The Greatest Generation

Today is Grandma’s birthday. Her 110^th. She’s busy celebrating it with Jesus instead of hanging out here with us, but she’s still on my mind.

She’s been on my mind a lot lately. I know some of her life story. How she was born at home in Charleston, South Carolina, one hot, muggy July in 1910. An only child, she was moved from one end of the country to the other for the next seven years until she lost her mother to TB. Three years later her father adopted her out to an elderly, childless couple (Anne with an “E” style), months before her father died of the same disease as her mom.

She lived in Arizona most of her seventy years, except for the war years between 1941 and 1945 when Grandpa was sent to Australia to fight with the Army. During those four years, she and their two young children were passed around among his relatives who reminded her daily that her husband would probably die over there and she should get used to the idea of being a widow.

She got used to tuning them out instead.

When Grandpa came back, mostly in one piece, they started over again in the Phoenix desert, living in the house Grandma built during the year it took for her husband to recover in a hospital in Texas from war injuries. Twenty years later, when Grandpa came down with melanoma and Hodgkin’s Disease, they sold the family’s homestead, moved north to Payson, and Grandma stayed busy with the Garden Club and the First Southern Baptist Church while Grandpa got well again. She suffered with rheumatoid arthritis and horrific migraines for decades, but still welcomed us to stay with her and Grandpa every chance we got.

She was the feistiest ninety pounds of woman I’ve ever known and I loved her like crazy. She loved Jesus like crazy. I watched her read her Bible every single day and when she died, I asked for one of her Bibles so I could hold the book that held her together through all the rocky roads she walked. I miss her humor and wisdom and acceptance, though that Irish temper of hers was something to be avoided.

The more I know about her life story, though, and walk through mine, the more I understand how she felt.

And I wonder, as I think of Marie Elizabeth Quigley Weatherford Jennings today on the 110^th anniversary of her birth, what would she have to say about the world that’s spinning out of control all around me right now? What would she think of lockdowns and panic and mandates? Of mayor/governor sanctioned riots? How would she feel about the destruction of historical statues, the burning of flags, the burning of the Star of David, and graffitied federal buildings?

It’s a rhetorical question, I agree, but it’s still on my mind.

You could probably guess what she’d say about defunding the police, making our Constitution obsolete, requiring untested vaccinations for our military, and forcing children to stay home from school while teachers unite with Marxist ideals and refuse to teach. Not to mention what she’d think about voter fraud and censorship in the media. How would a woman who watched newsreels about the war her husband was fighting in feel about government overreach and manipulated covid numbers intent on enslaving a nation of more than 300 million people?

She’d have a lot to say, I’m sure of it. I’m also sure there’d be a lot of liberals with their noses out of joint afterwards. But what would she think about the hopelessness I feel sometimes when I see the Republic I love with all my heart attacked by Communism within our own borders? And would my spunky, outspoken, opinionated wisp of a grandmother kowtow to the demands of rebellious youth, greedy politicians, and fearful religious leaders the way the media does? Would she stop going to church just because she was in her sixties and a pastor told her to stay home?

I really doubt it. She’d have probably headed the committee to fire him.

This pillar of a woman lived through the loss of two parents to tuberculosis while she was a child, the rejection of her own relatives that led her father to adopt her out to strangers, and was alive during the Flu Pandemic of 1918, as well as World War I. In 1929, six months after she married at the age of eighteen, the stock market crashed. In the thirties, she and Grandpa became parents to two children. One night while they were away from home, an arsonist with a grudge set fire to their house in an attempt to murder them. The man was never found or charged. Grandma and Grandpa lost everything except their lives and their babies.

Then they started over.

Because they had no other choice. If I’ve learned anything from examining what I know about Grandma’s life, it is that you do what you have to do to survive. And you get up and start over. Never give up.

During the Great Depression, she and Grandpa lived out of their own car for years, camped on the side of the road, and borrowed abandoned homes while moving from job to job with two young children in tow. They got back on their feet, never once depending on government bailouts while they were homeless, and Grandpa began his own business as an electrician. The day Pearl Harbor was attacked, Grandpa showed up for duty as an officer in the Army Reserves, and it was four years before he saw his wife and children again.

They lived through horrible times, including a pandemic that no one today had ever even heard about until fear mongers began making comparisons to it this year. The Great Depression was a national crisis, but it didn’t leave her in one. Grandma endured two “wars to end all wars” and watched her husband disappear for four years to fight in one of them. That home she built in the Arizona desert while Grandpa recovered from his injuries in another state? It had no air conditioning. Not even an evaporative cooler. Ever. While they lived on that small ranch, enduring 115 degree summers, they managed forty acres of citrus groves, took care of me and my baby sister for most of a full year when our mother became seriously ill, contributed to their church and community, and raised their own family.

Grandma saw a lot of chaos. I still remember the frown she wore while she watched news reports during the rebellious sixties as college students rioted against the Viet Nam war, demanded the right to free sex and drugs, and burned their bras and the American flag. She was there when television broadcast the assassinations of two Kennedy brothers, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. She was part of The Greatest Generation but, if you ask me, all those seventy years she was walking in the shoes I’m wearing now were nothing to look back on with fondness.

She suffered. But she didn’t suffer in silence. The only thing that ever silenced my grandmother was her own death and, even then, as long as people like me know at least part of her story and pass it on, her voice will never be muzzled.

What would Grandma say about all the confusion and chaos and rebellion and lawlessness that threatens to destroy the country her father and her husband fought for in their own times? Well, remember Grandma was a strong Christian lady. A patriot. A survivor. But honest to God, I think she’d point a crooked finger in my tear-streaked face and speak the truth.

“Stand up straight,” she’d tell me. “And stop crying. You’re a child of God, and a citizen of the greatest country in the world. Act like it. And fight for it.”

Thanks, Grandma. Keep talking. I’m listening.

Happy Birthday.