Happy New Year’s Eve, Grand Planners! Another year, another chapter of our lives’ stories in the books. On this day let’s raise a glass to family lore and the luminaries who starred in them. Let’s clink grandmother’s unwanted crystal goblets and toast the importance of unfiltered storytelling about our ancestry that brings perspective, healing and wisdom to our tribes, as this Washington Post article so wisely suggests.
Happy to get the ball rolling. This is my great grandmother Pennye Britt Person as I remember her in her 90s, after someone surprise-cracked a cascarone on her head one Easter long ago. Mama Pennye was fond of tricksters and had a remarkable sense of humor punctuated by a firecrackily “heeeee-heeeee!!” kind of laugh response to pretty much anything, whether it was funny or not. She lived in a mint green duplex in Karnes City, TX most of her life, served up sweaty cold Orange Fantas and Planters Cheese Balls on when we came to visit, kept her door key hidden in a Miracle Whip jar in her front hedge, and she wore a clunky hearing aid box around her neck because she was nearly deaf since her adolescence.
In retrospect, she didn’t have much to laugh about because there wasn’t much funny about her life. She grew up in wealthy ranch family that lost it all. She married a handsome young man named Val (shown on the right with the darker hair) who died of yellow fever in his early 20s not long after he and Pennye had their first and only baby, my grandfather Robert. Deaf and poor and alone, Pennye contended with some serious odds. And while she reveled in and heeee-heeee’d with family for 104 years, she spent her last decade in a small town nursing home because that’s all there was. But she never lost her sense of humor, or her toss-the-mayo-jar-in-the-bushes-and-off-we-go grit.
When I think about Mama Pennye and what I learned from her, I always get back to her sun-lit wintergreen kitchen —where I can feel the hot breath of a South Texas breeze idling through an open window by the icebox. I think of those two dripping, ice-cold Orange Fantas and the cheese ball pairing she put on the kitchen table for my brother and me — how she heeee-heee’d to herself how much we’d probably enjoy that after a 1.5-hour car ride from San Antonio in the station wagon way back. I remember screaming “THANK YOU, MAMA PENNYE!!!!” into her bosoms loud and clear. And I’ll never forget how she was always happily ready for what was next — when she’d pick up her boxy little suitcase, lock the front door and toss that damn jar into the bushes, ready for our one-hour road-trip to Goliad for the weekend. #GrandPlans
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