Grandmother Para
by Virginia Marie Stalls
Grandmother was a lot of fun to be around, and I loved spending at least a week in the summers with her and Grandaddy.
She and he would banter back and forth, and she and the housekeeper would do the same thing. I would just sit and laugh.
I learned a lot from her. She taught me to hold a pencil between my teeth when I spoke because "young ladies don't open their mouths very wide when they speak." She corrected my pronunciation from "git" to "get as in bet." When I had trouble with "W" and "M" learning to write she told me that water starts with "W" and that it would hold water. If you put water in "M" it would fall out. I learned to set a proper table. She would briefly look it over and say that we would have our meal when the table was set correctly. Usually it would be a knife with the blade facing the wrong way. She went to finishing school as a young girl, but I had my own private tutor!
Whenever she went anywhere, including the grocery store, she would be dressed very nicely and wearing a fur coat in the winter. She was definitely patient with me because I loved to stroke the fur.
She took holidays very seriously and decorated elaborately for Christmas. Whether it was Easter, Thanksgiving, or Christmas the table was full of her special dishes, and she was a great cook. I think my favorite was her oyster dressing with giblet gravy over it. For Easter she and Granddaddy spent time dyeing eggs, and Daddy would gold leaf one for the grand prize of 50 cents, I think it was, for the lucky person who found it.
They lived on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, TN when I was in junior high school. The owners of the house lived in the downstairs basement. There was a sunroom across the back of the house overlooking the lake. The owners would have parties, and country music stars attended. Grandmother pointed out to me who was there, and I can only remember Little Jimmy Dickens now.
When they moved from Nashville to Memphis I was in high school and would save my money to catch the train to go to visit with them. Later when I was a young adult and lived in Memphis Grandmother wasn't driving anymore. Her friends would pick her up about once a week or so to get together for cards. She would ask me to watch her soaps (Guiding Light, As the World Turns, and Secret Storm) so that she wouldn't miss anything.
Another thing she would ask me to do is to sneak Fate magazine to her and not to let Granddaddy know. She firmly believed in the supernatural and enjoyed reading about it.
She had a lot of plants by the sliding glass door going onto the balcony, and Granddaddy called it a "jungle."
What few stories about her childhood would come out usually at the prompting of my father if he was there. The one story I can recall right now is that as a child she refused to go to sleep until one of the housemen came to her bedroom and played the fiddle for her.
Another story involved a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in New York City. She asked their host what the gristly things were in her food, and he said it was rat tails. She promptly got up, went outside, and proceeded to throw up in the gutter. It's hard to imagine my proper grandmother sitting on the curb in NYC.
She liked corned beef sandwiches and chocolate éclairs a lot. Before I got the call that she had died I had spent the day craving those foods and wanting to shoot pool. She liked to play snooker. That day she and Grandaddy were getting ready to go to Nashville for a political convention. I talked to her the day before she died and she said she hadn't been anywhere in a long time, so she was really excited about going. She had just gotten out of the shower and sat down telling Granddaddy that she didn't feel well, and then she suddenly slumped and died.
Her funeral was a full Catholic funeral, and she is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis with her family around her. There is a monument with the Richards name where her parents and siblings are buried right near her grave. Her headstone is set flat, and Granddaddy is buried beside her.
