a FINE Maw Maw

My sisters, Melanie and Margaret, and I were chatting last night about our grandmother Peggy.  They don't remember much; she died when they were still young, and to be honest we haven't talked much about her in our family. I remember her as a loving force in my life.  She didn't have a maternal bone in her body.  I don't remember her ever telling me to brush my teeth, brush my hair, put on a sweater - I don't remember her ever checking to see whether or what I had eaten or concern herself with its nutritional content, but I remember that she loved me.

She passed away shortly after I turned 15.  Because of a series of tragedies leading up to her passing, these long years I have deprived myself of happy memories of her in what I thought was a show of solidarity to her sons.  I only just recently began pulling these treasures out of my locked box for consideration.

She wanted us around her, her grandbabies.  She would come and get us, if our parents wouldn't drive us, to San Antonio when we were very small, then to Dripping Springs when we were older.  She invited us to her house what seemed like every weekend, and she wanted us to spend all weekend with her.  She took us everywhere she went, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio... I have no idea now the nature of these trips; I have vague recollections of family members in some destinations, but I don't really know where we were going, just that we were with her.  I remember stops at countless Pizza Huts and Dairy Queens in small town Texas; I have snipptets of memories of dim restaurants seated next to my beautiful MawMaw laughing, her eyes sparkling.

She would get up on a Saturday morning and tell us we were going to KMart to shop - it was her favorite place for everything, like my Target.  She decided on one of these occasions she would have us sit for portraits at the KMart Photo Center.  I laugh outright at the photo result - me in stubby pigtails, Pippy-Longstocking style, directionally misaligned, one to the sky, one to the floor - I laugh in embarrassment and real gratitude to a Maw Maw who would take me looking like that to KMart and see in me a girl beautiful enough to sit for a portrait.  She always made me feel so ENJOYED.

These are my treasures, these memories.  In the short time I had with her, she never made me feel like she'd had enough of me or could use a break from me or had more important things to do.  In some ways, she was still a child herself, and certainly our teeth really would have "rotted out" and our eyes really would have "stuck that way" if we hadn't been forced to go home on Sunday afternoons, but... teeth can wait.