Tennie May
I went to that gift show a month ago. One vendor gave me a bag full of random crap they carry. I shouldn't say crap, some of it was pretty cool. Apparently one thing they carry is magnets, each one with a different day of the year. The one I got was May 10th. I was dishing out the goodies to those I deemed approprite to have them, and I knew that someone in my grandma's family was born on May 10th because they were named Tennie Mae because of it. I also heard them talk about a Nina Mae. In any event, at our weekly Sunday gathering as soon as I came through the door I said to Grandma, "Grandma, who is Tennie Mae?" She said, "That's my mom." I'm all, crap, duh. She said her mom would have loved being here on Sundays. As she was making food with my mom and great-grandchildren were running around playing together. I hadn't heard her talk about her mom in a long time. If you think about it, you really don't often talk about dead people. She said her mom was the kind of person that people would go to when they were down in the dumps and she would lift them back up. She said the day her mom died, a woman had come to her house with a bouquet of flowers for her for no particular reason, and when they told her Tennie had died she ran away crying. I had never heard that story before. I knew she had been in a wheelchair but I don't know why. I also heard about how hard the depression was and that grandma didn't get to live with her mom for much of her childhood. But I never really heard anything about who she was. I feel like I'm doing her a disservice by not knowing about her. I would hate for my great-grandkids to only know me as somebody who owned a store or as someone that took pictures. When grandma got choked up talking about how great her mom was, I felt like I had been missing out the last 26 years.
posted by Stacy @ 7:48 AM
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