THE ROCK
I knocked on every door on Music Row
But they looked down at me and said “Girl go back home”
You ain’t got what we need in this town
But they couldn’t whup the fighting side of me
You know, where I come from, we don’t give up easily
“Pocahontas Proud”
The strongest, most dependable, most reliable people in my life have been women. I can’t really explain it, but when I was growing up in rural Illinois, a lot of men were troubled, irresponsible, or in their own male world. They were often more of the problem than the solution. I’m no man-hater—far from it—but from a very early age I learned that if you ever expected a man to step in and make your life run more smoothly, you could be setting yourself up for a big heartache. In my experience, not only does a woman not need a man to “complete” herself, she can often get much further along in life without one, or at least certain ones.
Where I came from, the women were simply a lot tougher and more resilient than most of the men. Many of the women would work at an outside job all day—everything from waitressing to farming to road-building—and then come home and do all of the cooking, all the housework, and all the child-rearing. The guys around there didn’t know the first thing about washing a dish or adding bleach to a load of laundry. They’d do their own job all day, then come home and expect to be waited on by everyone else in the house. When I tended bar at Big O’s Tavern in Pierron, Illinois, I’d see these women come by for a drink and maybe shoot some pool. By the time they got to the bar, they’d already put in two days’ worth of work in one day and they were in no mood to put up with any crap from any guy in the place. One smart remark and they’d be ready to bash the guy’s head in. Literally.
I continue to have a very high regard for the strong, resourceful women who choose this life of work and family and have the guts and determination to pull it off. There was one woman in particular who epitomized this self-sufficient streak. Her name was Diane Jackson. When I was young, my Uncle Vern and I would spend a lot of time down at Diane’s house. She lived in a mobile home about a mile and a half down the road from our trailer. She and her husband, Jerry, an auto mechanic, had four or five boys and one girl, named Melissa. Vern and Jeff, one of her boys, were best friends and I just tagged along to start trouble. Even with all those kids, Diane was always happy to see us. The family lived in two mobile homes sitting next to each other. They were welded together, I think, the back door of one leading right into the front door of the other. The kids lived in one of the homes and Diane and Jerry lived in the other one. And these weren’t showroom trailers, either. They were beat up pretty badly.
Vern and I liked to go down there not only because of all the kids to play with, but also because they had an above-ground swimming pool behind their place. I don’t know how in the hell they afforded that, but they did. None of us could afford air-conditioning, so on a hot summer day, we’d head to the Jackson pool. It was an absolute luxury.
Jerry Jackson was a little guy, probably around five feet six and weighed no more than a buck twenty. Diane was short but very heavy. And she was a dynamo. On any given day of the week, you’d walk into her house and the scene would be pretty much the same. Her youngest boy, probably three or four, would have a pacifier in his mouth and a diaper on his bottom and be hanging on Diane like a monkey. She had really short red hair that she kept in pigtails, wore no makeup, and would usually be dressed in nothing but a great big Cross Your Heart bra and a pair of spandex shorts. It was invariably hot in those trailers and Diane dressed for comfort.
So you’d walk in and there she’d be, dressed in her bra and shorts, wrangling kids and usually talking on the phone. She had a phone with an extra-long cord that could reach all over both trailers and she would lug the receiver around, yakking away, as she was doing fourteen other things. Her main activity was usually frying cheeseburgers. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it seemed, she’d be standing over a hot stove, frying cheeseburgers. She was feeding eight to ten people all the time, not to mention the likes of Vern and me dropping by at suppertime, and she was usually so busy that she didn’t have time to dress, let alone sit down, have a cocktail, and watch the evening news.
Nobody’s ever heard of Diane Jackson, but she was a huge part of my life and an inspiration to be around. She ran the whole show. That whole household would’ve fallen completely apart if she had gotten a cold or decided to take a day off. Two trailersful of people depended on her in every way and she assumed the responsibility like that’s the way God intended things to be. She didn’t really have time to question her life. She was too busy frying up a new batch of cheeseburgers.
Jerry was a good man, as far as I know, but like many of the men I grew up around, he was silent and withdrawn. They didn’t talk much. They’d just do their job and come in at the end of the day full of grease and smelling like a workingman. They’d eat their supper, drink their two beers, and then go to bed, ready to get up the next morning and do the same thing all over again. You’d hardly hear anything out of them. They were just happy to be breathing. I’m not kidding. They were lucky that their wife didn’t kill them in the middle of the night. And many were exceedingly lucky to have a wife like Diane who kept things together.
A lot of these strong, self-defined women were farmer’s wives. My best friend in kindergarten was a girl named Nancy Gaffner and her parents ran a large-scale dairy farm. Nancy was one of five or six kids and they lived in a ranch-style home with a big basement that seemed like a mansion to me at the time. Everyone worked on the farm, keeping the milk flowing, and Nancy’s mom, Edith, a short, Susie-Homemaker-looking woman, worked like a dog to make sure the whole family stayed focused, healthy, and fed. All I saw her do every time I visited was cook and clean. Sounds boring, but it was absolutely critical to keeping the family enterprise going and she approached it like a mission. Three times a day the family would come in from the farm at a set time and a feast would await them. For breakfast, for instance, it was homemade biscuits and gravy and grits and bacon and eggs and sausage. The crew would come in, eat until they were full, and get back to the cows. They hardly spoke, including Edith. They were farm people. They didn’t have time for idle chitchat. They had work to do.
What struck me about Edith, even as a little kid, was the high level of respect in which she was held by the rest of the family. She never had to ask anyone to take off their hat or clean up before sitting down to eat. She never had to ask anyone to remember to say grace. In her quiet, unassuming way, she demanded respect and she got it. Her authority didn’t come from any external power. It came from inside, simply by the way she conducted herself. And as an example of dignity, she left a permanent impression on me.
My grandma, Frances Oneida Heuer, was the most solid person in our entire family. She was the rock, the stone. Her husband, my grandfather Vernon, was, for a good part of his life, a one-legged alcoholic with a nasty outlook on things and a general dislike for humanity. He spent years engaged in the time-wasting practice of drinking from eight o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock every night, then griping and bitching at anyone within shouting distance, then going to bed.
My grandma had a mysterious past. Her maiden name, Storey, was given to her when she was adopted by a woman who ran a home for wayward girls in Peoria, Illinois. Grandma was an orphan. She never knew the identity of either her biological mother or father. Her birth certificate was made when she was ten years old, so even its authenticity is in doubt. Our whole family has done a fair amount of investigation into her origins and we never came up with any definitive answers. My grandmother’s theory, which she believed in deeply, was that her adoptive mother’s brother was her real father and that her real mother was a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old runaway who was staying in their home in Peoria at the time of her birth. Though there is no hard evidence to back this up, Grandma held on to this belief about her origins until the day she died.
My grandma kept her most valued keepsakes in a small jewelry box, a little wooden treasure chest with lion’s heads on the front that I have held on to and cherished to this day. Among her meager possessions in that box were photos of her supposed father, whose name was Burt Wells, along with his death certificate and a newspaper clipping announcing his death. She felt her adoptive mother raised her out of guilt more than love. Her adoptive mother, she’d like to tell us, was hardly the nurturing maternal type. She was the kind of woman, Grandma would say, who would send you out after your own stick when you were about to get a beating. Apparently she carried a dog collar around her neck to whip my grandma when she acted up. It was a painful and confusing childhood.
Since none of us in the family know where my grandmother came from—including her ethnic background, her parents’ country of origin, their way of life, and so on—we don’t really know where we came from, either. It’s as if our family tree began all over again with my grandmother. If you know nothing about your forebears, you are always a little unsure of your own identity. Maybe this is why I’ve always felt such a deep attachment to my roots in Southern Illinois and my closest blood relatives.
No matter her nationality, my grandma was a beautiful woman. She had jet black hair, hazel eyes, and very fair skin. To me, her adoring granddaughter, she looked like Snow White, a fairy princess. But her life was in many ways tragic. The love of her life, or so she told us, was a man who served in World War II and died shortly thereafter of leukemia. He was only twenty-three at the time. She loved him deeply, and for the rest of her life she kept every memory of him she could find—a folded American flag, probably the one that accompanied his funeral, was with her always, along with a few love letters and postcards that he sent her during their brief romance.
Shortly after this man’s untimely death, my grandma started going out with and soon married my grandpa. Before long, she divorced him, married another man, had a baby, then divorced him, and remarried my grandpa. Later on, my Aunt Vickie did the same thing: marry a guy, divorce him, then marry him again. It’s kind of a family tradition. For some reason, we all have trouble finding a good one!
In my grandma’s case, the reason for sticking with my grandpa was understandable, in a sad sort of way. My grandpa was the brother of the love of her life, the man who died of leukemia. She married the closest person she could to the man she loved the most.
Unfortunately, love and marriage don’t work like that. You usually don’t fall in love with the next best thing. My grandparents never seemed particularly in love, at least to me; they didn’t even seem particularly compatible. But their marriage stuck and together they had three children—my mother, Christine, my Aunt Vickie, and my Uncle Vern. (My grandma also had two babies die on her.) My Grandpa Vernon had injured his leg in the war, then crushed the same leg in a motorcycle accident a few years later. When gangrene set in, he had to have it amputated at the knee. He owned a prosthetic leg but for some reason, probably just orneriness, he refused to use it. He’d put an Ace bandage around his nub, fold his jeans up, tuck them in the back over his belt, and hobble around with a pair of crutches.
As I learned when I got older, my grandpa had had a terrible childhood. Born to a stern breed of Midwestern Germans, he was forced at ten years old, during the worst days of the Depression, to leave his parents and work on his grandparents’ farm, doing mind-numbing, backbreaking labor for fourteen hours a day. On his deathbed, delusional with late-stage cancer, he’d call out, “Please, don’t make me go back out there. It’s too cold tonight. I’ve killed enough chickens.” It was clearly a torturous existence.
He lied about his age and joined the Army at seventeen, and after the war worked for years as a Ford car mechanic, both before and after he lost his leg. After I learned to drive, he was always bugging me about my car. “When was the last time you checked that ‘arwl’?” He had a lot of skills. Even with one leg, he was a master trap shooter. According to Vern, he could sit in a wheelchair and hit a hundred out of a hundred clay birds at sixteen yards any day of the week.
Then alcohol and bitterness took over. By the time I first got to know him, he hardly did anything all day but drink, cuss, and make everyone around him scared or miserable. Vern likes to say that because his dad was such a slave driver, he felt like he was in the Marines when he was ten. He also had a terrible temper. He’d get mad and start throwing anything he could find at Vern’s head—one of his crutches, a pipe wrench, even a steel trash can if it was handy. My Aunt Vickie had her own strategy—lie low in the weeds and pay attention. She also got out of the house by eighteen. Grandpa was a tough old bird and I think some of that toughness rubbed off on all of us, including me.
My grandpa’s nasty attitude was often directed toward anyone who wasn’t like him. In fact, he was probably the most prejudiced, backward hillbilly I’ve ever met. And it really was just ignorance. He wasn’t a particularly bad person, he was just deeply prejudiced. And it wasn’t just toward blacks, either. Everyone, in his twisted view, was “a no-good rummy”—Irish, Hispanic, Japanese, Italian, Jewish, Catholic, people from New Jersey, it didn’t really matter. He was an equal-opportunity bigot. If you didn’t look or act like him, you were a second-class citizen in his eyes.
St. Louis, only about fifty miles away, was a foreign country to him, full of blacks and other suspect minorities who’d stab you in the back for a pack of cigarettes. As I said, many people in the small towns I grew up in felt that way towards St. Louis. They rarely ventured there for any reason. They watched the six o’clock news and only saw a city full of drug addicts, drive-by shootings, and marauding teenage gangstas. They never saw ordinary, hardworking, family people who just happened to be black.
My grandfather felt equally superior to women. Even though my grandma brought in most of the earned income in the family, he wouldn’t let her get her driver’s license, let alone drive “his” car, usually a late-model Ford or Ford truck. Driving was “man’s work,” I guess he figured, and about the only work he did for years was driving her back and forth from her paying job every day.
Despite Grandpa’s less-than-winning personality, my grandma took care of him and put up with him for forty-five years of marriage. They lived pretty much their whole life in mobile homes and trailer parks and, as they got older, small, quiet trailer parks that catered to senior citizens. The home I remember best was an old trailer situated alone in the country on Rural Route 2 outside Greenville, Illinois. The first thing you saw when you drove up the gravel road was not the trailer, but my grandfather’s big shed where he kept his tools and assorted junk. He rarely spent any time in their home. If he wasn’t gone, he was holed up in his shed, doing God knows what.
Inside their trailer, besides the big TV that everybody watched, were always two things Grandpa Vernon cherished: a giant, stuffed hundred-pound swordfish he’d once caught on a fishing trip to Florida, and an old grandfather clock. The clock was a constant source of irritation for the old man, as if he needed something else to irritate him. He was always fiddling with it, trying to get it to work right. The fish and the clock—those were his heirlooms. Uncle Vern still has them to this day.
Grandpa had his favorite pastimes, and NASCAR was one of the biggest. Like all diehard NASCAR fans, he connected with certain drivers, Bill Elliott being number one in his mind for a good twenty years. Other than that, for most of my childhood, Grandpa’s only “job” was to collect Social Security and disability from the government, and drink. He’d get up early, drive down to the VFW Hall in Greenville, and sit and drink with his veteran buddies all day. Meanwhile, my grandma worked like a dog to make ends meet. She worked forty, fifty hours a week for most of her life. Work paid the bills but it was also a way for her to escape from the madhouse of her personal life. For a long time she was a waitress at a place called the Round Table in Collinsville, Illinois. At one point, she even filled in at Big O’s, the bar where both my mom and I worked for years. Like Diane Jackson, she ran the whole damn show.
I was just a little girl and from my perspective, it was a strange situation. My grandma and grandpa lived their whole life hating each other—I mean, truly hating each other—and yet he couldn’t live without her, and she really had no interest in living without him. He didn’t so much abuse her as ignore her, taking her efforts for granted and spending or hoarding money as he saw fit. As far as I can recall, she never got a birthday present or even a Christmas card from the old man, let alone a night out on their anniversary. He’d give her $40 at Christmastime to buy presents for everyone else in the family, but not herself. There’s never been a present under the tree that read “From Vernon to his loving wife, Frances.” Never.
They never even slept in the same room. In fact my grandma would pile stuff on her bed in her little bedroom and sleep every night on the couch in the living room. Grandpa would just go to his room, slam the door, and not be heard from again until morning. It’s as if they had signed a lifelong pact to stick it out together, no matter their feelings. It was not a “modern” marriage.
I’m sure that there were times when my grandmother didn’t know what kept her going. In moments of pure frustration, she’d yell, “Who in the hell else would put up with all this if I didn’t?” She just figured she had to, I guess, and then didn’t give it a second thought. She was stubborn and took pride in toughing it out. Her attitude was, “By God, I don’t care what in the hell life hands me, I’ll find a way to deal with it. I’ll keep moving forward.” That’s the kind of thinking I got from her.
I mean, what else was she going to do? She had no father or mother or siblings to go home to. Grandpa and the rest of our little clan was all the family she had in the world. She didn’t even know where she came from.
Though she could never make the decision to pack up and move away from the old man, it got to the point a time or two where Grandma made plans to bump him off and put both of them out of their misery. This was not some TV show; this was real life when a drastic situation called for drastic action. She later told me all about it. On one such occasion Grandma had the bright idea of sneaking into Vernon’s room before he got home from the VFW and spraying down his bed with Lysol laced with some household poison. The plan was that he would slowly inhale the fumes, die a quiet respiratory death in his sleep, and no one, at least in and around Greenville, Illinois, would detect the cause. Of course he didn’t die in his sleep. He just got up the next morning, coughed a little, cursed the world, and took off for another day of leisure.
On another occasion, she tried to kill him by putting motor oil in his soup. Just a touch, I guess, to make him deathly ill and keel over from a ruptured intestine or massive diarrhea or something. She even told me beforehand that she was going to try this deadly scheme. I didn’t think it was going to work, since he’d probably taste the oil and spit the whole thing out, but I didn’t say anything. When I asked her later how it went, she replied, deflated, “Oh, it didn’t do nothing but give him the shits.”
For all those years when my grandfather drank constantly, my grandma, though never an alcoholic, liked to have a beer as well. I’d take her to lunch when she was well into her sixties and she’d asked me if I was going to have a beer. I’d ask her if she wanted one and she’d always answer, “Well, I’ll have half a beer.” Of course she’d end up drinking three or four “half” beers, but she’d never indulge herself and ask for a whole one. It was hilarious.
It was a madhouse over at their trailer. As crazy as it was in my own home, with my mother’s life constantly in turmoil, it was even crazier over at Grandma’s. It was more of a comic crazy. Besides a one-legged alcoholic husband, my grandma also had to take care of his mother, old Grandma Heuer, who moved in after her own husband passed away. The state paid them $40 a week to keep her instead of putting her in a nursing home, and along with Social Security and disability, this allowed my grandma to stop working in her old age. Not that taking care of Grandma Heuer, sinking slowly into senility, wasn’t a job. They built a huge room adjacent to the back door of the trailer to house her. It was the biggest room in the whole trailer, like sixteen by twenty. When I stayed with Grandma, I slept on a cot in that room.
Grandma Heuer didn’t know where she was half the time. I’d go over to visit her and she’d look right at me and say, “There’s some middle-aged woman who keeps coming in here and stealing my sweaters.” And my own grandma would chime in, “Well, jeez, Grandma, that’s me. I’m not stealing your sweaters, I’m washing them!” Toward the end I remember visiting the old lady and she’d point to my picture on TV and say, “You know, that little girl comes to visit me every once in a while.” I’d try to let her know that the woman on the TV was me and that I was standing right there, but I’m not sure she ever made the connection.
The craziness around there escalated at dinnertime. My grandma had a Mexican Chihuahua named Daisy that was the meanest dog I’ve ever encountered. She was solid black and had huge ears—she looked like a miniature elephant. Daisy curled up on a pink fuzzy blanket in the closet in my grandma’s room, and if you were a kid, you didn’t go near that closet. That little nipper with the giant ears might bite your finger off.
So that was my grandma’s daily charge—a one-legged alcoholic, a doddering eighty-plus-year-old, and a pint-sized version of Cujo. It took me a while, but I finally figured out why both the dog and Grandma Heuer seemed to be getting crazier as time went on. I started to observe a strange ritual that would happen almost daily at dinnertime. My grandma, having fixed dinner entirely by herself, would call everyone to the table, and once we were all seated, she’d point out to Grandma Heuer that, like always, her daily dose of pills was sitting in front of her in her spoon. My own grandma would turn to start passing out the food or something, and Grandma Heuer would, almost like clockwork, look around for her pills in the spoon, get confused, and then flip the spoon on the floor, spilling all the pills. Who do you think would gobble up those pills within seconds of them hitting the floor? Daisy the deranged Chihuahua.
Now a six-pound Fido full of strange medication, Daisy would then make a mad dash to her pink fuzzy retreat in the closet and stand guard, probably hallucinating giant phantom raccoons and squirrels from all the drugs she just swallowed. Open the closet door and she would snarl at you like a man-eating pit bull. I watched this little comic scenario take place almost every night and no one really knew about it except me and Daisy. Only later did I realize this could have been fatal to one or both of them. Grandma Heuer’s mind just kept slipping away, something the medication might have helped, and everybody just thought Daisy was the world’s meanest water rat of a dog. That might have been true, but she had a lot of help from that daily spoonful of mind-altering chemicals.
Pills aside, dinner was always a treat because my grandma would cook a big meal every night, even after working a twelve-hour shift at the Round Table. Fried chicken, rhubarb pie, or when things were tight, maybe squirrel or rabbit, but it was always a lot of food, made with love. Sometimes, when things were especially tight, Grandma would fix possum three times a week. We ate our share of catfish, too, and lots of frog legs. The truth is, I always hated frog legs, and wasn’t exactly crazy about some of those other dishes. Maybe that’s one reason why I’m such a big McDonald’s fanatic to this day.
After dinner Grandpa would retire to his recliner without even clearing his own plate and start to drink his nightly round of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. He had a system wherein he would finish a can, then hand it to me, and grumble, “Go put this in the box for Vern to smash.”
My Uncle Vern was still living at home at the time and that was one of his jobs, along with burning the trash and gutting the rabbits and other wild game. Vern would take the used beer cans, smash them flat with a sledgehammer, then fill up an old refrigerator box full of smashed cans and haul them off to the recycling center to collect money on them. The box, Vern fondly remembers, held 285 cans, which is a good indication of how much my grandpa drank. Vern would return the money to Grandpa, who would of course spend it on more beer. It was its own little alcoholic ecosystem and the old man himself never had to leave his recliner.
This routine went on for years. Then one night I couldn’t take his arrogant attitude anymore and told him so, loudly. I must have been about eleven or twelve years old and not really big enough to take on anyone, let alone a grandpa with a mean temper. In any case, about the time he ordered me that evening to get him his third or fourth beer from the refrigerator at the same time I was to deposit the empty out back, I just lost it. I stood right in front of his chair and cussed him out. I said, “I don’t give a damn if you’re one-legged or crippled or whatever, you can just get up and get your own damn beer. I’m sick of getting your beers, while all you do is sit and gripe and bitch and moan at everybody.” Remember, I was eleven and female. He must have been as shocked as I was with what was coming out of my sassy mouth.
My grandma’s own mouth was hanging open throughout this whole rant and I remember my Uncle Vern quickly backpedaling into his bedroom; he didn’t want to get hit when my grandpa started whacking people in the head with his crutches, which is what he often did whenever he got mad. I was afraid of getting hit, too, but I was ready to stand my ground. The old coot had just pushed me over the edge.
My grandpa slowly got out of his recliner and cussed me right back in my face. He then walked straight down the hallway of the trailer to his bedroom and slammed the door. He went to bed around seven that night and you could hear him cursing and yelling all night about his smart-ass eleven-year-old granddaughter who had the gall to tell him to get his own damn beer. The rest of us tiptoed around the trailer that night, afraid to set him off even more.
The next morning he got up as usual, got dressed, drove down to the VFW Hall, and ordered an orange Sunkist soda. He was apparently through with drinking and never had another drop of alcohol until he started dying of colon cancer many years later. He quit drinking cold turkey the day after I told him he was a loser. As mean as he often was, I think I embarrassed the hell out of him and made him feel small enough that he felt he had to change his drunken ways to maintain even a shred of personal dignity.
My grandpa remained more or less sober for the next twenty years. He was always an ornery cuss but he ceased being downright mean. He was even fun to be around at times. He was stingy, though. He hoarded money like Scrooge McDuck and if he spent any, it was usually on a new gun or set of tools for himself. He had a little can where he would stash $2,000 or more and squirrel it away in a secret hiding place. He didn’t trust anyone with his money—the banks, the government, and probably his own relatives. You’d look out the window and see him skulking around the yard, looking for a site to bury his treasure. If he caught you looking, he’d move it around to throw you off the scent—he’d lock it in his toolbox, or stick it under the washer and dryer, or under his bed.
My grandma, on the other hand, would work three times as hard, pinch every penny, and spend very little on herself. I remember one time when I took her to see the Eddie Murphy movie Harlem Nights. She had saved up $5 for the ticket by stashing it away, a dollar here and a dollar there, and she couldn’t possibly tell the old man where she was going. First of all, he would want the money for his can in the backyard, and secondly, he’d go completely berserk if he found out she was going to a movie starring a black man. Next thing he knew, she was liable to bring one home! In his twisted brain, seeing an Eddie Murphy comedy was like a personal betrayal. That would have set him off more than the money.
My grandpa wouldn’t even watch black-centered TV shows like The Jeffersons or The Cosby Show. Of course a lot of things on TV bothered him. We all remember what would happen when a tampon or feminine hygiene commercial would come on. He would start to clear his throat and then cough like he was about to die. The coughing would drown out the sound so he couldn’t hear about Feminique or easy-day tampons.
On another occasion I took my grandmother to the movies at the theater in Highland, the only one in town. We were standing in line and I said, “Grandma, do you want a Coke or some popcorn or something like that?” She immediately reached into her purse and pulled out this mangled, smashed-up paper cup that she had saved. She started to straighten it out and as she was doing that, she said, “Here. You can use this. Now you don’t need to pay for another one of those. You just tell them this is a refill and they’ll give it to you for free.”
I was both taken aback and impressed. She had been saving that measly paper cup in her purse for months, waiting to use it again to save the price of a Coke. That’s how poor she was, and resourceful. If you took that same purse and shook out the contents, you’d find Sweet’N Lows from every trip she ever made to a restaurant, and napkins, and little packets of ketchup, and anything else she could quietly tuck away. Whatever it took to get by, she did. She was going to make it through, come hell or high water.
And amidst all the chaos and poverty, she found her ways to enjoy life. Around the skirt of every trailer they lived in, she’d build a beautiful little garden. She loved to wander the woods and to fish in the pond near her trailer out on Rural Route 2. She loved all animals and had a particular fascination with owls. She’d fill her trailer with ceramic and stuffed owls. That’s another one of her eccentricities that I picked up on and maintain to this day—a love of owls. When on the road, I decorate every dressing room with a collection of old ceramic owls I’ve gathered along the way. They’re like a good luck charm and I can’t imagine walking into a backstage room and not seeing them staring down at me.
My grandma had a gift for animals. For instance, she was the only person in the world I ever saw who could hand-feed a red fox. She located this fox living near her place, and over a period of maybe ten to twelve years she patiently worked on befriending that wild animal until it finally felt comfortable enough to just walk up and eat food from her hand. She always had two or three dogs running around, a bird or two in the kitchen, even a yardful of geese at one point. The geese were mean—they wouldn’t let visitors get out of their car—but Grandma loved them. She felt a connection to the natural world and a peacefulness that came in interacting with it. I hope I can pass that same affection for creatures along to my own daughter someday.
And she was a night owl. She’d wait until everyone went to bed and the house was as quiet as a church, and then she’d sit down to enjoy some television. She’d watch something like Court TV or The Jeffersons until three in the morning. That was her quiet time and she cherished it. Whenever she let me join her for these late-night retreats, I cherished it, too. She’d often decide to cook a full meal in the middle of the night and serve up cheeseburgers or a freshly baked blueberry pie. Feasting on my grandma’s home cooking and watching All in the Family reruns with her at two A.M. were some of the happiest moments of my entire childhood.
Which is probably why I do exactly the same thing to this day. The only time I watch TV is at the end of the night. I crawl in bed, treat myself to a bowl of Raisin Bran—the same cereal she often liked to munch on—and watch Court TV until I fall asleep. It’s almost like a late-night meditation, a time to do nothing and let your brain process everything that had happened that day. It’s also a ritual that helps me remember my grandma and how much I loved and respected her.
My grandma’s great dream in life was to outlive her curmudgeon of a husband and have a few years of unabashed pleasure. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way. My grandfather became very ill with colon cancer and it seemed like he was going to succumb long before my grandma. Despite the fact that he started drinking again, and made everyone around him feel a little worse, she still took care of him like always. Then one evening in 2000, she sat down on the couch to watch some TV and fell asleep, never to awaken again. Apparently her heart skipped a beat and she had a massive heart attack and died quietly. There was no struggle. She had her lotto tickets in her hand when she died. She fell asleep while waiting for the local news to give the winning lotto numbers. She died, in other words, while waiting for a miracle to happen.
And Grandpa Vernon died a month later. He probably knew on some level that he couldn’t live long without her. And as he was dying, all the bitterness, anger, and disappointment of a lifetime seemed to disappear. During his last few hours of life, he made a point to call us all in, one by one, and tell us that he loved us. I don’t remember him saying those words to anyone in all the time I knew him, but he said them then and revealed the tender feelings he has always felt for his family. It was a grand gesture of healing, for all of us.
Well after Grandpa Vernon died, I came across his own little treasure box, a cigarette box, where he proudly stored, among other things, his Ford work badge. I also found a set of pictures he held on to for fifty years that gave me some insight into why he was so bitter about life. They were small black and white photos of the victims of Hiroshima taken only a few hours after the bomb had dropped. They included pictures of Japanese women, completely nude because the blast had blown their clothes off them, holding dead infants with their heads half-blown away. He wasn’t present there himself, but he had fought in the war, probably took down his share of Japanese, and never talked about it to anyone. Vern would constantly ask him, “Dad, how many Japs you kill over there?” and he would go, “I don’t want to talk about that shit.” He held on to those pictures, I think, to remind himself how awful that war had been and the scars it must have left with him.
On the night Grandma passed away, I remember getting a phone call from my mother at four o’clock in the morning in Nashville. She was beside herself with grief. “My mommy’s dead,” she kept saying, “My mommy’s dead.” It took me a few minutes to even figure out who I was talking to, since I’d never heard my mother call her mother “Mommy” before. I finally got the story straight, and then I got out of bed and went into the bathroom and threw up.
The very same night my grandma died, it turned out, I had conceived my daughter, Grace. To me, this was much more than a coincidence, as I’ll explain later.
My grandmother was cremated, as was her wish. There were only six of us at her funeral, the only blood relatives she’d ever known—my mom, Aunt Vickie, Uncle Vern, my stepbrother, Josh, me, and Grandpa. She had few friends outside the family, because she had no time for a social life. She was either working or taking care of someone. Her social life was her family. In a lot of ways, we’re still that way. That’s why Vern, Vickie, Josh, and a slew of other family members are so involved in my current life. We all learned a critical life lesson from Grandma—Job Number One is to take care of each other.
I have the urns of both my grandparents’ ashes on my mantel at home today. I see them as a constant reminder of what my grandma did to keep this crazy family together for all those years.
After she was cremated, I came across a wish list she had written and stashed away in her jewelry box, alongside family photos, the death certificate of her “real” father, and the flag and other mementos from her first true love. The list contained items she planned to buy or things she wanted to do after my grandpa no longer had the power to talk her out of them. This wish list is as close as I ever got to a window into my grandma’s private life and private yearnings, and that’s why I keep it near me as an invaluable touchstone. Grandma didn’t wish for a million dollars, a trip to Europe, or a new Cadillac. She just wanted the simplest of things to make her life a little more comfortable. She just wanted many things that the rest of us, forever hungry for more and more of the useless things that America often dishes up, would take for granted.
The top of the list reads, in quotation marks, “The Smile of Hope.” The first thing listed is “Cosmetic Surgery,” by which she meant getting her teeth fixed, not a Joan Rivers face remolding. Then there was an entry, “Dog doctor, nails, bath, and exam.” She then had a little dog named Coco—this was many dogs after Daisy, the demented, pill-popping Chihuahua—and one of her dreams was to have Coco checked out, bathed, and then have them put little ribbons in her hair. She didn’t want to look like a beauty queen—she wanted her little Coco to look like one.
Because she saw so many infomercials on late-night television, she picked a couple of products from TV that she wanted on her list—a Bose Wave “radio with built-in c.d. player,” and something every American should have, a “Ronco rotisserie oven.” And she wanted two other gifts for herself: a manicure, for the first time in her life, and a maid service to come in and clean up the trailer, once. Not every week—just once. The whole list probably added up to two or three hundred dollars in expenses, tops, but to my grandma, that was a fortune. She’d never dare spend that kind of money on herself as long as her priority was taking care of her family. Only after the prospect of Grandpa expiring would she even think of something so rash and indulgent as getting her fingernails pared and painted by a professional.
I learned a lot from my beautiful, hardheaded grandmother, but probably the key lesson was that no matter your circumstances, your burdens, and your tragedies—life is what you make of it. In many ways, you couldn’t have been dealt a worse hand than Frances Heuer—no parents, no past, the love of her life killed in a war, a husband that was often maddening to be around, and few skills to rise above a lifelong level of poverty and need. But she did rise above it, way above it—she had dignity, grace, and perseverance and she found contentment where she could find it—taming a fox in the woods behind her house or laughing at George Jefferson at two o’clock in the morning.
I’m sure that Grandma dreamed of a different, better life and in many ways she was disappointed with her own lot—she could see that it wasn’t glamorous or, in her darker moods, probably felt that, for all the agony and struggle, it didn’t add up to much. I just wish she could have only lived a few more years and were here today. She would see the profound effect that she had on all the people she loved and nurtured, especially me. She would see how her example, as humble as it was, inspired me to achieve more than I ever thought humanly possible.
And if that wasn’t enough, all she would have to do was to look into the eyes of her offspring, including her great-granddaughter and namesake, Grace Frances, and see that, even if she didn’t come from an identifiable family, she created one that will live on, nurtured by her spirit, for generations to come.