Jamie Louise

Once upon a time four and half years ago I joined Twitter. I tweeted about twenty times and then stopped. HOWEVER, I remembered today that among those tweets were a couple of real gems of quotes from my grandmother/namesake, Jamie Louise Collins Powers, a lady of class and spunk (whose mind has taken a precipitous turn south in the last year or two, sadly) who was unintentionally hilarious (to me, at least) on these few occasions.

Grandma, on staying overnight at the Days Inn in Carlisle, PA: "Oh, it was LUXURY!"
— Jaime Alley (@jetame) July 21, 2009

Grandma was born in 1919 and grew up on a farm during the Depression, and then raised seven children on a budget of pennies and smiles. Even though she managed to see some of the world later in life (Israel, Egpyt, Rome, Ireland, Russia) and she was very proud of the mink stole she found at a Goodwill in Swarthmore, PA, her "luxury-o-meter" was always modest in scale. I love that she was so impressed by a Days Inn in the middle of nowhere. I imagine her thinking, "Does it have hot water? An indoor toilet? A TV with a clicker? I do declare, this must be the Ritz-Carlton!"

Grandma on eating dinner at the Chinese buffet: "Oh, the variety is just WONDERFUL!"
— Jaime Alley (@jetame) April 29, 2009

My attitude at a Chinese buffet: skepticism about how long each dish has been sitting out
My grandma's attitude at a Chinese buffet: wide-eyed amazement. I love that. And she is right! So much bounty! So much choice! And for so cheap! The modern world is amazing. For proof, just go to a Chinese buffet.

Grandma on meeting Grandpa for the first time: "He wasn't a very good dancer. Well, he was a good dancer, I just couldn't follow him."
— Jaime Alley (@jetame) April 29, 2009

Grandma has always been a talker. (I have wondered sometimes if my sweet Chatty Cathy Tessa-lou is actually related to me, her taciturn mother, but really there's no mystery that her loquacity comes straight from her Great-Grandma Jamie. The talkative gene is hiding on a recessive allele somewhere in my DNA, but in my daughter it decided to EXPRESS ITSELF *jazz fingers*.) Grandma is also one of those people who was born without whatever mechanism that is between brain and mouth that stops you from saying just anything. With Grandma, you always know exactly what she's thinking because she will tell you, for better or for worse. :) No filter at all. Sometimes, like in this particular quote, this leads to saying things that just make no sense. :) I love the stream-of-consciousness of her correcting herself, and her obliviousness to what this says about her own dancing. LOL

My sweet Grandma always had a little more spice than sugar, and was not much of a cookie-baking kind of Grandma, at least in my memory (though she was famous for her whole wheat bread, made with wheat she ground into flour herself...now that I think about it, practical, nourishing, unsweetened, no-nonsense whole wheat bread is a pretty good metaphor for what kind of grandma she was). She expected me to get up early, not be sassy, and turn off the lights when I left a room. I grew up in her home until age 11 so maybe other grandchildren have a rosier memory of her grandmotherliness, but they possibly never knew her talent with a switch, either. :) (Maybe? I dunno.) I have used the past tense a lot in writing this because even though she's still around, she's not all there. I get to go home to see her this Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I'm so thankful, because I don't know how many more she's got in her.

She may not have been an indulgent Grandma, but I know she loved/loves me and her influence in my life has been indelible. I have watched her strike up conversations with complete strangers in thrift stores that led to new bosom friendships and the discovery of mutual pals. I am naturally shy but I'm not as nervous to meet new people as I used to be and I do pretty well at small talk now - smile, joke, ask questions, look for commonalities. That's how Grandma does it. Her work ethic is famous, and while my natural tendency is to sloth, I am finding myself more and more as I get older thinking of my Grandma, wanting to hit the ground running in the morning on my days off (well, once I drag myself out of bed...natural sloth, you see), push against my natural laziness and do, do, do, no, don't sit down b/c you'll never get up, ugh you checked your phone and now half an hour is gone STOP THAT, pick up that sock, that toy, that paper, put away that dirty dish, wash that load of colors, fold that pile of laundry. "What would Grandma do?" I'm still nowhere near her productivity - I don't vacuum near as much, I don't hang my clothes to dry, I don't fill paper grocery bags with the sweet gum balls I've picked up in my yard, I don't have to haul buckets of dirty wash water outside to dump after doing laundry (her laundry setup was wacko...I still don't understand it), I don't spend evenings shelling beans - but I think of her and can aim a little higher. Maybe, by the end of my life, I'll be a little more deserving of her namesake.

THE END