By Eric Maddy
The SCORE

On a night when there are hundreds of other things I should be doing or writing about, I’m introducing a new feature at The SCORE.

Those who remember my tenure at the local bi-weekly newspaper may recall I wrote an occasional column called My Turn. The first effort, in fact, was a convoluted explanation of how I came to choose that name. (If you really care, send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ll mail you a copy).

Though My Turn is being offered through a different form of media, the premise is the same. It’s a chance to offer some perspective on, to steal a title from a favorite author of mine named Dan Jenkins, “Life Its Ownself.”

As I have written and said many times, writing a column – especially a tribute to someone who has died – is one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do as a writer. Try as I might, I always end up feeling that my words are completely inadequate.

But I’ll try again anyway.

It’s hard for me to believe that it was 10 years ago today that my paternal grandmother died. Ethel Maddy saw a lot in her 83-plus years that started in the deep hills of southern West Virginia and ended up in a nursing home in Pittsburgh.

She was born before the United States entered World War I and died after the Persian Gulf War. She endured the Great Depression and countless recessions, and was alive when three presidents died in office – Warren G. Harding, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Fifteen men held that job during her lifetime (and in case you didn’t know, there have been only 43 presidents in our country’s 200-plus year history).

I am the proud owner of a kerosene lamp she used on the family farm; before she died, computers had taken over the world. Radio had not been invented when she was born, but she lived to watch movies on cable television.

I could go on, but you get the point. What you don’t know is about why the woman was so special, and I’m not sure I can illustrate why in just a few short stories.

We were very close. We shared the same initials and the same birthday, May 24. One of my fondest memories was taking her to the Downs at Albuquerque for her 75th birthday and bringing money back to her from the cashiers window after every race. I kept telling her that I threw an extra horse or two in her quiniela bets and we were splitting the winnings, but what didn’t say was that I was putting so many extra horses in the equation that I ended up down a couple of hundred for the day.

I remember the way she used to butter toast – I swear it was an art, getting real butter (the stick kind) to melt all the way to the corners.

In her later years, we did crossword puzzles together and went out almost every day I was with her to buy Lotto tickets. And there are her letters – this was pre-internet days, of course, when people still wrote letters and mailed them at the post office. I still have them all in a box, though I look back at them now and see how her handwriting began to decline just as she did.

I remember the family stories of how she promised her dying mother that she would make sure to take care of all of her siblings. And she was the last to die, less than six weeks after her youngest brother.
 
Alzheimer’s disease, dementia or whatever you want to call it had long since set in, so we never really knew if she knew her brother had died. But one could almost sense that she knew her mission in life was complete.

She buried an infant child, as many in her generation did. But she also buried a husband, adult son and grandson, plus countless of other relatives who died in everything from coal mining accidents to tragic automobile crashes.

I’ll never forget how I got the news. I was a journalism teacher at McAllen (Texas) High School, and Dec. 19 was a Friday, the last day before Christmas break. After classes were done I went out to do some Christmas shopping, but came back by the classroom about 8 p.m. just to check messages one last time.
 
On the machine was a message from my father, the kind you never want to hear. And even though we all knew the end was near, it was still quite a shock.

There is nothing as quiet as an empty school, especially a school that was being vacated for two weeks. Playing that message, I never felt so alone in my life.

I’ll never be able to repay the kindness of my landlord at the time, who drove out to the second house she was renting to me on a daily basis to take care of my pets. And I won’t ever forget that my yearbook representative took three hours away from his family on Christmas Day to pick me up at the Harlingen Airport and drive me to the airport in McAllen from where I had departed, which was the only way I could make the flight connections work.

I remember an emotional reunion with my immediate family coming in from two different locations and dealing with the inevitable delays that traveling during the winter bring. There was cold and mud and rain mixed with snow – the kind of weather that is appropriate for a funeral, I guess. And I remember being stuck alone overnight on the outskirts of Cincinnati on Christmas Eve because I couldn’t get a flight out and others in the family could, and watching a lot of the record three inches of rain for the date fall outside my motel window.

But what I remember most is that on the day she was buried, Dec. 23. I thought about stopping to play the Lotto in her honor, but the transportation schedule from the funeral home to the cemetery to the gathering afterward didn’t allow me the time.

So imagine my chill when watching the 11 p.m. news and seeing that the daily three-digit number for the day was, in order, 5-2-4 -- our birthday. It felt like a final personal message of goodbye.

So here it is, 10 years later. A lot of things have happened to all of us since then, but there still rarely a day when I don’t think about her.

I miss you, Nanny. I got your message, and you don’t have to tell me again.

I’m damned sure going to play that number this time.

MOTHER'S DAY, 1993: It was a special day for the author, who got to treat his mom and both grandmothers to brunch.