For She's a Jolly Good Fellow

Today is my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday.  She was born on January 17^th, 1922.  Yes, I did pull out a calculator to make sure my math was right.  1922.  Isn’t that amazing?  When Grammy was born, there had only been one World War.  The United States was still trying to figure out whether it was a hermit or a hero.  Radio was just getting started, and the suffrage movement had finally won out.  In that year, Egypt and Ecuador gained their independence; the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated; King Tut’s tomb was discovered; and Babe Ruth signed on to the New York Yankees while construction began on Yankee Stadium, which in my father’s opinion meant a greater concentration of evil in the world.  Mohandas Gandhi, Annie Oakley, Walt Disney, and Pope Pius XI were some of the great names of the day.  And to satisfy my thirst for weirdness, a woman confessed in that year to having been married sixty-two times, while the duck-billed platypus was first exhibited in a US zoo that year.*

All that in one year, so can you imagine what ninety of those years amounts to?  What a life; what an incredible journey.  My grandmother saw television, computers, planes, and phones come into being, watched them evolve and change and become part of daily life.  She saw the world change, too, as the Nazis rampaged Europe, as the Communists rose to power and lost it again, as the Civil Rights Movement tore through America.

I imagine that Frances O’Connor, née Mims, took it all in with her usual aplomb.  As her husband moved her back and forth and up and down the nation, as he went to war and came home, as she raised four boys into men, she made so much that was extraordinary in her own life.  She’s coped with the hard things—a long estrangement with one of her boys, leaving homes which she loved, and the loss of her husband, her granddaughter, and another of her sons.  And she’s gathered around her a large, rather nutty family which looks to her for wisdom, guidance, and the occasional gentle scold.

Ten years ago, there was a big party for her eightieth, with many tributes to her from all her loved ones.  Then, my contribution was to play the birthday song on my trumpet, little eleven-year-old granddaughter in my Easter dress.  Today this is my tribute, how I sing her praises.  I wish you the best, Grammy, with many lovely happy returns of the day.  With luck, I’ll have a novel to dedicate for your one-hundredth.

*1922 fast facts come from http://www.brainyhistory.com/years/1922.html