Ol’ Grandma Walker pulled a good one the other day...You know her? Grandma Walker...lives in that little house on Thomaston Street? She ain’t related to us but we call her Grandma just the same...she might as well be a Grandmother to the kids. I call most old women over 70 Grandma...they don’t seem to mind and it makes it where I don’t have to remember their name. They all look the same anyway.
Ol’ Grandma Walker...She’s always giving them kids her stale candy and cookies and what not. Them kids will go down there and sit with her and she’ll tell them stories and usually they’ll come back with a bag full of crap they don’t need. She’s always passing on stuff her husband left behind...because he’s dead and all. Heart attack. I guess I’d feel bad for him but he was 88...it’s pretty hard to get all torn up about somebody that got to live that long…
They come home the other day with a bag full of worn out flannel shirts and a couple big bottles of hair tonic. You know what hair tonic is? That’s what them old timers use to make their hair all stiff and shiny. You can tell them old guys at church use it cause when they bow their head to say a prayer the light from the window will reflect down on their hair and burn your eyeballs out...that is, if you have eyes open during a prayer...which I don’t.
I don’t even know if you can buy the stuff anymore...and the stuff the kids brought home...damn...I believe it was left over from the Civil War. Grandma Walker told the kids that if they put that junk in their hair they could get all the girls. She said it not only made their hair look good but made them smell good too. Now, maybe that stuff smelled good a hundred years ago after a day of riding horses and growing cotton...but not no more.
Them kids come out the other morning wearing these old flannel shirts and their hair shining and stinking to high heavens. They looked like some damn sharecropper coming out for a night on the town. I yelled at them and told them to wash it out but they put so much of that tonic in their hair that it froze it up harder than a got damn turtle shell…turned it waterproof. I didn’t know what else to do...so I sent them down to Grandma Walker’s house...she can figure it out...she ain’t related to us...but she’s their Grandma just the same.