Southern Girl...Southern World

My grandmother called at 9 am on the dot this morning to wish me a happy birthday. Today is not my birthday, but I thanked her heartily anyway. (I called her on her birthday last year, and she told me it wasn't her birthday. (: It really was her birthday, but I apologized for making the "mistake.")

I asked her to tell me the story about how she showed up on a bus in Lamesa, Texas, alone with three small children in tow, found work in the second cafe she went to, and with $3.68 (all she had), she bought a loaf of bread and a pound of bologna that lasted them until she was able to buy groceries with tips from the cafe.

She had divorced her perpetually drunk and abusive husband back when divorce was still more shameful than tolerating an over-imbibing misogynist. The trouble was that the divorced husband would still come back banging on the door at two o'clock in the morning, screaming obscenities for the neighbors to hear and demanding to be let in.

So she asked a total stranger one day while she was waitressing if he knew of a place she could go where she could just "disappear." He told her that Lamesa seemed like a place like that, so she took him at his word. She boarded a bus with the kids, and never looked back. I never tire of hearing about that.