Memories of a Grandmother I Never Knew ~ by Marcia Mayo, Atlanta, Georgia

I must have been told early on that I had only one grandmother, and that one grandmother was Mammo, who was my mother’s mother. The reason for this was because my father’s mother died in 1920 during the influenza epidemic that swept the world like a giant tsunami wake, killing millions. She was 34 years old when she died and pregnant with her fifth child, a baby who would have grown up to be my aunt or uncle.

I didn’t miss the grandmother I never knew. In fact, I remember thinking that being partially grandmotherless made me interesting, having someone who should have been something to me die before she ever had the pleasure of meeting me. It was the only sad part of my family’s history as far as I knew, so I believed it added a tragic element to my otherwise boring short biography

In my child mind, I never thought about my daddy or my aunts and the fact that they’d lived most of their lives without a mother and how hard it must have been for them. That’s because when I met them they were my grown up daddy and aunts and they seemed just fine.

It wasn’t until I became a mother myself that I realized what a sad thing it was that my grandmother wasn’t given a life long enough to see her children grow up. And it wasn’t until I became a grandmother that I was able to see what my own grandmother missed and what I missed never having had the chance to love her, to sit in her lap as she recounted her own memories, telling me I looked just like she did at my age.

My daddy and his sisters didn’t talk much about their mother. The only story I recall my father telling was one about his mama being all dressed up to go out and his pitching a fit, causing her to cancel her plans. My aunts, who were only five, three, and one when their mother died sadly had very few first-hand recollections of her and just a couple of photographs, one of which was her wedding picture.

When my father passed away in 1994, I was still young enough not to have given much thought to the family stories he could have told me. Not asking more questions when I had the opportunity is one of the things I regret most when it comes to all members of my family who have passed on. Although two of my aunts are still living, it’s difficult to get them to remember and share family stories. I've learned that I can’t be pushy. I have to be patient and wait for a memory to come as they rest in their revery.

Just recently, my Aunt Madge, in a flash of clarity, confided that my father had, as a seven-year-old boy, stood by himself at the window of his bedroom and watched as the wagon from the livery stable his father owned carried his mother’s body away.

That tiny glimpse into my father’s sad childhood just about broke my heart.

I Churched with Dwight Eisenhower ~ by Marcia Mayo, Atlanta, Georgia

Memories are often, for me, like smoke drifting over my head and then evaporating - just a wisp and then gone. The other morning while putting on make up, I remembered that my family once attended church with President Eisenhower.


Now, that memory wasn’t a surprise. If I’d seen it as a true-false question on a test about my life, I could have easily marked it "true." But the memory wasn’t fleshed out; it was a mere whisper, flirting with me as I applied blush to what used to be the roses in my cheeks.


What? Did we really do that?


Yes we did, and this is how it happened.


I believe it was around 1956 and we are visiting Gettysburg as many good Americans did and still do, when we heard that the President and his wife were spending the weekend at their farm there and they would be attending church the next day. I think my mother must have read it in the paper. She also noted an admonition that well-wishers, if they arrived at a certain time, would be able to see the President and First Lady from the sidewalk across the street from the church, but they would be kept behind police barriers for the safety of all involved.


What happened the next morning was a combination of my family’s adherence to the notion that Sunday equaled church no matter where you happened to be, and my mother’s cunning. I’m pretty sure that, good Methodists that we were, we’d packed our church clothes next to our binoculars and we'd planned to visit a local Methodist Church in the midst of our trip.   But Mama, at the last minute, decided we should at least try to look Presbyterian on that one day to see if we could add our own personal family chapter to the American history books by bypassing the giddy throngs as we made our way, with what I'm sure was a1950's version of white protestent condescension, into the very same sanctuary where the President was opening his hymnal and tuning up his vocal chords. 


All I need to add is that Mama's plan worked and I do now remember the way the leader of the free world's bald head added a special shine to the front pew of a Presbyterian Church on a certain Sunday in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania over fifty years ago, and that, furthermore, this particular family chapter has now been written and the memory has become a Norman Rockwell painting in my mind.

This is why I believe that writing down memories is so important, even if we don’t think of ourselves as good writers. The documentation helps to give substance and color to  those wisps and whispers, or as my friend, Efton, puts it so beautifully: The "putting in words" somehow gels the flurry of blurred memories - turning a bit of a fogged past into a very clear moment - one moment otherwise lost in the storm of going on with life.


What wisps and fogged pasts do you have that could use some articulation?

All My Loving ~ by Marcia Mayo, Atlanta, GA

I became a woman on February 9, 1964. No, this metamorphosis wasn’t based on the purchase of my first bra at Belks, nor was it that messy surprise necessitating a special talk between my mother and me. In fact, it had nothing to do with underwear or the organs south of my bellybutton. Instead, it had everything to do with my heart.


February 9, 1964 was my 14th birthday, and, although my birth certificate doesn’t indicate the exact hour I made my initial entrance into this world, I think it was some time in early morning. But it’s not what happened early in the day of my 14th birthday that was so momentous, it’s what happened that evening. And that’s because that evening was when I realized that, yes, I could love a man - and the man I knew I could love was none other than Paul McCartney.


The Beatles made their American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, a fact known by about 99.9% of those of us who are currently either circling middle age or people, like me, who’ve somehow overshot it.


But back to 1964. That next summer, my best friend, Ann, and I wrote a secret story about the Beatles and how George was her boyfriend and Paul was mine. Ann’s little sister, Nancy, had to make do with Ringo because John was obviously off limits, being married to Cynthia.


Many years later, my other best friend, Allison, offered up the good news that Paul and I were both finally available at the same time, after my divorce and Linda McCartney’s death. But alas, by then, it was too late for us.


I’m pretty sure that Paul will be sad when he reads this.


What rites of passage do you remember from your youth? Are there songs or places or smells that bring it all back to you?

Stepping Up on a Birthday Memory ~ by Marcia Mayo, Atlanta, Georgia

February is my birth month; I was born on the 9th. One of my earliest memories has to do with the day I turned four. In the foyer of my childhood home in Waycross, Georgia, we had this huge hall tree made of burled wood, with ornate metal hooks for coats and hats and a full-length mirror that was losing its silver lining - but not for me because I was four years old and quite proud of it. There was some kind of rounded shelf at the bottom of this massive piece of furniture, just perfect for a little girl to step up on to see what four years old looked like. I remember inspecting myself for an overnight change and being a little disappointed that four looked very much like three.

I’m pretty sure, in a week or so, I’ll look at myself and discover that sixty-one looks much like sixty. All I can say is those other birthdays must have been hell because sixty looks absolutely nothing like four.

They say that, by the time you attain a certain age, you have the face you deserve. If that’s true, I must deserve quite a few wrinkles because I’m overrun with them. While some of my errant skin arrived on my face and body from too much sun as a teenager and too many White Wine Spritzers as a young woman, many of my worry and laugh lines were gifts from my three children, whom I love more than life itself. And now those children are going about creating other little beings for me to worry over and marvel at as I head into my future birthdays, God willing. Pretty soon I’m going to be mistaken for one of those dried-up apple-face dolls everyone was making about twenty years ago (when I was a mere forty).

Back to the hall tree. I don’t know what happened to it.  I do remember that it followed my family from Waycross to Savannah and then to Sunbury where my parents had a home after my brother and I grew up. I’m pretty sure they must have sold it or given it away when they moved to a retirement home.

I’d love to be able to step back up on that childhood memory one more time to wonder where all the years have gone.

What are your birthday memories?

An Uninvited Guest ~ by Marcia Mayo

No one has ever accused me of being a great hostess. I don’t cook and I don’t clean and I don’t like people all that much. However, back in the day when I was still married and had young children, I did manage to host New Year’s Day parties for several years.

Although there’s no way I could have handled the turnip greens, which were someone else’s job, I did manage to cook up the black-eyed-peas-and-rice-based Hoppin’ John, which is the other staple of a Southern New Year’s Day good luck dinner. As for dessert, I’d had the brilliant idea for everyone to bring their leftover Christmas goodies for a final perusal in their Tupperware containers and rather-sad aluminum foil packets.

With the men in the den watching football and the women in the kitchen talking about kids and work and who said what, the kids ran rampant, up and down the stairs, in the front door, out the back, slamming, always slamming.

On one such occasion, just as we women had cleaned up the kitchen, finally relinquishing the fudge and peanut butter bars to their final resting place, the trash, and just as a touchdown had been called back thanks to an idiot referee, we heard a communal shriek from upstairs, and then the bam, bam, bam of multiple descending various-size-and-shod feet.

“Guess what we found under Billy’s bed?” was the song chirped in unison by the kidly choir.

“What?” was the parents’ choral response.

“A real Easter egg!”

I do believe that I remember said egg, with its purple and yellow embellished shell still intact after months in hiding, was being brandished about in a rather cavalier fashion.

Therefore, the orchestrated refrain from the horrified adults was, of course, “Don’t break it!”

So what if our memories include a few rotten eggs? These stories are often our favorites, offering up the opportunity to forgive ourselves for our shortcomings and, in retrospect, to find the funny in our shared humanity.

As the New Year begins, resolve to take some time to remember.

Sunbury~ by Marcia Mayo

This past Thanksgiving, my daughter Molly and I drove down to Sunbury, on the Georgia coast, where my parents had a home when my children were young. For Molly, who was only six when my folks sold their house to move into a retirement community, Sunbury seems a bit like a dream. For my two older children, though, it was a magical place very different from our home town, a place on the river where they could run and play with their cousins, watch and laugh with their grandfather at the antics of the neighboring peacocks, and go fishing and shrimping with their grandmother. There was even an electric car they could drive up and down the sandy roads to and from the dock. Sunbury helped to define their childhoods, embellishing their remembrances with the smell of river mud, the feel of the coastal sun on bare backs, and the taste of a low country boil. For me, it was a place to be a daughter again, turning over the reins of daily life to my mama and daddy for a few short days.

Sunbury is, to my children, what my friend Mary Summerlin calls a sacred place, a place that anchors them, a place replete with the gentle ghosts of fond memories.

What are your sacred places and what memories do you have of them?

Rachael and the Extension Cord ~ by Marcia Mayo

The other day, Rachael, one of my former students whose mama had just had a baby, ran up to me in the lunchroom and called out, “Dr. Mayo! Dr. Mayo! My baby brother’s extension cord fell off!”
That’s such a great story to me, not only because Rachael confused the words “umbilical” and “extension,” but also because it reminded me of confusions my own children had when they were little. For example, my youngest, Molly, called eggs “meggs” because we were always asking her if she wanted some eggs, which, in her little mind, sounded like “some meggs.” To this day, in our family, when we talk about eggs, scrambled, poached, or sunny side up, we usually call them “meggs.” Indeed, “meggs” have become a part of our family lore.

What are your memories of confusions you had as a child or malapropisms that your own children or young relatives or friends employed? Take a minute to jot them down or share them with someone. But beware! Memories beget more memories so get ready for them to flood on in.