Yesterday was the anniversary of my grandmother’s death.  I was tight with my grandmother, so it’s always a sad day for me. My grandmother was, hands-down, the best person I have ever known. But what a lot of people don’t know is that she was funny, too.

One of her nieces had married a man in the service and they had lived just all over the place, and apparently in some large cities.

We had not seem them in years when she brought her little boy to visit us down on the farm in Rentz, Georgia (population 315).

We must have seemed so quaint.

He slipped away and I found him plundering in a drawer in the bedroom and asked what he was doing and he said, “Mama always plunders.” So I hauled his little self back into the kitchen where he proceeded to ask impertinent questions and interrupt the grownups, which we just didn’t do.

When lunch (which we called dinner) was ready, Grandmother said she’d just go get the roasting pan out of the utility room for him to sit on, and his mother said, “Oh, no, the phone book will be fine.”

Grandmother said, “I better just get the roasting pan.”

But nothing would do but that he should sit on the phone book to reach the table, so Grandmother said, “Well, all right, then,” in that way she had, and went in the bedroom (because people used to not conduct their phone business out in common areas) and got the phone book and put it on the chair for him and sat down herself.

And that was that. It was all I could do not to laugh, but I knew from the twinkle in Emily M. Currie’s eye that we were just going to laugh on the inside.