I'd give anything to have a piece of my Grandma's homemade chocolate pie. Other people have made them using her recipe, but they didn't taste as good.
She spoiled her dogs and grandchildren. A lot!
She watched "When a Man Loves a Woman" and "The Shawshank Redemption" every time it was on. No one really knew why.
For a person who only went to school through eighth grade, she could do the crossword puzzle pretty damn fast.
We'd spend the night with Grandma just to get some of her pancakes, which were thin like crepes, although I didn't know back then what a crepe was. And she made her own syrup which she served with a ladle and was roughly the same temperature as molten lava.
She loved to read newspapers. The best gift you could get her if you were traveling was a community paper from wherever you'd been. Although she may not have known the people the stories were written about, she'd read them cover to cover.
At Halloween, Grandma always made her grandkids a little package of candy. If you weren't going to make it by the house, she'd save it until the next time she saw you. This was something she did even after we outgrew trick-or-treating. I'm not quite sure how long she did it, but I got my last one when I was 38, usually when I came to visit for Thanksgiving.
My Grandma only cared about two things: The St. Louis Cardinals and anyone who walked through her door. If you needed someone to talk to, she lent an ear.If you needed a place to stay, there was room.
Although I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have left my Grandpa for them, I'm pretty sure she had full on crushes on Elvis Presley and Ted Simmons.
She was funny, but she never tried to be. She was our family's answer to Yogi Berra. On the tail end of a family gathering, we were talking about how her grandkids were so tall, with the exception of one. My cousin, Kip is several inches shorter than all of us, even his sister. Grandma said, "You know... Kippy would be a lot taller if his legs weren't so short." Yes, Grandma, everyone knows that.
When I was younger, my very favorite thing to do while visiting my Grandma was to scare the hell out of her. Favorite place to hide was the space between the wall and the refrigerator, but I'd use any corner or door to hide behind and jump out at her. Every time, same reaction: "Godblessit, Joel! You wanna give me a heart attack?"
She was scared to death of snakes - all species - from rattlesnakes to garter snakes and hoop snakes (which don't exist but she told me she had nightmares about) to plastic snakes that I bought with my own money when I found out she was scared to death of snakes.
There's nothing more embarrassing than walking from the on-deck circle to the plate and hearing your Grandma say for everyone in the dugout to hear, "Get a hit, Joely!" except getting a hit and her yelling "WAY TO GO, JOELY!!" so loud that even the opposing team could hear it. Joely is a girl's name, after all, something Grandma never quite grasped.
Grandma blamed her forgetfulness on Alzheimer's, which I changed to "old timer's disease" when she first used as it an excuse when she was in her early 40s.
Grandma never lost her Missouri Bootheel drawl, which meant that the way she said things different than most folks. Amongst the grandkids, one of the favorite Grandma expressions was unanimous, and my cousin, Kendirley does a really good impression of it. When she was calling out my Grandpa for something he said or did, she'd say "Oh Lawton, that's just awful." The way she said "awful" was the clincher; not quite three syllables, but definitely not two. "AW-uh-ful."
I'll miss the way she hugged me - just on the neck, and almost strangling me - when we were getting ready to leave after a visit. I'll miss the way she talked and the way she said my name, which also got elongated into two-and-a-half syllables. I think most of all, I'll my Grandma's laugh and how she'd snort sometimes when she really got tickled.
Those are all the things I wish I'd said about her.
