Helter Shelter
Last week, we Jowerses went down to South Carolina to spend Thanksgiving with wife Brenda’s dad, Grady. It’s a long ride—450 miles of holiday traffic with Chattanooga and Atlanta between us and our destination—but it’s worth it to spend a little time with Grady, who is the finest, and luckiest, man I know.
When Grady’s wife Lula came down with Alzheimer’s disease, Grady kindly and gently took care of her every need. He cooked her meals and fed her, gave her medicine and cleaned up her messes. He patiently answered her questions, which she repeated every few seconds. Every day, Grady helped Lula out of the house and into the car and took her for rides around the farm. Lula was blind in her last few years, so Grady gave grand narrations as he drove, describing spring flowers and fall colors, horses and cows, birds, dogs, deer and friendly neighbors who weren’t there. Lula didn’t have a lot of joy toward the end, but every day she got to live for a few minutes in a world where the beautiful things were many and vibrant, and the ugly things just weren’t worth mentioning.
In his younger years, Grady had the gift of timing. In November of 1941, he was stationed on the USS Tennessee in Pearl Harbor, but shipped out on an oil tanker a few days before Japanese airplanes rained bombs on the Tennessee. Soon after, Grady became one of a very small group of naval aviators. He trained to fly in combat, but the war ended just before he finished flight school. Grady didn’t get sent to Korea, and he retired from the Navy—truly an officer and a gentleman—just in time to stay out of Vietnam.
Somewhere along the line, though, Grady picked up an odd quirk: he never stops trying to make people comfortable. For instance, Grady starts talking about breakfast about 12 hours early. “What do y’all want for breakfast in the morning?” he asks. “I’ve got grits, eggs, bacon, ham, sweet rolls, bagels, cereal….”
“Don’t worry about it, daddy,” Brenda responds. “I’ll just fix something when I get up.”
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“I’ll be up before you,” Grady says. “You want butter in your grits?”
“I don’t know, daddy,” Brenda says. “I might just want a bagel.”
“You want that with cream cheese or jelly?” Grady asks. “Or jam? Mizz Stewart brought me some good peach jam.”
Brenda gives in. “Anything you make will be just fine, daddy.”
In the morning, Grady will have every edible thing in the house on the counter—all the things he mentioned the night before, and more. He greets me as soon as I walk out of the bedroom. “Walter, you like tomatoes and onions with your grits? Or cheese? I’ve got some good cheddar cheese. You like it grated or in chunks?”
“Grady, I just got up. I can’t even feel my tongue yet. Can I get back to you on that?”
“I just made a pot of coffee,” Grady says. “And I’ve got some fresh orange juice.”
At that point, I give up. “I like everything in my grits, Grady. If you’ve got it, I like it. And I think I’ll have a cup of coffee and some orange juice, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ve got some mint jelly,” Grady says. “You like mint jelly?”
Well, as it turns out, I’d rather take a biker-style ass-whipping than eat mint jelly. But I say, “I do like mint jelly, Grady. I’ll just put a little dab on the side of my plate.”
“I’ve got sausage in the freezer,” Grady offers.
“I love sausage,” I say. Because now that sausage has been mentioned, I know it’s coming out of the freezer, and somebody’s going to have to eat it.
Right about this time, Brenda starts trying to rescue me from the choices. But don’t you know, since she’s Grady’s daughter, her help takes the form of even more choices. “If you’d rather just have a bagel,” she whispers to me, “I’ll make you one.”
“Too late,” I say. “I’ve got a big-ass all-I-can-eat breakfast casserole coming, with all the fixings. And many beverages—coffee, orange juice and 2 percent milk. Maybe some grape juice, too. Hell, I can’t remember.”
“Can you eat all that?” Brenda asks.
“No way,” I say. “The beverages alone are more than I can handle. If you love me, you’ll eat at least half of it, or at least hide it and save some of it for lunch.”
“I’ll hide it,” she says.
Just then, daughter Jess walks into the kitchen and, before Grady even sees her, pours herself a bowl of cereal. “Jess, you want some grits and sausage?” Grady asks.
“No thank you, granddaddy. I already had breakfast.”
“Well then,” Grady says, “I want to teach you to drive a tractor today. Do you want to try the little green one, the middle-sized orange one or the big red one?”
“All three of them, granddaddy,” Jess says. Because she knows that, now that the tractors have been mentioned, they’re all coming out of the barn, and she’s going to have to drive each and every one of them.