A week ago, I wrote about the presentation I attended by the originator of a non-profit organization that publishes "Grannie Annie" stories. This was a series of books that were anthologies of family histories as written by children ages 9-14, about people and events who lived and occurred before they were born. Our writers group prompt for this week was to write a Grannie Annie story of our own. I decided since I was in the singular position in this group of being named Anne and having a great-grandmother who was called "Granny" by our entire family, then I absolute had to compose something to share. I didn't have a single long anecdote that would fill the 250-500 word requirements for the published books, so I made my composition more of a character study of a woman I knew for the first 11 years of my life, with tiny vignettes from before and after my birth. I am actively choosing to use my story exactly as written, including specifically naming some individuals who are now deceased (and won't mind me name dropping in this case). In a few instances, I have stated definitively some details that my mother, whom I interviewed for content, presented with less certainty. So without further delay, here is my ~500 word sketch of a woman I truly loved, and still do to this day.
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Annie's Granny
By the time I was born, my great-grandmother Emma Granger was already almost 83 years old. In my early childhood, she was a cherished figure, a brave woman living in the apartment above the detached garage at my grandparents' house, spoiling the whole family, but especially us young great-grandchildren, with her many indulgences, including divine scratch-made chocolate cakes. Once I was six or seven years old, Granny had retreated from being the independent, charming matriarch and small-town celebrity of her reputation, to an unsure, frail old woman. The change came suddenly, and in retrospect, it could have coincided with them taking away her opium-based daily medications, making her go cold turkey. Around her 90th year, perhaps 1974, she became deathly afraid that if she continued to walk, she would fall, break a hip, and be confined to a chair, never walking again. She decided the best way to avoid this fall was never to walk again. From that day until her death in 1979, she never voluntarily touched her feet to the floor. I have a vague image of the nurses at the home transferring her from her bed to the chair where she crocheted away her days, holding her under her arms, while her legs dangled unused, several inches above the ground.
I was so young, the last time I saw her standing up, that I really don't know how tall she actually was. I used to call her a "little German cube," five foot two tall by five foot two around. I've come to realize I exaggerated by several inches in each direction. Back during the Johnson administration, at the wedding reception of my mother's friend Paula, Paula's grandmother suggested that someone should offer Mrs. Granger a hand in standing up, so that she could come get some wedding cake. My Granny replied, "I AM standing up."
Granny's odd habits are the stuff of my family lore, and some of them still live on through her progeny. I can't guess how many times we were at restaurants, and my mother would pretend to be Granny by handing me sugar packets or other items off the table and saying, "Here, put this in your purse." We like to blame the Great Depression for her desire to hoard freebies like that, but honestly, I think Granny might have just been a kleptomaniac.
Her favorite thing to do from the 1940s through the 70s, after Sunday restaurant dinners, was to have my grandfather drive the whole family around town, so that she could see the new houses that had been built, and pass judgement on them. Afterwards, she would always suggest that they should drive through the cemetery, "just for fun." Two days before I'd asked my mother for her recollections, I caught my head turning toward the Mountain View cemetery as I drove down Main Street, thinking that it was time for me to go walking down there, just for fun. It turns out that a little of Granny Granger lives on through me.
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