A Mother's Day Tribute: Mrs. Helen Watkins (1912-2011)

My grandmother died at age 98 on the evening of Tuesday, April 26 right in the midst of the flooding of the Mississippi and the Ohio. While most of the residents in the town of Cairo, Illinois evacuated, I spent the week trying to figure out how to get down there in time for her funeral (either by plane or, if necessary, by boat). I was unsuccessful.

My grandmother stood at about four-foot-eleven; by the end of her life, she was probably closer to four-foot-nine. She never left the house without wearing pumps and pantyhose, even well into her eighties and nineties. She prided herself on looking good for her age.

"Nobody can believe I'm 93," she would say. "Everyone says I don't look a day over 80."

Once, when we were eating at Lambert's Cafe in Sikeston, Missouri, a pretty waitress with a southern twang kept a vigilant eye on our table. We thought it was because of my athletic, early-twenties brother, Steve. But we soon realized, as my grandmother chattered to the waitress about the events of our day, that Steve wasn't the big draw after all.

"Oh, you're soooo cuuute!" the server cooed. Then she turned to us, "Isn't she just soooo cuuute?"

My grandmother never met a stranger. From store clerks, to restaurant servers, to auto mechanics (my grandmother also drove her own car well into her nineties despite her cataracts), she would talk to anyone and everyone as though they were lifelong friends. And people loved her for that.

During one visit to Cairo, Steve and I were waiting for Grandma in the drugstore, passing our time looking at toothbrushes, while she chatted with one of the pharmacists.

All of a sudden, we heard from behind us, "Woo-wee! She still looks good, doesn't she?"

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see two bent-over elderly gentleman, wearing trucker hats and sitting on folding chairs against the store's side wall.

"She's got to be ninety-something now. Her sister lives over there on Washington. She's almost ninety too. But she still looks good."

"Yeah," the other man answered. "She looks good."

"Helen, that's her name."

I punched my brother on the arm. He had also heard the conversation, and we watched incredulously as one of the men creaked out of his chair and waddled over to Grandma.

"Helen, how are you doing?" he asked, and my grandmother started to tell him all about her grandchildren visiting and how we were going to have dinner at Alice's tonight and how we all lived in Idaho.

Steve and I stared, sharing the same wide-eyed expression.

"I think she's flirting with him," I said, observing the extra flounce in her gait as she made her way to the front of the store.

"Weird . . . "

My grandmother's love of attention probably originated during her Vaudeville days. The Dunn Children (my grandmother, her sister, and her brother) had an act that they performed around the Midwest circuit. Grandma enrolled my mother in dance and piano, hoping to instill in her that same passion for the stage, but my mother soon tired of this. Imagine my grandmother's delight when I was born craving the spotlight.

Any time I played a role in a theater production or an opera or danced or sang in a recital, my grandmother would say, "The papers called the Dunn Children the 'Eighth Wonder of the World.' I think you must be the Ninth Wonder of the World, Becky!"

My grandmother was endearingly quirky, to say the least.

One of my brother's and my favorite home videos of my grandmother is one where she is holding a newborn Steve, shaking a little stuffed duck over his head. She keeps shaking it and shaking it, not getting any sort of reaction from the calm, stoic baby Steve. Pretty soon, she starts bopping him on the forehead with it over and over and gurgling in his face. Steve just lies there, motionless while Grandma has loads of fun bopping him with the stuffed duck.

Grandma was also known for bringing a slight bit of levity to solemn occasions. The Phantom of the Opera had just been released in theaters the month my mother died. After the funeral, my whole family - my brother, father, husband, grandmother, aunts, and uncles - piled into a couple of cars and headed to the movies to relieve some of the tension. My grandmother fell in love with the little, cymbal-clapping, toy monkey in the Phantom film, and she would start clapping like the monkey at random times throughout the rest of her trip. When my family members would laugh and egg her on, she would clap even faster - always the performer - and say, "I just loved that little monkey."

The presents she would send us were always interesting fodder for conversation. In one of her less politically correct moments, she sent Steve a cartoon about a little girl with long, black braids. "It looks like Pocahontas," she explained in a note she had taped to the video.

She shopped in the juniors department and bought two sets of each outfit, one for my mother or me and one for herself. We knew this because she would mail us a photograph of herself the following week, donning her new clothes. Once, she sent me a bright blue and white polka dotted sleeveless body suit with matching leggings trimmed with lace. Surprisingly, we never received a picture of her in that outfit.

My grandmother sent my mother newspaper clippings about once a week. When my mother died, I inherited the duty of newspaper clipping recipient. One such clipping reads, "One (more) for the money: Elvis sellout accelerates." In the margin, my grandmother has scrawled in blue ink, "Your Mom loved Elvis! Ha ha."

My grandmother sent me one thing frequently throughout the years - the sheet music for the song "I'll Fly Away." Starting at the age of twelve, I have received a different choral octavo every few years (usually an arrangement from the collection of the Cairo Baptist Church Choir, of which she was a proud member until entering the care center). At the top of the music, Grandma would write, "I want this song sung at my funeral."

My grandmother sent me an "I'll Fly Away" arrangement only once more after my own mother died. Grandma included a note that read, "I can't stop thinking of what a beautiful Christian she [my mother] was. Know I'll see her someday and probably won't be long." This time at the top of the music, Grandma had written, "My Favorite."

"Some glad morning when this life is o'er, I'll fly away.
To a home on God's celestial shore, I'll fly away."
-- "I'll Fly Away" by Albert E. Brumley