Kink

Well, as I have blogged, my grandmother died, on Memorial Day. She was 95 years old. The morning of the funeral, I wrote down all I could think of related to my grandmother, and here's the list:

--My grandmother's name was Catharine Sprinkle Henry but everyone called her Sprink. All of the grandkids called her Kink because the first grandchild couldn't say Sprink.
--She was married to George Henry, who was the bishop of Western North Carolina. He died in the 1970's, and she once told me that he told her to remarry, but she could never think of finding someone as good as him.
--When she went on her honeymoon in 1937, the local newspaper wrote about the scandal of her wearing shorts.
--She had four children, the youngest being my mother. She had eleven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren at last count.
--For most of my younger life, she lived in a condominium with a great swimming pool, and my brothers and I would go over most every day in the summer. She'd lather us up with grease, put on her Sprink visor, and take us over to the pool for hours. She taught me how to swim.
--She said things like "Well hoopy-do!" "Lordy Moses!" "Ah, go to!" "You're gonna grow up to be a scrawny runt." "We'll have to put you in the garbage can and screw the lid on tight!"
--She had a very interesting system of veins in her hands, and she'd let me look at them and rub my fingers over them over and over.
--She had a laugh like a cackle
--She had one of those hairdryers like they have in salons, where you sit under it while it dries your hair. To do her hair, she wrapped it up in tight curls and sat under it. When I spent the night, I could sit under it too.
--She held "tea parties" for us every day, at 3 or 4. Tea parties were "Co-Cola" in her famous red Dixie cups (Kink wrote our names on a plastic cup and put them in the dishwasher, reusing them over and over until they cracked. It was really gross actually). The snack would be something like half a pack of crackers, or half a pack of Swiss Cake Rolls. As my brother put it, she did not promote obesity in children.
--She embroidered towels for me and made all of the clothes for my American Girl doll. Unfortunately, she didn't finish putting all the snaps in before Christmas morning, so most of my doll clothes didn't have snaps.
--She walked around her complex moving rubber bands from one hand to the other so she could measure how many laps she had walked.
--She loved playing games, especially Yahtzee and Tripoley. Once, when my brother was dealing her some cards, she looked right at him and said, "Don't you put the hoodoo on these cards!"
--She had the best box of blocks that three kids could ask for.
--Once she got a little upset when I asked her what it was like to live a century. She was only in her 70's at that point.
--She lost her teeth when she was a little girl, because her mother died and no one looked after her. So when we spent the night, she always made sure we brushed our teeth.
--Before I went to college, she moved into a retirement community, and I'd go over and have dinner with her at the all you can eat retirement home buffet. Before dinner we'd sit in her apartment and she'd tell me stories about growing up and going to college, like how she went around the dorms with a wagon of candy bars to make some money. At the buffet, she'd always make sure that I had the ice cream for dessert, because she thought it was the best.
--She loved going to the beach and went with our family for several years.
--She loved working puzzles and would get very excited when she got a piece in.
--She liked watching Lawrence Welk on Saturday nights.
--She was an extremely bad driver in later years and many a time I thought my young life was coming to an end.
--She made this chocolate mousse dessert that she would put in fancy teacups, and she'd give us those tiny pink Sweet-n-low spoons to eat it with. We loved it, and when we'd come over, she'd go, "Don't look in the refrigerator!" And that meant that the good dessert was in there.
--Other cooking specialties: waffles, where she made sure that butter was in every single square; ham and cheese casserole; sandwiches (made with frozen bread); cut up hot dogs with toothpicks in every piece.
--It was hard in the last few years because she didn't know who anyone was. It is believed by the whole family that now she is up with my grandfather, having a bourbon and water, which was her favorite drink.

Hopefully I'll add to this list. Lately I've been discovering all sorts of things about my family that no one ever bothered to tell me, such as the night that Martin Luther King came to the house, or that she was presented to the queen of England.