Mandy Newham-Cobb illustration
Back in the 60’s when I began teaching in Georgia, I went through a period of misgivings about leaving my grandmother on the front porch of her old house in Rhodes Cove. After all, she had raised me, and I was repaying her by leaving her to fend for herself in her old age.
The rest of the family was equally concerned, and my Uncle Asbury began neglecting his own family and spending time in the afternoon “taking care of Momma.” He piddled mostly, working on the antiquated waterline and electrical wiring. He also began bringing her “something to read,” which consisted mostly of an awesome stack of Time magazines.
“She sits out there and rocks all day, humming ‘Shall We Gather at the River,”” Asbury said. “She needs some distraction.” Asbury jerry-rigged an old floor lamp and moved the magazines in the living room where my grandmother could reach them. Well, apparently, it worked. A neighbor told me that some nights, she could see the light from Granny’s floor lamp twinkling like a solitary star.
When I came home from Georgia, I found a grandmother that I had never seen before. Nervous and fretful, she told me that she couldn’t sleep. I asked her why. “Because this is a terrible world,” she said.
She confessed that she sometimes got up at night and checked the door locks. She told me about thousands of children starving to death and about drug addicts who victimized the elderly.
Then, when I thought she had worn herself out, she said she wanted to show me the worst crime of all. She went to her stack of Time magazines and extracted a single issue, thrusting it at me with a trembling hand.
“Look at this!” she said.
It was the infamous cover of Time magazine (April 8, 1966) that asked: “Is God Dead?”
My grandmother, shook her frail little fist and said, “He is going to show them! Just you wait.”
So there it was. My sweet little grandmother who read Mary Roberts Rhinehart and James Fox and walked out of Rhodes Cove each summer to see “How Green is My Valley” and “Trail of the Lonesome Pine” at the Ritz Theater had been snatched from her front porch haven into the “modern world.” I knew, of course, that she was an anachronism, and I desperately wanted to put her back in a world where God was certain.
I used to make an effort to “enlighten” her. I am bitterly ashamed of it now. I once chastised her for using the “n” word. “Gar Nell, that was the only word that we had when I was growing up,” she said.
Once I told her that my former roommate at WCU had moved out.
“Well, I am sorry to hear that. I liked Howard,” she said.
“Momma (that is what I called my grandmother), Howard is gay and I am not,” I replied.
“Well, of course he is. You could stand to be a bit more good-natured yourself.”
The Time magazines discreetly were withdrawn and The Grit, The Upper Room, and The Gentleman Farmer were substituted. It was akin to an improved diet, I guess, and she regained much of her good will. She began clipping recipes and poems from her magazines and singing “I Come to the Garden Alone,” as she rocked on the front porch.
She sang in a high falsetto, and would occasionally get up and walk to the end of the porch where she could see the big hemlocks below the house and the cloud-wrapped Balsams in the distance. If it was summer and a clear day, she would nod and smile as though she saw evidence that, yes, God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.