmother started each morning with a Coca-Cola, but I suspect it was for as long as she smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes because I rarely saw her doing one without the other.

I also don’t know what would have happened if someone drank the last Coke because, to my knowledge, no one in the family was ever brave enough to try it.

Back in those days, when you drank a Coke, you didn’t throw the empty glass bottle away. You put it back in the carton and returned it to the store where you got a credit on the refills.

Because my grandmother drank so many Coca-Colas, we’d fill the whole trunk of her Buick with empties before heading off to the Piggly Wiggly to get more. When we left the store, we had two buggies – one for groceries and one for Cokes.

I miss my grandmother. But I hope my friend Nicole enjoys her time with hers. She'll have great memories to look back on.

 

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